Award-winning broadcast journalist Bill Moyers will serve as commencement speaker at the Class of ‘08’s Dec. 16th graduation ceremony.
“We’re thrilled to have such a distinguished journalist addressing our graduates as they set out into their new lives as professional reporters,” said Dean Stephen B. Shepard. “Bill’s accomplishments are an inspiration.”
The commencement will take place at The Times Center in The New York Times building, with a reception to follow next door at the J-School.
The ceremony is set for nearly a year to the day after the J-School graduated its pioneering first class, whose commencement speaker was New York Times Assistant Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet.
Moyers, who began his career a cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger at the age of 16, went on to serve as a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, a Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for the documentary series CBS Reports, and senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News.
With his wife and creative partner Judith Davidson Moyers, he formed Public Affairs Television, which produced such groundbreaking series as Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, Healing and the Mind, The Language of Life, NOW with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, and Moyers on America. Their latest weekly public affairs series, Bill Moyers Journal, premiered in April 2007.
Moyers has received more than 30 Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and two prestigious Gold Baton awards from the Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Award, nine Peabody awards, and three George Polk Awards, including the Career Achievement Award.