Documentary on Bush & the media & the Iraqi War:
" BUYING THE WAR"
As the intro to the film puts the question:
" Four years ago on May 1, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrierAs the blurb from PBS explains:
USS Lincoln wearing a flight suit and delivered a speech in front of a giant
"Mission Accomplished" banner. He was hailed by media stars as a "breathtaking"
example of presidential leadership in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite profound
questions over the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction and the
increasing violence in Baghdad, many in the press confirmed the White House's
claim that the war was won. MSNBC's Chris Matthews declared, "We're all neo-cons
now;" NPR's Bob Edwards said, "The war in Iraq is essentially over;" and Fortune
magazine's Jeff Birnbaum said, "It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq
really was in the broadest context."
How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence
disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between
Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? "What the conservative
media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House
from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the
President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism
and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not
satisfactorily explored," says Moyers. "How the administration marketed the war
to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How
and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists
in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?"
This is an incredible documentary showing how the media bought into the lies & half-truths The Bush/Neocon propaganda to convince the American people & the world of the urgency & necessity of invading Iraq & thereby becoming as culpable as
the administration for this unnecessary & mismanaged & bungled war which
has become a damaging blow to America's reputation & integrity.
" How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well
covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and
what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out
fact from propaganda?....watch "Buying the War," a 90-minute documentary that
explores the role of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, which
includes interviews with Dan Rather, formerly of CBS; Tim Russert of Meet the
Press; Bob Simon of 60 Minutes; Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN; and
John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers
(now McClatchy). "
The following video is a promo for the documentary:
and here is another clip from the documentary:
And on " the absurdity of connecting AlQaeda/ 9/11 & Saddam Hussein " why only a few in the Media questioned the Bush/Neocon assumptions:
And the following are some of the responses to this documentary & the welcome news that Bill Moyers is back & may bring some integrity back to network journalism which is so lacking the last five years or so as various mainstream journalist have become " Mouth Pieces" for the Bush Regime & the Neocons...
The Cincinnati Post , April27, 2007
Moyers returns with scathing report
By Rick BirdPost staff reporter
and from Varity.com april 20,2007 :He's back and with a journalistic vengeance. This is good news for those who
bemoan the loss of in-depth, tell-it-like-it-is broadcast journalism.
Bill Moyers returned to PBS Wednesday night with a special looking at the Bush
marketing scheme that led up to the war in Iraq. It was a special report that
preceded the debut tonight at 9 (CET, KET2) of the "Bill Moyers Journal" (the
title of his first PBS news series in the early '70's).
Wednesday night's show was one of the most hard-hitting and incisive documentaries in memory, showing Moyers is at the top of his pull-no-punches game. The piece was a scathing attack on the Bush Administration, exposing a flimsy public relations charade to justify the war in Iraq. It also was an equally relentless attack on American broadcast and print media for giving Bush a free ride. Moyers
returned with barely a mention of his new series, plowing right into the night's
topic. His crisp, tightly written opening lines left no doubt what was
coming:
"Four years ago this spring the Bush Administration took leave of
reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into
a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told.
But they couldn't have done it on their own. They need a compliant press to pass
on their propaganda as news and cheer them on."
What followed was a riveted piece where Moyers had the likes of former CBS anchor Dan Rather and NBC's Tim Russert squirming over why they never challenged the war drums of the Bush Administration. Moyers shamed cable networks and some of the most respected newspapers and columnists in the country, concluding this is what happens "when a free press surrenders its independence and skepticism."
Moyers teased tonight's show saying he will talk to Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" and explore how "faking the news can reveal more of the truth than all of the Sunday morning talk shows put together."
Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War
(Documentary -- PBS, Wed. April 25, 9 P.M.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
And from today's Blog at Huffington PostBill 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 doesn't soft-peddle his take on the situation, summing it up near the end of this pointed project by noting that four years after the war began, "The press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses."
Administration defenders would dispute the latter half of that point, but if
nothing else, 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." Nevertheless, conservative pundits repeatedly sounded the drumbeat for war, and Iraqi defectors carefully leaked horror stories to both headline-hungry news outlets and a Bush administration that would then confirm those accounts --
creating, as Moyers puts it, "a circular, self-confirming leak."
..At the same time, those who dared question the case for war were, as Moyers says,
"denounced by the partisan press and largely ignored by the mainstream press" --
scrutinized by what former CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson calls the "patriotism
police" and buffeted by what Dan Rather dubs "a very effective slam machine."
.
Although Rather and CBS News' Bob Simon are among those who participate, the laundry list of luminaries who Moyers says would not be interviewed is more striking. They include former New York Times reporter Judith Miller as well as Times columnists Thomas Friedman and William Safire, Fox News Channel CEO Roger Ailes and such pundits as William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, who frequently serve as talking heads in friendlier venues.
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.
What The Hell Happened To Tom Friedman?
April 28, 2007
Eric J. Weiner in his article What The Hell Happened To Tom Friedman?April 28, 2007 criticizes jounalist like TomFriedman for selling the war in Iraq to the American people based on false information & encouraged by the Bush Regime...
...Moyers's 90-minute prosecution of all facets of the media obliterated the
myth that the reporters and columnists who supported the march to war in 2002
and 2003 were simply working from the facts that the Bush administration
provided. The reality of the administration's lying charade and the accompanying
looming potential for disaster were readily available to any enterprising
journalist on the story who was willing to pick up the damn phone. Instead,
ignorance, political ideology, and a paralyzing fear of being attacked as
unpatriotic by partisan Republicans resulted in the Washington press corps'
almost universally fawning coverage of the administration's war plans.
For example, Moyers spoke to Bob Simon of 60 Minutes, who in December 2002 reported one of the few major skeptical stories during the run-up to war, exposing as hype the administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was close to acquiring
nuclear weapons.
....Simon wasn't the only heavy hitter Moyers spoke to.
Others included Tim Russert, Dan Rather, Walter Isaacson, and many more. Russert in particular looked horribly uncomfortable answering questions about how the administration used his Sunday morning roundtable, Meet the Press, as a marketing vehicle for the war. But at least he was willing to explain his journalistic thought process. I'm no Russert fan. But it took balls to sit for that interview, and history will thank him for it.Which brings me to Friedman. If you look back at his foreign policy columns starting in late 2002, Friedman regularly provided intellectual heft to utopian neoconservative points of view. He was especially forceful in arguing that picking a fight with Iraq and diverting our attention from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would give the U.S. the historic chance of remaking an oppressive Middle Eastern dictatorship into a flowering democracy. Then, once the war started to spiral out of control, he
refused to backtrack, regularly positing that "the next six months" would be
essential to determining if we'd be able to have a decent outcome in Iraq. Of
course, on Friedman's calendar six months apparently can last nearly three
years, because in more than a dozen instances from December 2003 through May
2006 Friedman floated his "six months" theory. (Check the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting for the entire list.)That's all for now,
Take care,
GORD.
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