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 Robert Borosage, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Tom Hayden. 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 Earth Day Network, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, 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.