I don’t know how many of you would claim to be a C-Span junkie but I certainly do. I cannot get enough of it. Programs like Washington Journal, American Perspectives, and Book TV, are mentally intoxicating.
I was just watching a speech by Bill Moyer to the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Wow, there is a reason why he has won 30 Emmys for his work. He is a brilliant linguist and public speaker.
He mentioned his documentary title “Buying The War” which I just finished watching. For anyone that questions the war on Iraq and who believe that Mainstream Media has failed us, this documentary is a must see.
The full length original can be found on PBS’s site here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html
Here are some quotes about the documentary.
In “Buying the War” Bill Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes document the reporting of Walcott, Landay and Strobel, the Knight Ridder team that burrowed deep into the intelligence agencies to try and determine whether there was any evidence for the Bush Administration’s case for war.
In the run-up to war, skepticism was a rarity among journalists inside the Beltway. Journalist Bob Simon of 60 MINUTES, who was based in the Middle East, questioned the reporting he was seeing and reading. “I mean we knew things or suspected things that perhaps the Washington press corps could not suspect. For example, the absurdity of putting up a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda,”
The program analyzes the stream of unchecked information from administration sources and Iraqi defectors to the mainstream print and broadcast press, which was then seized upon and amplified by an army of pundits. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation about WMDs went virtually unchallenged by the media.