Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War” Exposes the Media’s Failure to do Their Job.
In some quarters, this week is set aside as “turn off your TV week.”Beyond the fact that it’s a silly enterprise - Pick and choose, people! Pick and choose! - there is one important offering on the nonfiction front that should not be missed. 
If we could retroactively pull the plug, say during the saturation coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith saga, that might have been a good week to skip the tube.
But - do-gooders take note - this week a devastating 90-minute documentary should be required viewing. This is the kind of work television can do brilliantly when given time and resources and the talents of a questioner like Bill Moyers.
A point-by-point explanation of how the media failed the public en route to the war in Iraq is carefully assembled and patiently related Wednesday by Moyers on PBS.
“Bill Moyers Journal,” at 8 p.m. Wednesday on KRMA-Channel 6, presents “Buying the War,” an eye-opening view of how the mainstream press got things exactly wrong in the ramp-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (local listings here)
The passing of unchecked information, the fear of appearing unpatriotic in the wake of 9/11, the readiness to join the drumbeat of misinformation about weapons of mass destruction and the willingness of the rest of the media to follow The New York Times - all contributed to the media buying in and failing to help readers and viewers separate fact from propaganda.
Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, tells Moyers, “I don’t think there is any excuse for my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll-up to the war. Overall … there’s no question that we didn’t do a good job.”
Tim Russert of NBC’s “Meet the Press” has a tougher time admitting complicity, or allowing that his influential program was used by the administration. Russert says he simply followed the lead of the front-page story of The New York Times. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went on the Sunday-morning shows and cited the infamous “smoking gun as mushroom cloud” story, which they gave the Times.
Bob Simon of CBS’s “60 Minutes” sums up that performance: “Remarkable. You leak a story, and then you quote the story.”
As in so many phases of the administration’s marketing of the war, the media simply stood by.
Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN, says, “Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time.”
A particularly embarrassing news conference with President Bush two weeks before he ordered the country to war demonstrates the passive state of the press at the time.
“At least a dozen times during this press conference he will invoke 9/11 and Al-Qaeda to justify a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not attacked America,” Moyers narrates.
The president calls on reporters designated by his staff. The questions are friendly to the point of puffy. The press corps wouldn’t awaken until after Hurricane Katrina. They knew the war was going to happen, so they got out of the way.
The work of an investigative team from Knight Ridder newspapers (acquired by The McClatchy Co. last year) is singled out as a rare example of healthy, skeptical reporting. Yet while almost all the Bush claims about WMD would prove to be false, the story citing “lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons” got little play.
Among the cheerleaders for the war who refused to talk to Moyers for this report are (no surprises here) columnist Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, conservative pundit William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, president of Fox News and former Nixon and Reagan strategist Roger Ailes, Washington Post columnist and Fox news commentator Charles Krauthammer, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, and Times political columnist William Safire.
It’s easy to campaign in favor of turning off the television. The bumper sticker “Kill your TV” is ever popular. But if more of us were better informed, as this documentary makes painfully clear, the world outside the box would be a better place.
Members of the media will be parsing this historic lapse for years to come, trying to explain how the watchdogs dozed.
Journalism students everywhere should watch and take notes.
Copyright 2007 The Denver Post
Perhaps after the media and the public begin to digest the depth to which citizens were fed falsehoods leading up to the war in Iraq, people will begin to examine what may turn out to be the greatest lies of all: the government account of the September 11th attacks. Perhaps more will discover the troubling reality that a third World Trade Center building, WTC number seven, collapsed very swiftly on that day. Never struck by any air craft, WTC number seven collapsed in six and a half seconds. Like the “magic bullet” in the JFK assassination, WTC number seven presents most convincingly the idea that we have not yet heard an honest explanation for what happened that day. The Tillman death fabrication, the Jessica Lynch fiasco, the mass weapons debacle–how many more ridiculous lies must we discover our government promoted until we demand an honest and unencumbered investigation? Might our government’s probable complicity in attacking our own people deserve at least as much attention as Anna Nicole’s death? Hopefully, Moyer’s show will inspire people to demand more truthful and probing media coverage of things that really matter.
The War in Iraq is the largest of many neocon schemes designed to restrict civil rights and transfer money from U.S. taxpayers into the hands of the richest of the rich. Hopefully this program will be the first in a series that examines other schemes that the media enabled the neocons to pull off. Examples include tax cuts, prescription drug reform, patriot acts and energy policy. The first series should be followed by a series examining similar schemes that neocons have not yet succeeded in pulling off, such as social security privatization and the complete elimination of habeas corpus.
