Bush Lied & People Died

I wasn't able to watch the entire show the other evening, so I just finished Bill Moyers' illuminating documentary on the role of the press in the lead up to the Iraq War, Buying the War. I've included his interview on Real Time with Bill Maher. In his PBS program, Moyers explores:

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? "What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored," says Moyers. "How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?"

Moyers story echoes my own experience. I was just an avid reader of the news and I was able to figure out that the Bush Administration was lying to us in the run up to the War, ably assisted by the media. But it wasn't easy. At the risk of repeating myself, I noted before:

My own interest in blogs, international and alternative media sources (such as the Guardian Unlimited, AlterNet and truthout), can be traced to the run up to the war in Iraq. Traditional media, be it newspaper or TV, did not report on (or question) the many areas in the Administration's push for war that were clearly bunk. It was astonishing to me at the time to see what wasn't reported at all in the press or what was slanted in favor of the Administration's position. It wouldn't surprise me if some Press Releases issued by the White House were printed in their entirety, without any independent investigation. Reporting the propaganda promulgated by the Administration was the order of the day for the press. Wrapped in a flag, of course, as was everything in that period of enforced patriotism.

The Philly papers were owned by Knight/Ridder at the time, so I also was privy to the reporting of Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel which was carried in the Inquirer. I used to wonder why Knight/Ridder wasn't part of the Stepford Press on the Iraq War -- I figured that Tony Ridder must have had some falling out with the Bushies and this was his ultimate revenge.

As Glenn Greenwald at Salon said, "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." Greenwald has an excellent precis of the show:

One of the most important points came at the end. The institutional decay which Moyers chronicles is not merely a matter of historical interest. Instead, it continues to shape our mainstream political dialogue every bit as much as it did back in 2002 and 2003. The people who committed the journalistic crimes Moyers so potently documents do not think they are guilty of anything -- ask them and they will tell you -- and as a result, they have not changed their behavior in the slightest.

Just consider that, as Moyers notes, there has been no examination by any television news network of the role played by the American media in enabling the Bush administration and its warmonger propagandists to disseminate pure falsehoods to the American public.

Even though I was familiar with the events covered, as I watched this story unfold, all I could think of was that what happened should be a crime, if it isn't. The Bush Administration (and the press?) should be held responsible for their actions. The refrain -- Bush lied & people died -- is more than that. It's true. As Greenwald said:

The fraud that was manufactured by our government officials and endorsed by our media establishment is one of the great political crimes of the last many decades. Yet those who are responsible for it have not been held accountable in the slightest.

See also, Shaun Mullen, The Big War Story the Media Is Ignoring.

Tags: Journalism, Commentary, Bill Moyers, Bill Maher, Iraq War, Video