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Former White House Press Secretary and famed broadcast journalist Bill Moyers has died at the age of 91.
Moyers died on Thurday at a hospital in New York, his assistant, Tom Johnson, told the Associated Press. His son, William Moyers, said his father's death came after a "long illness."
During his career, Moyers worked as a Baptist minister and was later named the deputy director of the Peace Corps. He served as the White House Press Secretary for Lyndon B. Johnson and later became a senior analyst for The CBS Evening News and a chief correspondent on CBS Reports.
Moyers' most well-known work was created for PBS. He produced hundreds of hours of programming that covered topics like government corruption, drug addiction, and religious and environmental abuse.
In the late 80's, Moyers produced "Joseph Campbell and Power of Myth," which was a series of six one-hour interview with the religious scholar whose work probed, in party, how humans use and understand stories. He produced a best-selling book based on the discussions.
He also produced "The Secret Government" around the same time, which dove into the Iran-Contra scandal.
His work helped to shape movements and policies. In 1993, his series "Healing and the Mind" was influential on the medical community and on medical education.
While Moyers considered himself an "old-fashioned liberal" during a 2004 radio interview, he preferred to describe himself as a "citizen journalist" working outside the bounds of a strictly black and white ideological framework.
In 2007, he told the Associated Press that public radio allowed him the freedom to throw "the conversation of democracy open to all comers."
While he appreciated the skill of his colleagues in commercial media, he also saw the flaws of a profit-seeking business model on the practice of journalism.
“I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,” he said during one interview, “but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”
During his career, Moyers won 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polk awards, and the Alfred I duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton Aware for career excellence in broadcast journalism twice.
He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1995.
Moyers, born in Hugo, Oklahoma on June 5, 1934, got his start in journalism writing about sports. He had wanted to play football, but said he was too small, so he wrote about it instead for his school's newspaper. He started his working career in journalism at age 16 for the Marshall News Messenger.
He joined Johnson's campaign in 1954 after writing to the then-senator asking if he could work for his campaign. He was hired for the summer, and returned as a personal assistant in the early 1960s before heading the Peace Corps for two years, where he eventually held a top leadership role. He served as White House press secretary from July 8 1965 to February 1 1967.
In 1986, he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, started their own production company called Public Affairs Television. This allowed him the freedom to pursue projects he cared about, regardless of their potential profitability.