I have just ordered “Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast. I intend to read it in one sitting!
I’ll be watching Moyers on Wed. He is the only True journalist I can trust anymore on anything resembling regular TV.
We have to keep digging because many in Congress will not. Some of them are waking up at long last, but there are still way too many with the corporate blinders on.
Mr. Hammons, you wrote: “As Moyers will show in the upcoming program, much of the mainstream press and media in the US can no longer be trusted.”
The bastards couldn’t be ‘trusted’ 60 years ago. The CIA has had their people on the payroll of the NYTs, other print and electronic media since TV hit the air. The media bastards sold this country Korea, Vietnam and every war of conquest we have ever fought for our Ruling Class. They are now and have been active players in our System of Control and they know it. They exist to sell you our latter day genocidal Aryan slave Empire by any means necessary. We’re just getting it shoved in our faces for the momment.
Luckily, Americans are bred to know two things: 1)Politics has nothing to do with them; 2)Their job as Americans is to keep their f**ing heads down, their f***ing mouths shut, and their f***ing noses to the grindstone. No substitute for good peasant child rearing. Watch more TV. And you were worried about the commercials.
Peace.
Knowing about it is good, but WE have to act to do any real good. Let’s get the bastards out of the white house!
http://www.ImpeachBush.org -
Please call AND write your representatives in Washington telling them to Impeach Bush - and please keep writing (and/or calling) them until they do it.
Without Justice - we’ll never know peace!
If one reads works by Adorno and others, one gets the impression that human psychology, particularly among persons with Authoritarian Personalities, is not entirely rational and subject to manipulation. For example, it seems that Authoritian Personalities have an inherent proclivity towards belief in good/evil/the occult, and will readjust their mental constructs to accomodate good/evil/occult suggestions no matter how irrational they may be. Such people also tend to see things in terms of false-choices: “You’re either with us, or against us.” Bush communicates directly to such people: “We’re in a struggle against ‘Pure Evil’.” I suspect that the percentage of Authoritarian Personality types in the US population is around 30%, or roughly Bush’s public approval rating.
You’ll never be able to reason with these people. On this basis, the purpose of the media in a democratic society has collapsed.
Bill Moyers is awesome. But for the most part I personally think TV sucks. Not to mention I know people who are so addicted to the thing they will without a thought forgo paying necessary bills in order to pay the cable.
Seems to me I would instinctively love to watch TV if the news coverage (and other programming) wasn’t terrible, or even worse than just terrible — that is pitches for special interest groups cloaked as news. Such as the mind numbing 10 minute ad for “the right to bear arms” couched as a news sidebar delivered by an “expert” on CNN, right smack in the middle of their coverage of the Virgina Tech tragedy. I almost lost my dinner right there in the middle of the laundromat.
No thanks.
At the time I knew Saddam was no threat because I was reading The Nation, Counterpunch, In These Times, The Progressive and Common Dreams and watching Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! Scott Ritter’s authoritative commentary was also useful in discerning that Team Bush was a bunch of liars.
As Colin Powell spoke every word of his speech before the U.N. I knew it was a ridiculous.
Words of wisdom: stop listening to the corporate mainstream media.
MEDIA REFORM is more important than global warming. MEDIA REFORM is more important than the War on Terror. MEDIA REFORM will give the people at the bottom of the pyramid a voice. MEDIA REFORM will change the world.
Atta go Bill keep up the good work.
Media reform without economic democracy continues to be the pipe dream of people who still believe in representative democracy. A public referendum for media reform is needed.
I need to continue watching TV because there is a great show about how bad TV news was during the run-up to the war? So let’s watch good TV about bad TV? Look, television is addictive. People rarely pick and choose. It’s like telling an alcoholic to pick and choose what he drinks. Most television is very bad. Television news is a farce on both the local and national level. There is absolutely no international news in this country. And the shows - American idol? Donald Trump?
I no longer watch television. I do have a TV, but it is only set up to play DVD’s. If I happen to hear about a good show or series, I’ll rent it out when it becomes available (just got the Dog Whisperer last week, for example). I also watch a movie or two each week. Otherwise, I read, listen to music, do more projects and my brain feels a lot less loaded with junk. If I want news, I go to internet sites that provide real news and opinion.
