"Just-the-Facts"

I once devoted an edition of this column solely to trashing public television as an anti-democratic instrument pandering to elitist tastes and corporate power. As a rule, that's still true. But, as with every rule, there have to be exceptions.

One notable exception is some of the public affairs programming produced by Bill Moyers, especially two documentary projects he turned in during the last quarter of 1987. The first, which aired in November, was his retrospective on the Iran-Contra affair called The Secret Government. That report (see "Without Consent of the Governed," page 6) was mostly a historical account of the withering of American democracy over the past 40 years leading up to the Iran-Contra scandal.