Bill Moyers Journal: "Buying the War"

[rwarn17588]

In case you missed last night's excellent program on PBS, you can watch it here or read the transcript. It's quite a report.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

[Conan71]

Just a hypothetical here.  Indulge me RW, since everyone has played the hypothetical "If Gore were President, we wouldn't be in this mess."

What if Al Gore were the President and the exact same thing had played out with Iraq and WOT as it has under President Bush.  Do you think Fox would be looking for and exploiting every single mis-step or set-back?

Do you think Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann would be cheering on the war and talking about how all this is necessary?  Would Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi be trying to drum up even more funds for the war, while budget hawks like Coburn try to cut funding?  Would Liebermann have been shunned by the Democratic party for expousing his own independent beliefs?

299,999,999 (give or take a few) Americans all have their opinions, yet one man was faced with the final decision on what the appropriate response was to threats to our national security and foreign interests.  I'm thankful I'm not in his seat right now, or back when these decisions were made.

Don't you think this war has run predictably along party lines ever since the '04 election?

[rwarn17588]

I don't do hypotheticals.

It's utterly pointless to speculate on something that didn't happen. You can't go back in the past and change what happened. I'm just not a "If I had to do it over again" type of guy. That's just the way I am and the way I live my life. The best you can do is learn from mistakes.

I don't think the war's been run that predictably since 2004. You have Republicans like Chuck Hagel who have been critical of the war, and Democrats like Lieberman who've been supportive. You've got a Republican presidential candidate (McCain) who's been critical of the war. Heck, you've even got people in the administration (Condi vs. Dick) who've been warring over the direction of Middle East policy.

Sure, the war's been mostly along party lines, but what issue isn't? Except for immigration, it's a most splintered issue I can think of.

Did you watch the program? Your questions are, ahem, considerably off-topic.

[iplaw]

No surprise that you watched this little contrived piece of lefty journalism.  You're one of about 10 others.

And Bill Moyers...please.  You do know that as president he personally oversaw a half-million dollar transfer of funds from the Schumann Center Foundation to Media Matters don't you?

He's a partisan hack and poisoned the well of unbiased journalism long ago.

[Wilbur]

quote:Originally posted by rwarn17588

In case you missed last night's excellent program on PBS, you can watch it here or read the transcript. It's quite a report.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

Had no desire to watch, but I'm confident Moyers presented a fair and balanced documentary, having representatives from both sides of the discussion.

NOT!

[cannon_fodder]

quote:Originally posted by rwarn17588

I don't do hypotheticals.

That's what Bush says. []

I hope to read that article over lunch. I dont have time atm so I must with hold comment.  But had to float the 'no hypotheticals' thing at you.  (jab jab).

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by rwarn17588

I don't do hypotheticals.

It's utterly pointless to speculate on something that didn't happen. You can't go back in the past and change what happened. I'm just not a "If I had to do it over again" type of guy. That's just the way I am and the way I live my life. The best you can do is learn from mistakes.

I don't think the war's been run that predictably since 2004. You have Republicans like Chuck Hagel who have been critical of the war, and Democrats like Lieberman who've been supportive. You've got a Republican presidential candidate (McCain) who's been critical of the war. Heck, you've even got people in the administration (Condi vs. Dick) who've been warring over the direction of Middle East policy.

Sure, the war's been mostly along party lines, but what issue isn't? Except for immigration, it's a most splintered issue I can think of.

Did you watch the program? Your questions are, ahem, considerably off-topic.

Hardly OT considering your citation of Moyers focuses on how the war was sold to and via the media.

Since you are an independent, I figured you might be willing to chime in on the partisanship aspect.  Especially since people take commentators like Matthews and Hannity as purveyors of hard news, when they are basically spokesmen for their own respective political factions.

[MichaelC]

I didn't watch it.  But...

The mainstream media gave Bush a pass on scrutiny leading up to the Iraq War.  It's only when you get into 2005, and 2006 (when the War appeared to be endless), that the media picked up the ball.  They didn't ask questions, or give significant air time to decent in the run up to the Iraq War.

