Buying The War

Look, Bill Moyers kicks ass. There’s no disputing it.

After a while in “retirement”, Bill is back with a new show on PBS, Bill Moyers’ Journal. The show starts its regular run this weekend with an interview with Jon Stewart, which should be fun to watch. However as a kind of kick-start for the show they ran the documentary “Buying The War” last night. It’s a program which, in their words, “explores the role of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq”.

Now I’ve mentioned Bill here a couple of times before, and based on some of his ass-kicking in the recent past, I was quite excited to have a chance to see the new documentary. I missed the showing on PBS, but fortunately they have the whole show available online. From the show’s page you can link to streaming videoIf you don’t do streaming video, a little detective work can get you links to the actual files which you can DL and watch at your leisure. For example, the higher resolution quicktime files are: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. That’s how I watched this stuff in my hotel room. or transcripts of the show.

It’s both very impressive and very damning. It will serve well as a record of the failing of the press, but it’s frustrating to me because I’ve been saying these things for years now, and the fact that it took this long to get the discussion out in public (or as much as PBS can be considered in public–I know, I know) is annoying. Still, Moyers and his team do a great job of laying out the depth and breadth of the failure of the American journalistic enterprise, and maybe we can learn a lesson from it this time.

If you don’t believe me, you might believe the Denver Post’s Tv Critic when she says:

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.

or Variety when it reports:

Bill Moyers launches his new PBS series with a methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap of mainstream journalism’s collective failure to challenge the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, thus marrying two of the long-time liberal advocate’s favorite themes — the lackey-ism of big media and failings of modern conservatism.

I strongly encourage you to take the hour and a half and watch the documentary. Further I would wager that sparing a little time each week to catch the new show, either on TV or on the web, would be a rewarding exercise.

As an aside, There’s a nice bit of synchronicity of timing with this documentary being shown on the same day that Salon opinion columnist Glenn Greenwald unloads with both barrels on the media for complicity in the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories.

Here’s a few extracts from that piece:

It is difficult to watch these clips from yesterday’s House hearings investigating the absolute, deliberate lies regarding Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch fed to the American public by the U.S. military — with an eager and accommodating assist from our excellent and intrepid media — and feel anything other than disgust (and this is just beyond comment). But as anger-inducing as it all is, there is really nothing remarkable about any of it.

What these episodes actually do is illustrate how virtually every rotted and broken branch of our political and media culture operate:

Also, this one is quite illustrative:

Just look at this repulsive post by Powerline’s John Hinderaker yesterday as he tries (needless to say) to defend the Government’s conduct in the Tillman case by telling his readers they need not listen to Kevin Tillman’s accusations because he is “an antiwar activist who has posted on far-left web sites.”

What does Hinderaker omit from that description? That Kevin Tillman was in Afghanistan along with his brother, having volunteered to risk his life to fight for the U.S. Army in the wake of 9/11. But because he came to conclude that the invasion of Iraq was wrong — and because he has persistently demanded that the truth about the Bush administration’s conduct in his brother’s case be exposed — he is subjected to discrediting smears from smarmy little chest-beating play-acting warriors like John Hinderaker.

Oh, and be sure to check out the “Update” at the end of the piece for the nigh-obligatory 1984 quote. Don’t you just wish the Bush administration realized it was a dystopia, and not a playbook?

Anyway, it’s not like Moyers’ case needs any backup, but this piece does serve to highlight his points.