JUNE 2025 – Longtime broadcast journalist Bill Moyers died last week at age 91, and both the Washington Post and the NYT came out – on the same day as his death – with lengthy and robustly textured obituaries of him. Obits of course are hardly “breaking news” when they are of the very old – newsrooms often get months of heads-up that a high-profile person is approaching his last day.
As such both newsrooms produced inspiring narratives, downright identical in some ways, a reminder that the Post and the Times could merge tomorrow and the world would little note nor long remember that there were two progressive from-the-mountaintop voices in American journalism. (Of course, such a merger is unlikely now: Jeff Bezos in the last year has begun molding The Post into that Manhattan-based promoter of capitalism, the WSJ.)
Both obits are almost identical structurally – NYT obit lede by Janny Scott::
Bill Moyers, who served as chief spokesman for President Lyndon B. Johnson during the American military buildup in Vietnam and then went on to a long and celebrated career as a broadcast journalist, returning repeatedly to the subject of the corruption of American democracy by money and power, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 91.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/business/media/bill-moyers-dead.html
Washington Post obit lede, by Fred Bernstein:
Bill Moyers, who served as chief White House spokesman for President Lyndon B. Johnson and then, for more than 40 years, as a broadcast journalist known for bringing ideas — both timely and timeless — to television, died June 26 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 91.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/06/26/bill-moyers-lbj-pbs-broadcasting-dead/
But Scott’s treatment of “Billy Don Moyers” captured a bit more:
To admirers, many of them liberals, Mr. Moyers was the nation’s conscience, bringing to his work what one television critic called “a sense of moral urgency and decency.” Others, mostly conservatives, found him sanctimonious and accused him of bias. In a 2004 retrospective, the conservative website FrontPageMag.com called him a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”
Famously modest and self-deprecating, Mr. Moyers often invoked his humble small-town roots in Marshall, Texas. Yet he was ambitious, political, intense and shrewd. His Rolodex was once said to contain the names of every important person who ever lived, but he emphasized the importance of speaking to, for and about “regular people.” He could draw anyone out — from psychiatric patients to Supreme Court justices.
But near the end the NYT’s Scott includes a current, relevant idea when he quotes Moyers:
“The line between entertainment and news was steadily blurred,” Mr. Moyers told Newsweek. “Our center of gravity shifted from the standards and practices of the news business to show business.”
The best obits deliver the why-they-were-important message, in a way that contemporary readers can understand and relate to. It’s why the NYT obit desk remains the best in the business.