There are many types of journalists, covering the inner and outer worlds in distinctively different ways. We tend to think only about the reporters on the scene trying to give us the facts, just the facts, without internal editorial bias. Or, we expect straight opinion from a commentator, not a journalist.

But Bill Moyers fits neither type, and his chart shows it. Although he has Aquarius Ascendant, which is ideal for the dispassionate image we like to see reading the news onscreen, his inner story is much more of a personal struggle, and it is the tale of the inner journey that he has focused on giving us most of his life. His immediate talents for communication are obvious, with a grand air trine of Ascendant, Sun, and Jupiter. But with North Node rising and Saturn in the first house, his approach is always to see things as responsibility, part of the larger picture that we create and must live or die with. His reporting has been about internal uncertainty and seeking, not external certainty and solution. His flexible Gemini Sun is square Neptune, giving him early personality confusion as to who he was and what he was looking for. Add to that Moon square Mercury, and you’ve got emotional conflict and indecision about the way he feels about what he says or writes. Add to that an out-of-sign conjunction of Venus and Uranus, marking constant changing of goals and desires based on sudden and perhaps conflicting epiphanies, and you don’t have the makings of a reporter firing out a dedicated live story as natural or manmade catastrophes burst around him. What you actually have here is the makings of a media missionary bringing you the stories of life’s inner moral and spiritual conflicts, ones he has had to face and come to understand himself.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he began as an ordained minister, and then was led by his administrative skills to be picked as associate director of public affairs for the Peace Corps under John F. Kennedy, later to become a tope aide and press officer for Lyndon Johnson. He was to see the best and the worst of the stormy 1960s from the inside and was quite ambivalent about what he could and couldn’t do — and what he was forced toYour Order Number: 20070604162805-M0013331
during those years. He found his focus after that as a journalist and commentator, renowned for his faith in public participation in the area, with perhaps his greatest-known high point being his series with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, highly influential in spiritual quarters, not the least of them astrology.

Current events: Moyers is back in the spotlight now more than ever, with his PBS show Now with Bill Moyers and a series of TV documentaries and reports delineating government manipulation of the American press and the popular culture itself. Ever gentle and careful to see the whole picture, he’ll be seen a lot more as his progressed Moon hits his MC this fall, following transiting Jupiter into his tenth house. He’s repeatedly turned down presidential drafts for both Democratic and independent organizers, but expect him to cast a particularly clear, inner light on those who do actually run.