Legendary Journalist Bill Moyers, Correspondent on FRONTLINE Documentaries Including ‘Two American Families,’ Dies at 91
Legendary journalist Bill Moyers, pictured in a still image from FRONTLINE's documentary 'Two American Families: 1991-2024.'
Bill Moyers, one of the most celebrated journalists in American media and a trusted presence in public broadcasting who served as a correspondent on multiple FRONTLINE documentaries, has died at the age of 91.
Moyers’ final documentary with FRONTLINE, the decades-spanning Two American Families: 1991-2024, won an Emmy Award on June 26, 2025, the same day his death was reported.
Accepting the award, filmmaker Tom Casciato said, “I know Bill would want me to mention one thing that we’re not going to lose, that we don’t plan to lose, and that we want to thank. And that’s the only film and television entity in this country that would support a film like this over three decades — and that’s PBS.”
Moyers’ documentaries with FRONTLINE in the 1990s investigated issues including global exports of toxic waste, pesticides and chemicals in America’s food, and the Iran-Contra scandal. The 1990s was also when Moyers, Casciato and filmmaker Kathleen Hughes first began chronicling the lives of two families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — one Black, the Stanleys, and one white, the Neumanns — fighting to stay afloat in a changing U.S. economy.
Across the next 30-plus years, Moyers stayed on the story and brought a warm, personal touch to what would become the Two American Families series, building trust with both families and narrating their stories over the course of five PBS documentaries and six presidential administrations with compassion and dignity. He also probed the economic trends towards part-time, low-wage work that made achieving the American dream feel increasingly elusive for these families — and many others.
Last year on The FRONTLINE Dispatch podcast, Moyers spoke with FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath about how the Two American Families series began and evolved over time, and the public media audience’s powerful response to the Neumann and Stanley families’ stories over the years.
“I’ve watched a thousand films in my life, and I’ve never seen an audience, felt an audience, that wrote the way they did,” Moyers said of comments from viewers who saw their own lives reflected on screen. “Real people dealing with real issues, practical issues, in their life, and they were getting it from a television show. That’s the highest compliment that I think we can expect as journalists, when they feel that we’ve shown them the world that they experience.”
The most recent installment in the series, the now Emmy-winning Two American Families: 1991-2024, aired last year. Jackie Stanley, the matriarch of one of the families, died earlier this month.
The 2024 film was the fifth installment in a series of PBS documentaries with Moyers following the Stanleys and Neumanns that began in 1992 with Minimum Wages: The New Economy, and continued with a 1995 collaboration with FRONTLINE called Living on the Edge, a 2000 PBS special called Surviving the Good Times and the 2013 FRONTLINE documentary Two American Families. The New Yorker wrote that the latter film would “take its place among the central documents of our time,” and The New York Times said the 2024 film was “a knockout documentary.”
The documentaries showed how both families refused to stop striving for financial stability across three decades — with Moyers’ voice a strong and thoughtful presence throughout.
Moyers said on The FRONTLINE Dispatch that the 2024 film “tells me that America is an unfinished promise. Because for all of us who are doing well or pretty good, there are all these people out there who work hard, continue to work hard, continue to do the right thing, and they never get a break. … And so we’re an unfinished society.”
Watch Two American Families: 1991-2024
Listen to Bill Moyers on Three Decades Documenting ‘Two American Families’
