Bill Moyers is returning to PBS, and he talked to Democracy Now! about his lead-off effort -- 'Buying the War,' which looks at how the U.S. news media bought what the Bushies were selling on Iraq.
First, an excerpt from the script:
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Good evening. I am pleased to take your questions tonight.
BILL MOYERS: [V.O.] Two weeks before he will order America to war, President Bush calls a press conference to make the case for disarming Saddam Hussein.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Iraq is a part of the war on terror. It’s a country that trains terrorists. It’s a country that could arm terrorists. Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country.
BILL MOYERS: [V.O.] For months now, his administration has been determined to link Iraq to 9/11.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: September the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a battlefield.
BILL MOYERS: [V.O.] At least a dozen times during this press conference, he will invoke 9/11 and al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America. But the White House press corps will ask no hard questions tonight about those claims. Listen to what the President says.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This is a scripted --
REPORTER: Thank you, Mr. President.
BILL MOYERS: [V.O.] “Scripted.” Sure enough, the President's staff has given him a list of reporters to call on.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Let’s see here… Elizabeth… Gregory… April, did you have a question, or did I call upon you cold?
APRIL RYAN: I have a question.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: OK. I’m sure you do have a question.
ERIC BOEHLERT (note: a liberal U.S. media critic - Bill D): He sort of giggled and laughed, and the reporters sort of laughed. I don't know if it was out of embarrassment for him or embarrassment for them, because they still continued to play along. After his question was done, they all shot up their hands and pretended they had a chance of being called on.
APRIL RYAN: Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: My faith sustains me, because I pray daily. I pray for guidance.
Here's a snippet from the interview:
BILL MOYERS: We are entering the fifth year of this war. The casualties keep mounting. April was the deadliest month so far. The deadliest day occurred in April. And the press, which was very much responsible for creating the momentum for the war, has yet to understand it's role. So I wanted to look, with my producer Kathy Hughes, at what are the lessons we can learn from what happened in the build-up to the war, so that we might not see it happen again. This is an example of what happens when the press surrenders its independence and suspends its skepticism and becomes a cheerleader for an administration. And I don’t care what administration it is -- Democratic or Republican. When the press gives up its power to scrutinize what power is doing, then we’re all in trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most surprised by as you did this investigation?
BILL MOYERS: I was most surprised at the marvelous work being done by the Knight Ridder bureau in Washington -- Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel -- who were onto this story about the flawed intelligence and the forged documents and the invalidity of what the administration was saying before anybody else. But because they don't have an outlet in Washington and New York and because they don't have -- they don’t play the game according to the Beltway rules, their reporting was marginalized. Their reporting was put aside, shut aside. You’ll see them in the broadcast tonight. They’re marvelous journalists, totally devoted to finding the facts and getting them to the American people. But because they were not celebrities, they never got on television. Because they were not stars, they didn't get on Meet the Press and places like that. So their reporting was blunted by indifference. That’s the thing that surprised me.
AMY GOODMAN: They say in your documentary, “We’re not writing for the people who are deciding to go to war. We’re writing for the communities where the people are being sent to war.”
BILL MOYERS: Yes, and the head of what was then Knight Ridder -- it’s been sold since then to McClatchy -- Walcott says, is that, you know, when you’re going to war, you’re realizing that people are going to die. And the way -- this is my comment, not his -- the way that they were talking -- the way they still talk about the war inside the Beltway is in abstract concepts, grand strategies, who’s right, who’s wrong, not in terms of the human cost that we have now seen in Iraq. And it wasn't talked that way in 2003 on the eve of the war, either.