Moyers is back!
Over at The Nation, John Nichols reviews Bill Moyers’ latest work for PBS. “Buying the War,” the first episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal, examines media complicity with the Bush administration’s rush to invade Iraq. Nichols comments that:
Moyers is still practicing the craft of journalism in the manner intended by the rebels against empire who wrote a "freedom of the press" protection into America's founding document.In other words, he is refusing to be a stenographer for the powerful.
"Buying the War" highlights that refusal.
Glenn Greenwald comments here that Moyers’ work will remain invisible to the mainstream media, because it is their fecklessness that is skewered so thoroughly:
Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it).They will almost certainly dismiss Moyers as a liberal partisan, not a real journalist, and continue to insist that they are doing a superb and even-handed job. They will continue to revere the most guilty parties responsible for the deceit and destruction of the last six years.
And, worst of all, the sicknesses documented so potently by Moyers will continue to pervade our dominant media and political institutions.
For those who missed the program, the transcript and video are available here; this interactive timeline is a nice feature.