Americans are really in denial about how television is a big part of the problem. Television sells us wars, it sells us bad leaders, it sells us large corporations. It sells us a bunch of crappy products and convinces us we need those crappy products, at the expense of, say, some people in China making 6 cents an hour. It babysits our children. It creates an uninteresting culture of slogans and cliches. You can’t pick out the good apples from a barrel full of rotten ones. You need to throw out the barrel.
I am eaeger to watch this program. It’s been such a long time coming after all.
What I am not so eager to review is all the transfer of guilt that has already begun and that is sure to follow the broadcast. In the Ostrow article, the “blame” is laid on the backs of a passive media. While I hardly wish to defend them (they are indefensible), the Press was not alone in turning a blind eye to the imperial shenanigans of Bush-Cheyney, Inc. We all, in the words of Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN, believed that, “Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time.”
Yes it is the Press’ mission to cut through the crap and propaganda and enlighten us to the truth. But we have a mission too, as citizens and shareholders in America. So while we take delight in watching these guys squirm and fumble and (in the case of Rather) apologize, we should never forget that it was all of us … a whole nation that let this happen, that re-elected these felons on the strength of these lies, and that most importantly, it was Cheyney, Bush, Rove and all their nefarious minions, who took advantage of our trust in the office, in our nation … and lied. Like the marsupial form Okeefenokee said, “We have met the enemy … and it is us.”
As for Steve and the rest of the Luddites who want to turn off their TVs, I can only say I’ve written all my friends and urged them to TiVo, tape or otherwise save a copy for me. I am in Europe and the Middle East and won’t be in the US on the air dates, so I want to be sure not to miss it. Live in a culture without so much media and spend hours surfing for some English language information other than Bloomberg or CNN. The choices we have in the US are astounding and yield gems like thıs all the time. All we have to do Steve, is choose.
PS … and you trust movies!? Ha!
PS: Don’t get me wrong. It is unquestionably a Military-Industrial-Media & Marketing Complex now … an anti-democratic collusion that now includes Madison Avenue.
I’m so glad that Mr. Moyers is going after Thomas Friedman and William Safire. These are exceptionally intelligent and sometimes even brilliant men, therefore the MISGUIDANCE they provided remains especially reprehensible.
Mr. Safire wouldn’t listen to anybody to the left of him and Mr. Friedman wouldn’t listen to his wife.
Steve EV…couldn’t agree more except that I would say that tv babysits (infantilizes) adults. There isn’t a more corrupt and corrupting element in western culture. I just wish that we could get Bill Moyers on the web. I think this is supposed to be coming.
And if anyone thinks that things have changed you’re wrong.
As evidenced this past week, or any week, major news stories get buried as we get bombarded with bullshit.
Why general strikes are not being called to put the MSM on notice, or to protest the war, is a mystery to me. General strikes don’t require people to travel and place themselves in harms way. If a million people stop buying a product you will get the attention of those that advertise on the news programs. You hit them in the purse, they listen.
I am gross and perverted
I’m obsessed ‘n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little had changed
I am the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can’t look away
I make you think I’m delicious
With the stuff that I say
I am the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I am the slime oozin’ out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don’t need you
Don’t go for help…no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That’s right, folks.. Don’t touch that dial
Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin’ along on your livingroom floor
I am the slime from your video
Can’t stop the slime, people, lookit me go
Frank Zappa
Those who would trade our last remnants of democracy for a full blown fascist empire have quietly deregulated every constraint against the monster. Like unravelling the strips of veil off a mummy, year by year, quiet little movements unpublicized, unnoticed because they require no vote only the steady enaction by the real terrorists, Bush and Co. So when corporations were allowed to own all the media the Administration finally owned the tv and radio, the mummy is unveiled. Sure the press is to blame for not watchdogging. The people are to blame for not watchdogging their own interest. The bad guy is still the bad guy. If the regulations that have been systematically removed over the last decade were somehow replaced, it would optimistically take twice that time to sew up our little republic but the damage would still be done. Perhaps now that the pendulum has swung so far right, we will see and learn. Of course we say that everytime we shake off the dust of the last war.
According to that, Bush & Company could launch a nuclear holocaust before anyone in the media got up the courage to say anything pro or con and we’d never know how it happened. I mean, when it’s five minutes to Bush’s “Armageddon” what can you do but regret you didn’t fight harder to get rid of the entire Worldwide nuclear arsenal while there was still time!
After watching David Gregory and Tim Russert defend Don Imus and trying to offend me by saying they weren’t aware of the racist under tow of the program, why would I expect them to have any idea what’s going on in this Administration. When they appear I start surfing.
