In one of many excellent passages in his new book, PBS: Behind the Screen,1 Laurence Jarvik characterizes the political views of one of that network’s most beloved symbols, Bill Moyers:
In questions of foreign affairs, from his opposition to the war in Vietnam onward, Moyers has attempted to declare foreign conflicts the result of misunderstandings, not substantive disagreements. This approach, the product of both deeply religious impulses and a conventionally liberal political outlook, has resulted in his maintaining a number of curiously naïve positions masquerading as sophisticated interpretations of international developments.
But this is more than just a personal idiosyncrasy of Lyndon Johnson’s former chief of staff. It is, in fact, an attitude built in, as it were, to the ethos of the network that the Johnson administration gave birth to. This was once again made apparent with the blockbuster series The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century2 which ran on eight successive nights in mid-November. A joint production of KCET Los Angeles and the BBC, with the assistance of the British Imperial War Museum and financing from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the series afforded a perfect example of the sort of television history so congenial to PBS. It may be the only kind of history left us after the combined efforts of the politicians and the educators of America have finally succeeded in destroying the humanities.
To be sure, they picked an
