The Bush War Sale

I hope you had the good fortune to watch Bill Moyers, one of the few journalistic icons we have left, tonight on his PBS special. It was a great program, pulling together what probably most anyone reading (or deleting) this is well aware of by now of the perfidity and criminality that led to the destruction and occupation of Iraq. It is exciting to hear he is back to a regular program (Friday night?).

I was late to come upon Mr. Bill. I guess that was of a piece with my skepticism with major media news and the idiot box in general. But I regret I did not see more of him in his prime - he has a winning way of being direct and un-gulled yet avoiding the whole panoply of fake emoting, shrill histrionics, and National Enquirer-style journalism that seems to have become de regeuer for the major networks. Presumably this is largely in reaction to the former success of Faux.

His show tonight, "Buying the War," struck me as exceptional. He gathered up so many of the loose ends related to administration malfeasance, active propagandizing, and war crimes as well as the absolute dereliction of duty by the vast majority of the media, too timid, unthinking, braindead, or simply corrupt and dishonest like Kristol et al to actually stop waddling and do some reporting. Or, in Kristol's case, a quiet suicide might be acceptable, the circumstances obviously fully explaining and justifying to the point where no note is needed.

My limited reading on the White House Correspondent's dinner the other night suggests nothing has changed there. We cannot expect to get real insights and independent reporting from the quislings who are sharing chuckles over Rich Little's stale old-in-the-60's bon-mottes with Laura. (Was the tune of that name - Hitchcock soundtrack? - insipid prior to 2000? I can't recall. It's ruined for me now.)

Apologies for this longer-than-usual squib from the always-entertaining Digby, but I felt it essential to make this as easy as possible:

I noticed this odd omission this morning too. Why didn't the NY Times review the Bill Moyers documentary that's slated to air tonight called "Buying The War"? They barely even mention it.

The LA Times did:

"Deep Throats were talking, but few in the press were listening," Bill Moyers says in 'Buying the War", a cold-eyed look at how lock-step with the Bush administration the mainstream news media became in the months leading up to the Iraq war.

Airing tonight on PBS, the documentary marks Moyers' return as a regular PBS presence. he left his previous eries, "Now With Bill moyers," at the end of 2004, frustrated by what he saw at the politicization of public broadcasting under then Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson.

Tomlinson is gone and Moyers is back (albeit with a suspicious lack of fanfare.) "Bill Moyers Journal" (which last aired in 1994) will settle into Friday Night on KCET after tonight's premiere. In "Buying the War," Moyers the citizen journalist (in the good sense of that term) goes back over the hawkish national climate in 2002 and '03, and the echo chamber the Bush administration created out of the mainstream media, including hallowed institutions such as "Meet The Press" and the New York Times, in selling the idea of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapon programs and ties to Al-Qaeda.

The heavy-hitters that Moyers says he tried but failed to get to comment for Buying the War" include former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Times columnists Thomas L. Friedman and William Safire, and Fox News Channel architect Roger Ailes.

The lighter hitters you will see a lot of are Warren R. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, reporters in the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder Inc, along with their bureau chief John Walcott.

This is Moyers' larger point: that these men were exceptions to the rule, writing stories that questioned the veracity of official intelligence, and because Knight Ridder (now owned by McClatchy Co.) didn't have a paper in New York or Washington, their dissenting voices couldn't compete with the theme of the moment.

The front pages were blaring, and cable news, of course, was banging the drum --- and the pots, and the pans. The clips alone that "Buying The War" amasses are chilling, what amounts to a hall of mirrors, administration officials leaking and spinning and then going on talk shows to point at their media-fed leaks or spin.

Phil Donohue, fired as host of an MSNBC show in early 2003 says he was told he could have a war advocate on his program as a solo guest, but dissenters had to be balanced out from the right."

Our producers were instructed to feature two conservatives for every liberal," he says.

There is no one representing the conservative argument here, not the deeper ideological reasons for believing in the Iraq invasion. But that's partly Moyers' position: In the run-up to war, point-counterpoint emerged as a devastating sham.

I guess it's not so surprising that the NY Times didn't bother to review this. It's cowardly, however.

Those of us who have been following this story in depth from the beginning know most of this, of course. But I'm glad that Moyers has amassed the footage and put it all in one place so that people can see it again in its glory. It's a big story and I'll be interested to see how many of the most dizzying moments during that long national acid trip Moyers was able to capture.

My personal favorite was Bush's press conference a few days before the invasion began. Matt Taibbi put it best:

The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.

Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list. Reporters, nonetheless, raised their hands in between questions–as though hoping to suddenly catch the president’s attention.

In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush’s behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.

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