Bill Moyers (1934 - 2025) was a political communication specialist and a broadcast journalist for more than four decades. He produced a number of groundbreaking public affairs series, including the first large-scale media literacy documentary series, "The Public Mind" for PBS in 1989. He was the White House Press Secretary in the Johnson administration from 1965 to 1967 and then worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years. "The Public Mind" featured a critical look at how public opinion is formed through the mingling of fact and fiction in a society saturated with images. Moyers revealed the complex impact of television on democracy of a mass culture whose basic information comes from image making, the media, public opinion polls, public relations and propaganda. In this series, Bill Moyers offered media literacy insights as part of his approach to commentary on the nature of media in democracy. It has a far-ranging impact on educators and scholars around the world.
Renee Hobbs
"The Public Mind" came at a time in my life when I was just beginning to make a commitment to media literacy. I had been to Guelph, Canada to meet with the international media education community, and I was teaching "critical viewing" in my Media Studies classes to undergraduate students. I remember taping all four episodes of "The Public Mind" with my VHS recorder and showing clips of it to spark discussion with my undergraduate students.
While the whole series is a foundational primer on media literacy (before that term was ever widely used), the first episode, "Consuming Images" has a strong focus on the role of education in helping people cope with the barrage of image-driven messaging. When Stuart Ewen, author of All Consuming Images, insists that people need to learn to critically read the artifacts of contemporary culture. I was hooked.
In that episode, he said, "But I think from very early on students need to be educated into the idea that images speak, that images say certain kinds of things, that there are values and priorities and meanings embedded in images. And they need to learn something about the vocabulary and the grammar of images. To be critical. To do critical readings. ...I think that what’s valuable about that, making visual literacy a basic part of education, is it will take materials which are primarily currently directed at the emotions and the senses, and it will reposition them within the framework of critical reason and thought."
Just a few years later, I was gathering media educators at the 1993 Harvard Institute on Media Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where my colleagues Neil Postman, Pat Aufderheide, Barry Duncan, and Joshua Meyrowitz were imagining an approach to help educators implement the practices of analyzing and creating media as a "new literacy."