“And they get away with the corruption,” read the email subject line.

I knew it was from Bill Moyers, because launching right into the point was typical as he sent me news clips and ideas, sometimes a couple a day, in the waning months of the first Trump administration. They would ding in at 5 a.m. or earlier—that, too, was typical of a man who at 85 showed no sign of slowing from a pace of work that one of his longtime co-workers described to me as an “overwhelmingly energetic idea machine.”

Moyers died last week, at 91. You can watch the tribute from his former colleagues at PBS, or read about his accomplishments in the big papers’ obits. It’s an incredible arc—born to a dirt farmer in Oklahoma, ordained Baptist minister at 25, LBJ’s right-hand man around the same time, present on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination, key architect of the Great Society and the Peace Corps, and then for decades legendary correspondent and host on PBS and CBS, where his interviews and documentaries changed how Americans thought about masculinity, spirituality, economic inequality, pollution, and more. (You can find a lot of his interviews, films, and writings at BillMoyers.com.)

This story, however, begins where Moyers’ New York Times obituary ends, after his official retirement in 2015. That’s when I got to know him, though he didn’t seem particularly retired to me. He was reading everything, talking to everyone, charming the socks off people with that soft drawl while also steelily driving them toward where he needed them to go. He talked about journalism as a calling, where the goal was “getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth.” He also thought hard and strategically about what the truth might accomplish. Once I heard him described as “that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator,” and that sounded exactly right. He would quote Plutarch and then George Bernard Shaw (“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics”). His first executive producer, Jerry Toobin, noted that “In all the years I have worked with him I have never heard him say anything dumb.”

Filmmaker Steve Talbot remembers it being surprisingly easy to schedule interviews for Moyers—including with Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, for a documentary about the influence of campaign money in the judiciary. “I soon discovered the reason it was possible to book the interviews was that both Kennedy and Breyer were big admirers of Moyers’ intelligence and journalistic integrity. They wanted to meet and engage with him.”

Former Mother Jones publisher Steve Katz recalls that after his first meeting with Moyers, “as starstruck as I was, I left thinking that what we see of Bill on TV is exactly the same man I met with just now. That, to me, was such an expression of Bill’s authenticity. It also was clear to me that as heartfelt and good a man as he was, he had a clear grasp on the question of power—how to get it, and how to use it.”

In “retirement,” Moyers was running his own media enterprise, producing regular videos and articles, and creating documentaries along the way. He was also the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which made grants to transparency watchdogs, nonprofit journalism, and environmental organizations.

By this time, Moyers was profoundly disillusioned with the major newsrooms where he had spent his career. He’d always been one of the very few voices on national television unapologetically saying the big truths about American society—about injustice, racism, and the capture of politics by moneyed interests. He’d clashed with his network bosses (at one point, he said the changes demanded by CBS executives to his exposé about baby formula had “turned ‘Jaws’ into ‘Gums’”). Now, as he watched traditional media struggle to accurately describe the Trump era, the stakes seemed existential.

Thus the “and they get away with the corruption” email he sent me. It was about a New York Times story exposing, two years after the fact, that the 2017 Trump tax bill had been even more of a giveaway to the wealthy than we knew. “Not a single corporation with a news division—the major networks, cable, newspaper chain, etc.—covered it,” Moyers wrote. “A free and independent press? Bah, humbug....Who will show us how corruption is not just episodic but systemic? That capitalism has democracy by the throat because democracy no longer has any balls?”

Moyers was acutely aware, sooner than most, that big money was eating away at American democracy. “Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s important that we reduce the influence of money [in politics],” he said in a 2014 interview. “Yet 91 percent think it’s not likely that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done. When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.” He went on to say that “there are people fighting back [and] if it weren’t for them, I would despair. It’s the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there’s still hope.”