I hope that Moyers has gone deep enough to verify the TRUE cause of the U.S. Press’ inability to question the veracity of the administration. If it were not for the fact that these once-tenacious members of the press are all owned by the same multi-national corporations who have profited from this war, or have profited from this admintration’s appointing former big business lobbyists be the regulators of the corporations which they already serve.
The dictionary has a word for a government run by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations. Thanks to a pliable and timid press, we have little defense against fascism except the ballot boxes not controlled by Diebold, and challenged by Karl Rove.
Com_n_sense is so right! A boycott blog ought to be started that would advise the public about how they are being duped about products, services, politically-slanted non-objective informative news, rights erosion, etc.
At LAST things are looking up for truth in the media.
Some of us who worked in journalism back in the pre-Bush1 days have been waving the red flag for two decades… when it first became apparent to us that something was seriously wrong with the balance of power in the media.
Sure hindsight is 20-20, but some of us understood the importance of things like “The Fairness Doctrine” and consolidation of the media ownership while others were buying the neo-con arguments against it.
Even Ted Turner started pointing out the dangers in an article in Washington Monthly in 2004. Turner said: “Consolidation gives them more power to tilt the news and cut important ideas out of the public debate. And it’s precisely that power that the rules should prevent.”
Few people realize to what extent the first Bush (during Reagan’s second term) was using the mainstream media against the well-being of the American public, even after Bush1’s “Office of Political Diplomacy” got caught illegally using dis-information experts from the CIA and the Army’s 4th PSYOPS Group to plant false news stories in the U.S. media.
Reagan was already failing mentally during his second term and that worked just fine with George1. It enabled him to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do and Reagan would cheerfully accept the blame.
REAL journalists are finally beginning to accept the fact that they have been led astray by the Kristols, Krauthammers, Novaks, Hannitys and yes, even the Russerts in the media… people who have rolled out the red carpet for the neo-con agenda.
Let’s never let them forget that they have “been had” once in their careers!
Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine would be a huge step forward.
Guess what folks we are about to start a nuclear war with Iran! Bush is having new nuke warheads made to fit existing bombs, and we are preparing to start a nuclear war just so no one else can do it! We are still the only country that has used them and will remain that way if they have to nuke us all to hell! We are running missions into Iran NOW and it is only a matter of time and they will do it. Nuclear war is upon us and they will do it before their term is out. Watch, wait and see!
I am not given to sarcasm, so please take this the way it is meant:
Bush, Cheney, Rove, and all the rest who are speaking out and saying outrageous statements, and playing so loosely with the truth must, I repeat: must do this if they are to get any leverage politically. Why? because their interests are at odds with the interests of the American people, with American values, with Democratic values which we the people choose over theirs: Empire building, political systems that bulldoze those at the bottom, with no remorse, or morals. If they were to tell the unvarnished truth, they would be out in a NY minute. So they don’t.
Chicago,
“Watch, wait and see” is what we’ve been doing all long and the reason we’re in this mess. It’s time to stop Bush & Company before they succeed in launching his precious “Armageddon” upon his “evil empire”. Impeach Bush and Cheney now, while there is still time!
Well some good comments I think about corporations and also the control of the media when Bush 1 came to power. I feel it is too late, as the deregulations have allowed the corporate raiders to get total control and Eisnerhowers comments come to mind. Afghanistan and Iraq and the corporation invasion really shows the contempt these “beasts” have for all of us on this planet. Big Pharma has taken over the FDA and your democrats and republicans will do nothing with this either. I see the same thing here in Australia. Just like here, I dont really see any light in the tunnel. The ms media just does not cover the topics that we need to truly be shown and discussed, which is why the man made global warming topic has made me suspicious about the barrage its been given.
One expose’ about the MSM’s complicity, which I see it as, will not change the current culture of journalists being told what to report to aid big business.
Who agrees this forum needs a self-edit button so we can correct mistakes before we post?
Yes, the media have a lot of responsibility, the Adminstration has more, but the people of the U.S. were amazingly willing dupes. Some of us screamed and wrote letters and demonstrated and protested, and heard ourselves called unpatriotic (and worse) and went right on because we knew we were being lied to, we knew the truth, and nobody wanted to think about it. Gut reaction, not thought; blaming everybody but ourselves, our laziness and our greed.
