Bill Moyers denounced the politcal right and top officials at the White House for trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media, according to this report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers," the Dispatch reports. And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases.

Moyers, whose reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s, spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. He is a former newspaper publisher and was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s.

Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable."

Answering for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal, Moyers described those officials as "obsessed with control" of the media. He said they are using the government "to threaten and intimidate."

Those charges came from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Republican, who paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers' show, "Now." Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series "Wide Angle."

On the recommendation of administration officials, Tomlinson hired a senior White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, according to a May 2 report in The New York Times.

Give 'em hell Bill.