Bill Moyers, an acclaimed PBS journalist who has hosted documentaries on campaign finances, is also the president of a foundation that gives money to a number of campaign finance reform efforts -- a fact which is raising questions about his mixed roles of journalist and advocate, the San Jose (Cal.) Mercury News reports.

Moyers is the president of the Florence & John Schumann Foundation, which subsidizes public radio and television coverage of the role of money in politics. However, the organization has also given $15 million to the campaign finance reform movement, the Mercury News reports.

Moyers does not see his roles as journalist and activist to be necessarily separate, the Mercury News reports.

"I practice journalism as a form of public education and I practice grant-making as a form of public education," Moyers told the Mercury News. "I think a journalist is a citizen and you have to be honest with yourself about what you care about as a citizen as well as what you do as a journalist."

The journalist has not received a grant from the foundation since he took over as president in 1990. However, several of the groups he has interviewed for news specials about reform have received sizable grants, the Mercury News reports.

In an interview with the Mercury News, Lee Wilkins --a professor of media ethics at the University of Missouri -- referred to the notion that journalists would not have conflicts of interest as "idiotic." He also told the newspaper that strong documentaries will generally have strong points of view.

"But disclosure of the conflicts is really crucial," Wilkins told the Mercury News. Wilkins said he was worried that critics might take the revelation of Moyers' foundation affiliation to mean PBS has an hidden agenda when it comes to the issue.

While Moyers says that he did not reveal his role in campaign finance reform in recent documentaries because he had been doing the subject long before he became the head of the Schumann Foundation, David Fanning -- the executive producer of "Frontline" -- told the Mercury News that the show may mention Moyers' role in the next documentary.

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