Bill Moyers retirement: Thank you for the inspiration.

Bill Moyers may be an unfamiliar name to a lot of people in the UK, but he is a very familiar name to me.

I first encountered him as the main presenter of a series called Now with Bill Moyers in 2002, but he became the victim of a conspiracy in 2004 to have him removed from the show, because the neo-conservatives who were in power in Congress and the Whitehouse, didn’t like the way that Bill Moyers took them on.  So Bill Moyers left the show in 2005.

But he didn’t stay away for very long.  He brought back an old show, Bill Moyers Journal, in 2007, and used it to champion causes of social justice, voting rights, and many other progressive issues.

He tried to retire in 2010, but was encouraged back to do a new show, Moyers & Company, in 2012.  It was supposed to last 2 years, but once again, he was encouraged to stay on.  Now, at 80 years old, he’s decided that it’s time to hang up his microphone, notebook and pen, and actually retire.

Bill is one of those people who helped me to refine my writing and commentary style, along with Keith Olbermann.  Through reading, watching and listening to his work, I found his essay commentaries to be incredibly well written, well researched and had a distinctive voice that made me want to up my game, in a similar but slightly different way to how the writings and commentaries of Keith Olbermann.  Keith inspired me to use humour in my writings more than I had done previously.  Bill inspired me to to research the heck out of subject before writing about it, not just the cold factual research, but also the well thought-out individual perspectives as well.

Recent personal history has reminded me that cold factual research only tells half the story, and as much as I like to get to the cold hard facts and away from the emotional, and often very personal responses of people, it is the personal perspectives from people’s own experiences, that often offer up unexpected facts and unseen viewpoints that can completely change how a subject is viewed.  One thing I want to do here on The Viewpoint Blog, is get some more individual perspectives in, and I’m looking at ways to do that, such as interviews, podcasts, videos and maybe even guest posts from contributors.  More on that in due time.

So thank you, Bill Moyers, not just for all your hard work over the years, but also for helping to inspire a new generations of writers and commentators, just like me.  If I can be just 1/10th of the journalist that you have been, I will be a very happy man.