NOW (TV series)

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NOW is a PBS newsmagazine especially covering social and political issues.

Launched in January 2002, and originally called NOW with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers hosted the program for three years, retiring on December 17, 2004. David Brancaccio, whom Moyers introduced as a co-host in the autumn of 2003, took over hosting duties on January 7, 2005.

NOW tends to focus on issues such as corporate crime and the environment.

In the summer of 2004 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it would no longer provide funding for NOW. This loss of funding may explain why episodes of the new version of NOW are only 30 minutes long (unlike the hour-long NOW with Bill Moyers).

In 2005, NOW came under further attack from Kenneth Tomlinson, the George W. Bush-appointed chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Without the CPB's permission, Tomlinson paid an outside consultant $14,000 to watch NOW with Bill Moyers and analyze the politics of the guests. Many, including the CPB-funded NPR, criticized the resulting "study" as being full of errors and a waste of money.^{[citation needed]}