PBS Launches New Moyers Special On Wednesday

Some PBS stations (Georgia is not one of them) will be broadcasting a 90-minute Bill Moyers special on Wednesday: Buying the War. (Watch a YouTube clip; check your local listing).

In this first installment of a new series (the Bill Moyers Journal), Moyers (72) explores how and why the press "bought" the White House line about war in Iraq. He asks "what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?"

The topic of selling war is not a new one to politics, PBS or Moyers. In January 2003, the NOW team with David Brancaccio explored the historical use of propaganda.

In December 2005, Columbia Journalism Review Daily reported that the documented budgets of US propaganda efforts in the Middle East totaled $57.6 million, "more than the annual newsroom budget allotted to most American newsrooms to cover all the news from everywhere for an entire year." (emphasis original)

Also in December 2005, the Pentagon reported it was planning to spend $300 million on propaganda abroad over a five year period. It's illegal to do this domestically, but no one has examined the legal implications of the spill-over effect of the Internet, which knows no geographic borders.

Media critics will not be surprised or disappointed, if early reviews are to be believed. From Variety:

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. Critics on the right will doubtless howl about providing Moyers this forum, but the intelligence that infuses his work and persuasiveness of his arguments have surely been missed as public TV has cowered against charges of liberal bias...

Moyers puts the lie to the assertion that everyone assumed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, meticulously documenting a series of prewar articles by the Knight Ridder newspapers with headlines like "No Sign of Iraq Threat" and "Terrorism Experts Say they Don't See Iraq Link."...

In the final analysis, it's hard to dispute that journalists not only bought the war, to paraphrase Moyers' title, but either through acts of omission or commission, helped the administration sell it.

To this day, I wonder about the sudden and extreme put pressure on Knight-Ridder to sell, given its role as being the sole news chain to consistently write investigative pieces on Bush Administration policies, like Iraq, that were the equivalent of a series of black eyes.

The (UK) Globe & Mail notes Moyers bites the hand that feeds him -- PBS -- by criticizing a "Frontline documentary, co-produced with The New York Times just two months after 9/11, that gave credibility to the spectacular stories of suspect Iraqi defectors." Henrietta Walmark writes:

It's a relentless exposé, with all too few exceptions, of leading journalists gone off the rails.

Those who wouldn't talk to Moyers include journalists and columnists on the right-side of the aisle: Fox News Channel CEO Roger Ailes, The Daily Standard's William Kristol and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. A bevy of New York Times writers bowed out as well: former reporter Judith Miller and columnists Thomas Friedman and William Safire.

Read more about Moyers, a southerner who worked in the LBJ administration, from BuzzFlash (2003 interview). As USA Today notes:

The media-White House dance is familiar to Moyers, who once spun the Vietnam War as a special assistant to President Johnson. "We circled the wagons. We didn't want to listen to the (CBS') Morley Safers and (the Associated Press') Peter Arnetts and (The New York Times') David Halberstams reporting on the ground. There's a tendency in Washington government to deal with your own view of the world without being contradicted by mischief-making journalists."

But during the buildup to Iraq, he says, very few journalists made mischief, and those who questioned the administration's motives were largely ignored.

FreePress is organizing viewing parties and a pre-release conference call with Moyers.

Bill Moyers Blog