For decades we in the U.S. and a number of our friends, have sown the winds of poverty, despair and racism in much of the world; now we are reapng the whirlwind, and we only make it worse with our stupid miltiary responses, our rudness and insults, our unthinking characterizations of everyone Muslim as a terrorist. I take no pleasure in having known what would happen, but every day I pray that we will not get what we so richly deserve and that somehow the world will survive our selfishness.
To Continue: I said
Bush, Cheney, Rove, and all the rest who are speaking out and saying outrageous statements, and playing so loosely with the truth must, I repeat: must do this if they are to get any leverage politically. Why? because their interests are at odds with the interests of the American people, with American values, with Democratic values which we the people choose over theirs: Empire building, political systems that bulldoze those at the bottom, with no remorse, or morals. If they were to tell the unvarnished truth, they would be out in a NY minute. So they don’t.
But the MEDIA? What excuse, other than a lousy paycheck do they have? The media must reflect the Democratic values on which we base our Constitution. If they don’t and they don’t all, then we must call them what they are and that is syncophants. That’s not journalism at all. And we must protect the real journalists.
I get tired of hearing that we all believed the crap Bush gave to justify his illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush had no more right to invade Iraq than Hitler had to invade Poland.
Iraq was no more a threat to the U.S.than Poland was to Germany. Or do you believe that a guy who might have a couple or even maybe several nukes would attack a nation which has 10s of thousands of nukes. It was laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
I stopped believing anything the government said when I was in the USAF during the Korean war. I was in the NSA and saw CIA reports showing the plots of our RB29s flights into the Soviet siberia to test their ability to detect them on their radar. Every time one of the planes was shot down the government would claim that it was just an innocent weather plane and indignant Americans would demand that we declare war on the USSR.
The Pueblo was an innocent cruise ship. Yeah.
Bush framed the issue as “WMDs.”
The issue was “iminent threat.”
kittyladyoregon, ‘The Great War For Civilization’ (1366 pages)- Robert Fisk, if you can lift it, its a great book one of the best middle east reporters ‘The Independent” in case you haven’t come across him
Steve H, yep the ultimate irony, and yep the ultimate joker after Tommy ‘flat world’ Friedman
Weapons Of Mass Destruction (1 hour, 37 minutes & 7 sec) its worth a try
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4437853756074043715
I caught most of Moyers’ show this evening and, as usual, it’s fairly top-notch.
There are many interesting threads he brings out, but one in particular stands out to me (having worked in public service for 20+ years). Namely, the fear of voicing a dissenting opinion. Your supervisor(s) have you by the purse-strings, can axe you at any time, etc. So both the public and private sectors, to varying degrees and by various means, discourage dissent (even if warranted). And, like basic traffic dynamics, people over-compensate. Think about how stop-and-go traffic turns into a parking-lot. If you don’t slow down the exact amount in relation to the driver in front of you, you hit him. So you need to slow down at least that amount — and always err on the side of more.
This is precisely the fear dynamic that plays itself out in vertical organizations.
But it’s been my experience that those who are most timid are those who should really be let go. That is, they’re afraid of being able to find a like capacity somewhere else and therefore doubt their own professional competence, They feel that they’re better off marching to the drumbeat of the organization in a sort of co-depependent manner, than in following truth. Let ‘em go, especially now that war is no longer fashionable. Maybe Fox will hire them all.
The program by Bill Moyers was excellent - - as far as it went.It did a good job of pointing out how the media has failed the public in digging out the real truth of how the Administration was buying off adequate research and selling the media a lot of hooey under the guise of “Patriotism” and all the while inciting fear if people didn’t go along with their lies. But let’s take this whole business one step further: go back to the beginning - - get at the root of the 9/11 attacks themselves and start digging at the unresolved problems with those attacks themselves and how the “official” 9/11 Commission Report is filled with distortions and lacks multiple areas that scream for further investigation and explanation. There are all kinds of information out there that the media has not picked up on and that require greater scrutiny. We either have tremendous official blunders or cases of extreme governmental complicity - -perhaps even to treasonous behavior - - for the preservation of our Republic more, much more work needs to be done!
This is not a duplicate comment with regard to the report of Bill Moyers PBS program. My comment stands - - it needs to be added to the other comments!
It is really joyful to watch the video, and I am looking forward to read the book.
Sadly, this issue was covered by another book for more than 3 years ago, but it did not receive much attention and the writer could not find a publisher since they were all afraid of publishing a book that documents the historical failure of the US media since 9/11 and the road to war.
