Something you may be interested in watching –
NEW YORK (Commentary) 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 this devastating 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.”
It does.
(Via The effervescent, minty fresh and ruthlessly moderate Editors.)
Mea bullshit! We are now entering the era of the breast beating. Next will come the period of flagellation. Ya all know what that looks like. We have been shown that image from the big I.
The last example for now- The liar saying to us all that he knows that the he made mistakes but that he won’t resign but he promises that if he can’t fix it he will leave.
So, stick the meas up their asses. They too failed this country. The Only industry singled out in the constitution for protection failed in its responsibility to the folks.
And as they say- “that you can take it to the bank.”
billjpa
It isn’t just the war. The manipulation of the media has been honed to America’s best science (since we’ve pretty much abandoned real science these days.) They do 24/7 coverage of a massacre to avoid even a crawl of the AG’s testimony, replace a moderate Republican morning show with a jingoistic far right hack, and form a “boys’ club” with with the White House staff (dancing and rapping rather than investigating.)
With respect to Rather, there has still never been any real effort to find out where the fake version of the real memo went, or why the media never reported it as a facsimile of a real memo. Supposedly, the person who provided it to Rather is a Kos regular, and yet still refuses to indicate where the fake memo came from. Talk about media manipulation!