Well John, after plinking around Google awhile, all I can determine is Moyers is the President of the foundation. I think it's safe to assume that as President, he has a little discretion in how funds are disbursed.
He really should be more forthcoming about his foundation role:
If Moyers had it to do again, he'd disclose his foundation role
Originally published in Current, Nov. 1, 1999
By Steve Behrens
When Bill Moyers interviewed three campaign-finance-reform advocates for a PBS documentary aired in June, he didn't think to disclose that they had received grants from a foundation he runs. "It should have occurred to me to identify them," he told Current last week. "Next time, I'll be sure to do so."
Moyers got a mild paddling in the press last month after Knight-Ridder correspondent Frank Greve revealed the connection with the PBS commentator's other career: president of the Florence & John Schumann Foundation.
The foundation had given grants to groups repped by three of the seven people interviewed in "Free Speech for Sale": Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, Burt Neuborne of the Brennan Center for Justice, New York City, and Bob Hall of Democracy South in Chapel Hill, N.C. The interviewees were chosen by Moyers' producers, and Moyers said it didn't "cross my mind" that they "should be disqualified because some of their funds came from the foundation."
Moyers does, however, draw lines between his roles as producer and grantmaker. The foundation hasn't funded any of his projects since he became president in 1991, he said, and he doesn't participate in projects that it does support. Two Frontline specials on money and politics have been reported by Moyers but have no Schumann backing, according to PBS: last year's "Washington's Other Scandal" and the upcoming "Justice for Sale," which airs Nov. 23.
The foundation, based in Montclair, N.J., had assets of $90.9 million at the end of 1998 and spent more than half of its $8.1 million in grants last year on "effective governance" projects. Media grantees included P.O.V. ($500,000), NPR ($500,000) and WGBH ($350,000 for "investigative documentaries").
Moyers said Schumann also backs Fairness and Accuracy in Media, and the new Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting (CIPB), which will campaign for a trust fund to back pubcasting. In 1997, it assisted CIPB leader Jerold Starr in preparing his forthcoming book, Public Television in the Public Interest: How to Make Public Television Accountable to Your Community.
The foundation paid Moyers a salary of $200,000 in 1997 and $100,000 in 1998, and for five years employed his son John as executive director. Observers of journalism agreed with Moyers' own second thought: he should have disclosed the connection. Prominent journalists are bound to have some conflicts of interest, University of Missouri Prof. Lee Wilkins told Greve. "But disclosure of the conflicts is really crucial." "Yet more evidence of the need for PBS to feature a warning label about bias," said a blurbette in the Wall Street Journal.
Michael Hoyt, senior editor of Columbia Journalism Review, recommended disclosure. "It's not surprising that subjects [Moyers] cares about deeply as a journalist are also subjects that the foundation cares about deeply. And it also doesn't surprise me, if this is [the Schumann Foundation's] big issue, that there would be an overlap between [grantees and good interview subjects]. To me, the whole thing would be solved if he would just tell us."
Disclosure is advisable whenever a journalist is "in business" with a subject, whether there's a real conflict or not, said Tom Rosenstiel, a press critic who is now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "It's difficult for me as an outsider to say whether this is an actual conflict that disqualifies [Moyers] from doing journalism," he told Current, "but it's safe to say it would be far wiser to disclose it and let the public decide. If he thinks it's okay, then disclose it and see if other people agree."
Does it matter that Moyers is a member of the clan of opinion journalists, who don't pose as neutral? No, says Rosenstiel. "What makes them journalists is their intellectual independence, their fairness, their fidelity to the facts. They are not combatants."
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