Bill Moyers insists he has really retired

This time, Bill Moyers really means it. After 43 years as public television's most visible intellectual and unabashed liberal, he's done, having officially retired from TV on Friday.

Yes, he's said that before. Twice, actually, in 2010 and 2013. Both times, he reversed course, returning to TV to pursue his varied crusades - against the corrupting influence of money in politics, for the environment and civil rights, against growing economic inequality - in familiar style, avuncular, Texas-inflected. His last retirement lasted 17 days.

In a note posted on his website in September, Moyers, 80, said the final show of his interview series, Moyers & Co., would be his last: "I am writing to assure you that this time it's the real deal. It's time finally to sign off."

Except for stints in commercial broadcasting (CBS News from 1976 to 1986; NBC News briefly in the 1990s), Moyers has been the face of public television for almost as long as Big Bird. He was even there at the creation. As a young aide (and later press secretary) to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s, he was part of the early planning meetings that led to the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established PBS and NPR.

Starting in 1971, during President Richard Nixon's first term, Moyers has produced and hosted innumerable specials, documentaries and series for public television on an array of topics. His work has won more than three dozen Emmys and nine Peabody awards.

His personal favorite is a multi-part, Emmy-winning Frontline series following the economic trajectory of two working-class Milwaukee families over 22 years. The series, conceived by his producer-wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, "nailed what was happening as the middle class dropped through the cracks and the political class looked the other way except rhetorically," he said.

Moyers himself has attracted as much controversy as awards. His unalloyed liberalism ("I find it very hard to have intelligent conversations with people on the right wing," he once said) has made him, to conservatives, a living totem of the news media's alleged leftward bias, and especially public broadcasting's.

As a "news analyst" who had worked alongside another conservative bete noire, CBS's Dan Rather, Moyers was already politically suspect to the right when he produced and hosted a 1987 documentary for PBS about the Iran-contra affair, The Secret Government. The program so outraged conservatives that it sparked a new effort to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the intermediary that funnels federal funds to public broadcasters.

The efforts against Moyers were renewed in 2005, when the CPB's conservative chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, sought to demonstrate liberal bias at PBS. He secretly commissioned a consultant to monitor the political views of guests on Now with Bill Moyers. He ultimately deemed the program "unbalanced" in its discussion of public affairs.

Moyers didn't back down, firing back that Tomlinson was waging "a surreptitious and relentless campaign" against him, his program and public broadcasting. "I always knew Nixon would be back," he said at the time. "I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

In fact, Moyers, an ordained Baptist preacher, has often been an equal-opportunity scold, raining damnation upon both political parties and the mainstream media alike.

An old friend, broadcaster and columnist Jim Hightower, says Congress should declare him "one of America's most precious natural resources."

Moyers' visibility has fallen in recent years, in part because Moyers & Co. airs at different times on public stations, sometimes in the wee hours. Though he will no longer have a television platform, Moyers will continue in the media as an investor. As the president of the New Jersey-based Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (2012 assets: $28.1 million), Moyers has helped direct millions of dollars in charitable grants to left-leaning journals and public broadcasting outlets over the years.