Story of the Day: The Return of Bill Moyers and "Buying the War"

If you want to see a concise yet in-depth breakdown of how the mainstream media sold the Iraq War to the American people, do not miss Bill Moyers' "Buying the War." (You can watch it there and/or read the full transcript.)

It's not that you'll find anything earth-shattering if you've been following our dysfunctional media during the Bush years. But somehow seeing it all laid out before your eyes - each piece connected to the other, each lie and manipulation building, resonating, told again and again and again, until millions of people believed them - it does remind you how astonishingly irresponsible the Washington press corps was and, sadly, remains today.

Psychologists talk about how human beings use coping mechanisms to deal with uncomfortable events in their lives in order to continue functioning. When I watched this documentary last night, I was reminded that even those of us who have committed years of our lives covering this stuff still use such coping mechanisms. If we spent every day thinking about what's happened and how it could've been averted, we'd go nuts. Confronted with the full trajectory of the lies and deception - and the resultant death and destruction - of this White House and the media's abdication of the most basic journalistic principles, it's almost unbearable to sit through. It's like watching a visceral movie or documentary about the JFK, RFK or Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations or the Vietnam War, that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach, the one that makes you want to cry and scream and curse and ask "why" all at the same time, knowing how much was lost and how it might have all been avoided. So you might do some of those things, especially if you're in the privacy of your own home. Or you sit there and stew. You feel helpless, maybe.

But then you must say we cannot let this continue. We must at least attempt to salvage our current botched democracy. We must force the current media elites to either do their jobs or step aside.

And that's why, as unbearable as it is seeing it all laid out before you, you must not turn away. I'm speaking here also to those who don't follow news so closely, in that I hope to not just be preaching to the choir when I say, as Bill Moyers always says, it's your duty as a citizen to know what your elected officials in Washington are doing in your name, on matters large and small. The one thing, in fact, that might have been missing from this documentary was the idea that if Americans were more aware, the pitiful exhibition of journalism leading up to and after the war would've been exceedingly more difficult to maintain.

I'll be following up on these thoughts in the next couple of days, dissecting some of the issues discussed in this documentary while also looking at them through the prism of what is happening right now.

Until then, enjoy the show.

Buying the War, by Bill Moyers
PBS

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

The Return of Bill Moyers and "Buying the War"

[edrita]

Saw it...great to have Moyers back on PBS on a regular basis.

Couple things:

Moyers bravely biting the hand that feeds him by showing some of the lame and irresponsible PBS coverage leading up to the war.
The close-up of an issue of the NY Times with one of Judith Miller's infamous front page pieces displayed. I had forgotten that some of those Miller travesties were co-written with Michael Gordon. He writes a book and gets interviewed by Russert and others......why?

[MediaBloodhound]

That was brave of him. And, yes, Michael Gordon, who helped build the case for the "surge" and for staying in Iraq in his reporting.