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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (105417)	4/24/2007 3:33:15 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 360921

Moyers Shows How Media Backed Bush Plan for Iraq By Dave Shiflett April 23 (Bloomberg) -- A journalist's worst enemies may be the replay button and the clip file. Bill Moyers reminds us that Fox News was hardly alone in beating the war drums during the run-up to the Iraq invasion in ``Buying the War,' which airs April 25 on PBS at 9 p.m. New York time. Forget Brit Hume. Here's Dan Rather on the David Letterman show six days after 9/11: ``George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions and you know, as just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.' Rather, one of several journalists Moyers interviewed for the 90-minute program, insists he was speaking as a private citizen, not a journalist. Yet Rather admits that ``in the main there's no question that we didn't do a very good job.' Moyers supplies extensive evidence to back up that view. The Washington Post, for instance, did some 140 front-page pieces between August 2002 and March 2003 ``making the administration's case for war' and only a handful raised serious questions about the policy, says Post media critic Howard Kurtz. The New York Times, USA Today, PBS, the New York Daily News and a vast number of regional publications sang variations on the same theme, as did a large chorus of conservative and liberal pundits. Among the few skeptics were Bob Simon of ``60 Minutes' and John Walcott, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, whose work for Knight Ridder (later acquired by McClatchy Co.) questioned the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Powell Speech Simon, posted in the Middle East at the time, didn't buy that link for a second. Saddam, he notes, was a ``total control freak' and to ``introduce a wild card like al-Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do.' Yet these views found little resonance, especially in Washington, where officials including Dick Cheney quoted news stories based on administration leaks. Colin Powell's war- justifying speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, was swallowed whole, producing headlines such as ``Irrefutable' in the Washington Post and ``Damning Evidence' in the Arizona Republic. The insistence that Iraqis would hail troops as liberators was similarly embraced; Oprah Winfrey assured a guest there was no guesswork involved: ``We're just showing you what is.' Former CNN Chief Executive Officer Walter Isaacson said ``big people in corporations' also offered editorial guidance, and the network was accused of being anti-American when it aired stories about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The show names many journalists who declined to discuss their positive spin on the prewar buildup, including Judith Miller of the New York Times, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, pundits Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman and Bill Safire, and Fox News chief Roger Ailes. McClatchy's Walcott argues that press scrutiny doesn't undermine the troops and isn't unpatriotic. ``Are we really behind them when we fail to do our jobs?' he asks. (Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this story: Dave Shiflett at dshifl@aol.com .