According to an NBC memo, Phil Donahue's MSNBC show was canceled just before the Iraq War because he wasn't "waving the flag" like the news programs on competitor stations.
Tom Shales reports in the Washington Post on tonight's Bill Moyers special, that covers how media conglomerates rallied around the flag as the occupation began, to serve their ratings and business interests.
Dissent was deemed not only unpatriotic, Donahue recalls, but -- perhaps even worse -- "not good for business." Most of Moyers's report involves serious, respected journalists who let themselves be swept up in war fever and who were manipulated by the administration sources who had cozied up to them. Instead of investigating administration claims about al-Qaeda and WMDs and such, cable news offered up hours and hours of talking-head television.Former CNN president Walter Isaacson tells Moyers: "One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is, it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb-suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters."
Dan Rather -- who has left his CBS anchor chair but continues with solid and superior reports on the high-definition cable and satellite channel HDNet -- tells Moyers: "The substitute for reporting far too often has become 'Let's just ring up an expert.' . . . This is journalism on the cheap, if it's journalism at all."
How did Virginia's self-described moderate Congressmen contribute to this debate? Let me remind you: He accused them of treason, a crime punishable by death.
Salon captured it here:
"... in late February [2002, Tom] Daschle raised relatively mild questions about the war, saying the future success of the war "is still somewhat in doubt" and that it would be a failure if Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden were not captured.
"....Republicans immediately and hyperbolically lashed out in yet another attempt to silence debate. The same day Daschle made his statement, ... Rep. Thomas Davis, R-Va., head of the National Republican Campaign Committee, chimed in, saying that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country." Conservative pundits like Sean Hannity backed them up and, again, debate quieted and another marker was laid down."
The prevailing GOP/conservative strategy is to try to shut down debate over the war before it even starts. Any questioning of the administration's handling of the war on terror is immediately mischaracterized and attacked as unpatriotic. This bullying makes actual dissent from the president's policies nearly impossible -- and it appears to be working yet again. And every time it does, our democracy is debased just a little bit more.
More from the Post and Tom Shales:
[Dan] Rather is among a select group of working journalists who agreed to be interviewed for the Moyers report. Others include media critic and Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, Bob Simon of "60 Minutes" and, formerly from Knight Ridder Newspapers, John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel.Moyers credits them with breaking from the pack and printing stories that looked deeply into administration claims. Because the Knight Ridder chain had no paper in Washington or New York, however, its stories didn't get the national exposure they deserved, and networks were skittish about following up on them.
Even if this Moyers report tells you some things you already knew, it puts the whole story of the media's role in the war into one convenient package -- a story of historical value that is also frighteningly rife with portents for the future and for what will pass as journalism in months and years to come.Moyers's last words on the broadcast, at least according to a preliminary script, will be: "The country is in chaos," but the syntax is such that one can't be sure if by "the country" Moyers means Iraq or the United States. Maybe he meant both.
Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War airs tonight at 9 on Channels 22 and 26.
Remember how easy the media was on Gonzales during his confirmation? He never promised to be anything but a "loyal Bushie." Why are we surprised?
While there are lots of reasons to object to these practices the last few years, don't forget the honorable journalists and honorable Republicans (yes I believe there are some) who fell by the wayside during these scandals. Forced to compete with crooks and media darlings for campaign financing, public support, airtime and ink, they had to join the conspiracies or leave public service. A Japanese proverb says, "The nail that sticks up is hammered down," and Tom Delay was "The Hammer." Tom Davis, who allowed him and Abramoff to raise money out of the NRCC offices, and alowed them to position lobbyist Dan Matoon as the RNCC's #2 man, is Hammer, Jr.
Lord knows Lowell's been right on the mark about mainstream media's big sucking wound.... it's an act of devine intervention just to get a LTE published which isn't significantly altered. OP/ED piece?? You have to know somebody or be skilled at blackmail.
I'm glad you posted about this since I probably would have missed this promising analysis.
