He was graduated from UT Austin with a degree in journalism in 1956, but actually began his career at the age of 16 on the Marshall News Messenger. Moyers said journalism was by no means perfect when he started working on the Marshall paper in the 1950s. The stories he wrote were all about the white population of Marshall, as if the town's African American residents were invisible. But for the white population, at least, the newspaper reported on local government and community events and followed the lives of ordinary people. He noted that only six companies control the content of the vast majority of books, magazines, TV shows and movies on the market today.
Huge corporations control who and what gets heard.
Because they have subsidiaries involved in so many other types of products and services, this raises serious questions about the freedom of reporters to cover stories involving these subsidiaries. News stories about the tobacco industry have been quashed, along with at least one book critical of the government of China, Moyers said. The Liz Carpenter Lecture Series has included anthropologist Jane Goodall, President Bill Clinton and poet Maya Angelou.