- Founder and former editor-in-chief of the Internet journal TomPaine.com
- Son of PBS television host Bill Moyers
See also: Bill
Moyers
The
son of longtime PBS
television personality Bill
Moyers,
John Moyers is a former
radio and newspaper reporter who also served as
executive director of his father's Schumann
Center for Media and Democracy.
In
1998
John Moyers founded
the Internet journal TomPaine.com, which features news and
editorials reflecting the left-wing perspectives of such contributing writers as Tom
Hayden,
Barbara
Ehrenreich,
and Robert Borosage. While serving as TomPaine's editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2003, Moyers himself wrote more than 120 “op ads,” as he dubbed them, on such
issues as campaign-finance reform, the environment, war, race, and
poverty. In 2001 he was named as one of six “New
Media Heroes”
by AlterNet.org.
In
an April 2003 ad campaign titled “The
Only Peace Demonstration the President Can't Ignore,”
Moyers urged Americans to “register for peace” by becoming registered voters and then casting their ballots
against George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. ”Peace’
isn't just ‘anti-war,'" Moyers co-wrote
in a companion piece to the ad. “It summarizes in a word the
concepts of economic and environmental justice, civil rights,
equality, democracy and compassion.”
In June 2003 Moyers
characterized
President
Bush as a “liar” who had “proposed cutting veterans' benefits
and sidestepped a law meant to protect the health of soldiers headed
for combat”;
a “hard-hearted radical [who] would push his Robin-Hood-in-reverse tax
policies”; and a rogue politician whose foreign policies had
“profoundly divided the international community, isolated America
and devalued her stock in the eyes of world.”
Moyers also
served a stint as executive
director of the Florence Fund, which bankrolled TomPaine.com
as well as a host of left-wing organizations such as the
Natural
Resources Defense Council,
the Sierra
Club,
Friends
of the Earth,
Earthjustice,
Earth
Day Network,
and the U.S.
Public Interest Research Group. In
2004, the Florence Fund and TomPaine.com (from which Moyers departed in 2003) were merged
with Robert Borosage's Institute for America's Future.
Also in 2004, Moyers moved
to Vermont to pursue personal interests such as the “adaptive reuse of
historic buildings and local civic activism.”
As
avid a supporter of Democrat
and
leftist causes as his father, Moyers has made political contributions
to Patrick
Leahy,
Ralph
Nader,
and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.
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