I attended a "Doc Talk" session on covering war. The panelists were Michael Tucker (Gunner Palace; The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair and the forthcoming Bullet-Proof Salesman) and Ellen Spiro and TV legend Phil Donahue, co-directors of Body of War.

Donahue had this to say about journalism:

Journalism is about telling people things they don't want to hear.

And this about the media business (paraphrase):

The people who run big media in this country, the first thing they think about when they wake up in the morninr is (their company's) stock price, and it's the last thing they think about before they go to sleep.

The problem, he inferred, is that real journalism sometimes interferes with the executives' prime directive.

The panel mostly focused on the Iraq war. Considering this is Canada, and our troops are effectively at war in Afghanistan, it might have been worthwhile to have an documentarian on to talk about that conflict. But now I'm thinking, has The Great Canadian Documentary about Afghanistan been done yet?

Anways, the topic of Judith Miller's reporting on WMDs in Iraq came up (a hot topic on this blog two years ago). Read this post for background, but I noted that then-NYT editor Howell Raines essentially gave a green light to Miller to do her administration-friendly stories. I made a mistake in my remarks; Raines didn't want it looking like his personal liberal beliefs were driving coverage, whereas I phrased it as him not wanting the NYT to look knee-jerk liberal on this issue. However, the end result was the same.

My point was that if the top decision-makers in national media organizations make a conscious decision to give the government a free pass to sell a war based on lies, then that is creeping fascism (note: I don't think the U.S. is there yet, but if what happened during the Iraq War is a trend and not an anomaly, then our neighbours to the south have a problem) .

None of the panelists disagreed with me. Donahue observed the U.S. government wants to be able to torture people and hold them in custody forever.

Donahue, who some argue was elbowed off MSNBC in 2003 because he questioned the rationale for going to war in Iraq, said it would be hard for many non-Americans to imagine the fear associated with being labelled a "liberal" in modern-day America.

Questioning the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, for example, wouldn't provoke a full-throated assault on one's patriotism, he said.

I asked the panelists what they thought about the approach of Michael Moore, who is the most commercially successful documentary maker in history, but who has some criticizing his methods (see my post about Manufacturing Dissent for details).

"I think Michael Moore is the Babe Ruth of documentaries," Donahue declared.

"I wish someone would make a movie about us making movies," cracked Spiro.

Ohh-kayyy. :)

In formulating my question, I noted that Moore had buttonholed lawmakers in Fahrenheit 9/11, asking if they wanted to sign their own kids up to serve in Iraq. Donahue asked if that approach bothered me.

"Absolutely not," I said, defending it as a legitimate journalistic question.*

* Note: Some of the congressmen in the film complained afterward they were the victims of drive-by editing by Moore.

Personally, I think every local newspaper in the United States should have asked their local Congressional representative if he or she would order a son or daughter sent to Iraq to serve in combat.

If the answer is is, then maybe the war truly is in the national interest. If the answer is no -- or more likely, no answer at all -- then maybe the factual foundations of the reason for going to war are not very solid.