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If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

Bill Moyers

The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.
BILL MOYERS

Democracy Media Quality
America’s corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they’re privatizing democracy. All the benefits – the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.
BILL MOYERS

Country Cutting Direction One
We now know that a neo-conservative is an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out.
BILL MOYERS

Fire House Years
Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.
BILL MOYERS

Charity Circumstances Commitment Personal Wealth
To the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process.
BILL MOYERS

Determine Embedded Moral Quiet Street
What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma – the science of the heart…the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.
BILL MOYERS

Believe Heart Need People
This “degenerate and unlovely age,” as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.
BILL MOYERS

Degenerate Governance Politics Seminal
We don’t care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
BILL MOYERS

Care Children Television
How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
BILL MOYERS

Democracy Political Soul
The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.
BILL MOYERS

Bargain Ease Longer Ordinary People
Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.
BILL MOYERS

Citizen Ordinary Struggle
Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don’t go hungry, unschooled or sick without care.
BILL MOYERS

Commitment Order Sick
Jon Stewart is a remarkable satirist and parodist in the vein of Mark Twain, because Jon Stewart understands what Mark Twain knew, which is that the truth goes down more easily in a democracy when it’s marinated in humor.
BILL MOYERS

Democracy Mark Veins
Standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.
BILL MOYERS

Country Government Mean
Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls ‘The Patriot’s Dream.
BILL MOYERS

Blood Dream Fighting
Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
BILL MOYERS

Done Journalist Reporting Truth

If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

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If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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