Bill Moyers Journal: Buying The War
(Documentary -- PBS, Wed. April 25, 9 P.M.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
Produced by Public Affairs Television and presented by Thirteen/WNET New York. Executive producers, Felice Firestone, Judy Doctoroff O'Neill; producer, Kathleen Hughes.
Host: Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers launches his new PBS series with a methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap of mainstream journalism's collective failure to challenge the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, thus marrying two of the long-time liberal advocate's favorite themes -- the lackey-ism of big media and failings of modern conservatism. Critics on the right will doubtless howl about providing Moyers this forum, but the intelligence that infuses his work and persuasiveness of his arguments have surely been missed as public TV has cowered against charges of liberal bias.
Moyers doesn't soft-peddle his take on the situation, summing it up near the end of this pointed project by noting that four years after the war began, "The press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses."
Administration defenders would dispute the latter half of that point, but if nothing else, Moyers puts the lie to the assertion that everyone assumed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, meticulously documenting a series of prewar articles by the Knight Ridder newspapers with headlines like "No Sign of Iraq Threat" and "Terrorism Experts Say they Don't See Iraq Link."...
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