The book
Moyers put the mediocrity of American journalists on display in a way that is seldom witnessed. The viewing audience was given a ringside seat to the unique spectacle of journalism’s “finest” describing how they actually think and reason and operate. And it was appalling. The self-serving and the cowardice, though glaring, were not as conspicuous as the sheer intellectual dullness,the childlike incapacity for critical thought, the blatant lack of seriousness in getting to the truth. It is as if the corporate scam of fake, pro-business, pro-corporate news has infected their brains with the net effect being the profusion of drivel which all intelligent consumers of corporate news correctly observe to be insulting to normal adults in it’s shallowness and it’s artificiality.
Dan Rather was embarrassing in his vanity and his trademark hollowness. Most revealing was the predictable gutlessness displayed by Thomas Friedman, William Safire, William Crystal, Judith Miller and Charles Krauthammer, those who strenuously promote the sending of other peoples children to kill and die, in their refusal to be interviewed by someone who knows precisely what they are, what they do, and why they do it. Such insufferable swine!
Bill Moyers did an excellent job of lifting the veil of silence over the “journalists” who have not bothered to live up to the name.
I applaud Dan Rather for his courage in admitting his mistakes. In seeing Hilary Clinton and others who spoke in favor of the war, and now expect us to give them the presidency, when they had the resources for God’s sake of knowing what the two Knight-Ridder reporters found, I can see why those candidates will lose out. A little humility about the lack of responsible investigation would go a long, long, way on everyone’s part, to setting this country back on a right course. But the “we didn’t know,” just won’t wash.
Dan Rather, thank you for setting an example of soul searching honesty that is healing to you, and to the rest of the country. Let’s see if others learn the lesson, or continue to use the, “If we knew then,” excuse.
Moyers has come a long way since writing speeches for LBJ. Known for doing his homework I wonder why he still thinks only 34,000 Iraqis have been killed, even CNN slipped out the figure 600,000 a few times last week.
Sorry, but it seems that my previous comment was truncated.
Here is the link to the book I was referring to:
http://www.noquestionsasked.org
“No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11″
By Lisa Finnegan , Foreword by Norman Solomon
ISBN : 0-275-99335-3
Best regards,
/Farhad
Having been conditioned to ultra skepticism and cynicism by “those in charge” whether they are politicians, main news media, organized religion, those in control of world wealth, et al, I have no faith that the news media will heed Moyers’ penetrating insights and begin to give truly critical reports. First of all most of them are like lemmings that follow the herd over idiotic edges. All one has to do to see this is to watch all of the news programs surfing them at the same time of the day to see how they display their banal psuedo-intellectualistic sound bites on any story that happens to have arisen, it doesn’t really matter what it is. And they all actually sound uninterestingly exactly alike. Quite laughably only their facial expressions and often hammy body gestures differ to some small degree as if that will convince us their picayune commentaries actually say anything worthwhile. I hunger for news reporters like Moyers and now that I know about them, those two courageous reporters from Knight-Ridder, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who I will now seek out online since where I live (North Texas) they are not admitted in print.
I thought “Buying the War” was as silly as a woman saying, “He lied to me,” when telling the judge why she wanted a divorce. Seems that he was out late, came home with lipstick all over his collar, and told his sweet little spouse that he had been at the library, and since she had a girlfriend who was a librarian and knew that the library was closed for painting, she knew right away that he was lying.
So the woman knew he was lying, but she didn’t want to know the truth; she was perfectly willing to divorce her husband for lying so long as she never had to face the truth, which was that he was shacked up in a motel with a floozy.
Moyers’s story is an old one: just about every “investigative” reporter has documented the lies, but NONE of them wish to face the truth which would force them to confront the other three violations of FOUR of the Ten Commandments.
Thou shall not covet, thou shall not bear false witness, thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal.
It’s about oil, but you would never know it from the whitewash put together by Moyers, who spent all his time on what WASN’T the reason for invading and occupying Iraq, while he completely ignored what WAS the reason for war and for having to lie in the first place.
Report on the lies, but don’t ever go near the truth. It is evidently too painful to face.
Aristotle said “everyman has a little bit of the truth.” It was about oil, does anybody doubt it? That fact has been pointed out numerous times, but it was also about retribution for Hussein’s thwarted assassination attempt on Bush #1, and about the economics of the industrial war machines, and about arrogant, pugnatious, obstinate political power. Moyers cannot put all of it together in one program. He apparently has more such programs ahead and apparently will “bring to light” the painful truths. I for one look forward to it.