Watching mainstream media first make Donald Trump a celebrity and then normalize his authoritarianism, Moyers had come to believe that real accountability was going to come from the outside—from journalists who were not part of corporate media, focusing on themes that were getting lost in the day-to-day headlines. One of these themes was corruption. He cited an annual survey by Chapman University that for nine years running has found “corrupt politicians” topping the list of Americans’ fears—ahead of “people I love becoming seriously ill,” terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

Corruption was a topic Mother Jones had been focused on since its founding. During the 2016 campaign, our reporters were among the very few digging into the massive conflicts of interest created by Trump’s business interests all over the world. Moyers told me that as part of the Schumann Foundation’s very last round of grant funding, it would support our work on this beat.

“Telling people he and his gang are corrupt is no longer news,” he would say. “If you can show them what America is going to look like because of it, they might be moved.” He would send me links about what Trump and the court were doing to environmental protections at the behest of corporate interests—one of the last ones bore the subject line “How venal can they be?” He sent me a column by the New York Times’ Charles Blow, warning that “Investigations and exposés by the press may dazzle and awe [but] keeping track of all the corruption and grift is exhausting, and maybe that’s the point.”

Bill trusted Mother Jones to do the work of exposing how “corruption is not just episodic but systemic.” He also trusted us to show that this was not an abstract concept—that it affected people’s daily lives, that it cost each of us money and opportunity. That’s exactly the kind of truth-telling reporting that our team strives to deliver every day—and we do it thanks to the financial backing from our loyal and generous readership.

He was simultaneously despairing of the power of journalism to move people, and trusting that it was the only thing that might. In a 2003 speech he quoted the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who set out to “slay the dragon of exalting ‘the commercial spirit’ over the goals of patriotism and national prosperity.”

“I am not a scientist,” Steffens had said. “I am a journalist. I did not gather the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis....My purpose was...to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride.”

Moyers believed that “shameful facts, spread out in all their shame,” could still “set fire to American pride”—especially when those facts laid bare how government was being turned into an ATM for the wealthy and connected. One of the last emails he wrote me noted that, “It will probably not surprise you that after four decades covering [big money’s] sabotage of democracy, from that first documentary on political action committees back in the 1970s, I often think of what the historian Plutarch said in his eulogy for the fallen Roman republic: ‘The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, however, this process of corruption spread to the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subject to the role of emperors.’”

“Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere,” Moyers closed. “When he rode into town, it was ripe for plucking.”

Rereading this, in the 23rd week of the second Trump administration, is depressing—but also strangely calming. Moyers knew Trump was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a problem that went back decades. Corruption, he wrote me, is “a condition beyond individual scandals—more a totality of governance, a philosophy that says democracy exists for us to take what we can while we can—to hell with the law, rules, norms and the country. It’s the crime family manifesto of the mafia, affixed to the civic life and public affairs of the nation.”

There are few people who’ve embodied the best of journalism—its ability to cut through BS, its capacity to uplift those who’ve been wronged, its curiosity and burning appetite to tell the stories people need to know—like Bill Moyers. We’ve never needed him more. But the worst way to honor him would be to mope about what we’ve lost. The best—and only—way to pay tribute to him is to go out and do the work.

And do it with joy. Moyers came to the conclusion that his early call to the ministry was “a wrong number,” but he never lost a preacher’s ability to enchant. His longtime producer and friend, Judy Doctoroff, told me that he had “an expansive view of public affairs, those things that make us human and feel connected with each other.” He created documentaries on poetry, on myth, on addiction (this one featuring his son opening up about his own struggles). His special on the song “Amazing Grace“ is a love letter to America.

In the end, perhaps this extraordinary life was captured in the inscription on a 17th-century church that he sometimes quoted: “In the year 1653 when all things Sacred were throughout ye nation, either demolisht or profaned, Sir Robert Shirly, Baronet, Founded this church; Whose singular praise it is, to have done the best things in ye worst times, and hoped them in the most callamitous.”

Onward,

Monika Bauerlein, CEO
Mother Jones