With FOX it's understandable, it's how FOX makes it's money, playing to a conservative niche.      The mainstream media is supposed to ask questions, and find the answers.  Not just repeat what the Administration is saying, and assume that's valid or even factual.

It doesn't make it right necessarily, but I do believe that the "mainstream media" is in ways a reflection of society.  While the majority of people supported the war, so did the media in general.  When supporters drifted toward a minority, the media increased the tough questions.

[rwarn17588]

Well, Hannity is a rightie. I honestly don't know what faction Matthews represents, except maybe just Washington insiders. I think he's all over the place.

And, iplaw, did you bother to watch the program or read the transcript before criticizing it? You could at least give it that common courtesy. Frankly, you remind me of the fundies during my youth who picketed the theater that screened "Life of Brian" near my hometown who didn't even bother watch it to realize it was 1) satire; and 2) thought-provoking.

I see Media Matters as an oversight tool. Ditto for any blog that catches inaccuracies in the media, no matter where it's from. Oversight is a good thing.

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by rwarn17588

I see Media Matters as an oversight tool. Ditto for any blog that catches inaccuracies in the media, no matter where it's from. Oversight is a good thing.

An oversight tool only if you are interested in the left's bias of the news.

Here's the first paragraph of their mission statement:

"Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

What about liberal misinformation in the U.S. media, or is that not important if someone wants the truth?

Problem with the media these days is the line between commentary and true reporting has become increasingly blurred.  Istead of factual-based stories, there are a lot of interpretations blended with a few facts which support the author's own views.

MPO, is that it's very hard to get anything which hasn't gone through the bias filter before it hits the air.

[rwarn17588]

<Conan wrote:

What about liberal misinformation in the U.S. media, or is that not important if someone wants the truth?

<end clip>

There are tons of conservative blogs out there that have been doing it for years. Plus, you have the Rushes, the Hannitys, the O'Reillys and the Becks who have their own bully pulpits do skewer the media if they wish.

Back to topic: The Moyer report analyzes why so many media outlets got the story about WMDs wrong when Knight Ridder got it right. The reason: Knight Ridder wasn't as cozy with so-called "insider" sources in Washington and got the story from the grunts in the military, intelligence community, etc.

[MichaelC]

The point is, questioning the media's role in the run up to the Iraq War is non-partisan.  It should be questioned, this isn't the USSR, the media is independent and had a duty to question the gov't.  And when they're wrong, they have a duty to question themselves.

It would be very misleading to say that the mainstream media was initially opposed to the Iraq War.  Of course, most of this thread is so far off topic, I'm not sure anyone said exactly that.

[iplaw]

quote:The point is, questioning the media's role in the run up to the Iraq War is non-partisan.

I think you meant "should be non-partisan" and if you did I agree with you.  The fact that Moyers is the one ram-roding the story ensured that non-partisanship was DOA.

[iplaw]

For anyone interested, here is the damning piece of journalism that Knight Ridder published before the Iraq war.  Not exactly earthshaking, as most of the commentary discussed doubt over Saddam's nuclear program.

For them to have "gotten it right", I would assume that they would have published multiple stories in the run-up to the war to justify our beatification of them now.  But they didn't.  We have one story.

This one story against the weight of intelligence from the CIA, FBI, MI6, Mubarak in Egypt, Putin, France, etc...

This is just wishful hindsight by Moyers.  I wonder how long it took for him to dredge out this one story?

[MichaelC]

Moyers doesn't bother me much, of course I didn't see it.  The mainstream media as a whole or in part isn't going to weigh themselves, and present the results publically.  They're primary business is now, not yesterday.

The motives of the gov't and the gov'ts credibility are always questionable.  The media, for all of it's percieved downside, is supposed to be there to help question gov't statements and actions.  A defense mechanism, similar to bearing arms.

Even though I was never initially for the Iraq War, and I really disliked the lack of investigation and reporting on the part of the media, I don't blame the media.  In a weird way, it's reassuring to know that in the "mainstream media", similarly to FOX, it's all about money.

It's a catch-22, for me anyway.