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"Devastating" Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming
By Greg Mitchell
Editor and Publisher
Thursday 19 April 2007
"Buying the War," which marks
the return of "Bill Moyers Journal" will broadcast on PBS on April
25.
New York - The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down
in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a
90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the
return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD
and a draft transcript for the program this week.
While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the
war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes
from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with
numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits
that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded
by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.
The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans
and Iraqis rising again - yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to
come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war
on false pretenses."
Among the few heroes of the film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy
bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The
people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the
people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very
good. We should've all been doing that."
At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused
to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger
Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.
But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there
is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press
in general in the roll up to the war…We didn't dig enough. And we
shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong
doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top
brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all
honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don't think we followed
up on this."
Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way,
explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to
deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost
light - if that doesn't seem ridiculous."
Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light."
Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't
question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost
a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties
it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big
people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being
anti-American here.'"
Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the
Washington Post, in which he declared, "It seems perverse to focus too
much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and ordered them to
balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors
at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, "Do
not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has
done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails."
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters
"do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something." But Moyers
gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain,
to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early
2003.
The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the
United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British
report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded
from the Web - with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials
with "plagiarism."
Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone
on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every
liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing
that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of
war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William
Safire (who predicted a "quick war" with Iraqis cheering their liberators)
wrote "a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war."
The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period
making the administration's case for attack. In the six months leading
to the invasion the Post would "editorialize in favor of the war at least
27 times."
Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six
months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in
the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no
coherent reply.
The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many
of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media."
He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait
for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom
cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael
Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.
"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post
as a columnist."
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