In this corner, at age 70... Bill Moyers!

Here's some exciting news. Bill Moyers isn't staying mum on the right-wing attempt to turn PBS into yet another propaganda arm of the White House. From The Nation:

"I should put my detractors on notice," declared the veteran journalist who stepped down in January as the host of PBS's Now with Bill Moyers, who recently turned 70. "They might compel me out of the rocking chair and into the anchor chair."

Moyers closed the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis on Sunday with his first public response to the revelation that White House allies on the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have secretly been holding PBS in general -- and his show in particular -- to a partisan litmus test.

"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. And that's what (CPB chair) Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."

Recalling former President Richard Nixon's failed attempt to cut the funding for public broadcasting in the early 1970s, Moyers said, "I always knew that Nixon would be back -- again and again. I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

UPDATE:

An audio recording [of Moyers' speech] can be downloaded at: www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/moyers.mp3

Or you can watch the video at: www.freepress.net/conference/audio05/freepress-closing40515.mov