And that was the theme of the program -- that too many of these professional, highly salaried journalists, made little effort to get the facts right on issues that meant war or peace.
Another telling moment was when a journalist, I forget which one, maybe Russert, essentially said that it isn't our job to question the government, it's the job of the opposition party. (Hmm -- where does the opposition party get the facts to contradict the government?)
There were some journalists who did get the facts right and published them, but their work was not picked up by the major newspapers like the NYTimes and Washington Post. And so their stories ran for a day, and then were ignored.
Bloggers can sometimes play a useful role by giving wider attention to good, solid journalism published in some of the less famous newspapers.
At the risk of using my own example, when a local paper printed up Tom Davis's lie that he didn't "take a nickle from oil companies," the reporter couldn't even be bothered to check the public record to see if he was lying. A few clicks on the FEC website showed he took about $3 million from energy PACs including oil companies, which bought his vote for their billions in tax breaks. Detcord, I'm just one of thousands of bloggers who go beyond letting themselves be used to deliver planted questions, like the one Moyers shows to President Bush, "how does your faith guide you?"
It seemed to start with Reagan extrolling "Supply-side economics." Only one or two economists - on the Republican payroll - bought into this voodoo. The press presented the single economist and his protogee against the 99% of the rest of economists as if there were a real dispute. They did the same thing more recently with climate change until it became "safe" to go with the 99.8%.
Walter Pincus said in the special that WaPo used to "Truth Squad" Reagan's speeches until the publisher told him to stop.
From Tom Shales review of the Moyers special:
Former CNN president Walter Isaacson tells Moyers: "One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is, it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb-suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters."Dan Rather -- who has left his CBS anchor chair but continues with solid and superior reports on the high-definition cable and satellite channel HDNet -- tells Moyers: "The substitute for reporting far too often has become 'Let's just ring up an expert.' . . . This is journalism on the cheap, if it's journalism at all."
That documentary is the second time I have seen Russert come off looking weak. The first was Wednesday afternoon where when asked what issue was critical in the upcoming debates he said " one little 4 letter word I R A K". I cracked up....He caught himself and corrected the spelling quickly.It was still hilarious!
Bill Moyer's documentary on PBS tonight -- "Buying the War" -- may have been the most important piece of broadcast journalism every shown. It was a fantastic exploration of how the mainstream media (except for two journalists at Knight Ridder and one at the AP) failed the American people and failed to do their job in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Masterful.
It's very sad, by the way, to see how far the mainstream media has fallen. Meanwhile, the blogs are increasingly filling the gap, doing their own independent journalistic work (e.g., Firedoglake's masterful reporting on the Libby trial, Josh Marshall's masterful reporting on the attorneys' firings, many many other examples). Here in Virginia, bloggers are covering events that the MSM doesn't even bother to cover, like candidate announcements and county JJ dinners. Plus, Virginia bloggers - left and right - are hustling for interviews and "live blogs" with candidates and elected officials, even bringing them on "Blog Talk Radio" for live debates, moderated by them. If that's not "journalism," I'm not sure what is. Lastly, bloggers are acting as a watchdog on the media, and also on each other, providing important accountability that has been lacking from they system. What would have happened during 2001-2003 if there had been a thriving blogosphere like there is today? We'll never know, but my guess is that the runup to war with Iraq wouldn't have been as smooth, that at least some of the more outlandish claims would have been questioned.
On the other end of the spectrum, the cost of entering the market through blogging is essentially zero, except for the cost of one's time. So I think it is true that blogging has become another career pathway or gateway for good journalists who, for whatever reason, want to go that route.
Of course, there are tens of millions, or maybe hundreds of millions, of blogs out there and there is a lot of drivel. But the law of large numbers means that on any issue, some of the bloggers are going to be commenting with a great deal of expertise and intelligence. The classic example may be the sudden appearance of experts on IBM typewriters during the "Rathergate" flap, who effectively undercut the basis for the 60 Minutes piece.
Hopefully, for us regular citizens, the net effect is development of our critical reading and critical thinking skills.