Parenting & Family Quote by Bill Moyers

A journalist’s bluntest move is to turn a supposedly passive mirror into an accomplice. Bill Moyers isn’t merely scolding television for bad programming; he’s indicting a culture that treats children less like citizens-in-formation and more like a market segment to be managed. The jab lands because it reverses the usual alibi. We like to say media “corrupts” kids, as if adults are helpless bystanders. Moyers insists the pipeline runs the other direction: television doesn’t invent our neglect, it packages it, normalizes it, and sells it back to us with a laugh track.

The phrasing is doing work. “We don’t care really” punctures performative concern - the ribbon-wearing, slogan-repeating empathy that evaporates when budgets, regulations, or inconvenience enter the frame. “As a society” widens the blame from negligent parents to institutions: advertisers, networks, lawmakers, school boards, and the viewer who keeps the TV on as a babysitter. Then he sharpens the moral claim: “children as human beings.” That’s a deliberately severe standard, implying that the current standard is transactional - kids as ratings, future consumers, or problems to be solved.

Context matters: Moyers came of age in an era when television became the dominant storyteller in American life, and when deregulation and ad-driven children’s programming intensified the tug-of-war between education and profit. His intent is to make indifference feel less like a private failing and more like a public policy choice - one that shows up, unmistakably, on the screen.