Moyers Came to Kick Ass or Chew Bubblegum (and he ran out of bubblegum)

Well, you actually can learn something from watching television. Yet another benefit of the Democrats controlling congress is that PBS is has the leeway to broadcast content more contentious than Andre Rieu and Antiques Roadshow. This afternoon, M. and I watched the Bill Moyers' Journal special Buying the War. (Viewable online here.)

His lead-in:

"Four years ago this spring, the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster.

"The story of how high officials misled the country has been told, but they couldn't have done it on their own. They needed a compliant press to pass on their propaganda as news, and cheer them on. Since then, thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day.

"Yet the story of how the media bought what the white house was selling has not been told, in depth, on television. So, as the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at the months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war."

The list of those who "played ball" has a lot of names who are not surprising: every conservative pundit (excepting Pat Buchanan), Fox News, everyone on MSNBC but Phil Donahue (who was fired for not going along), CNN, all three major news networks, and Oprah. So far, so what.

But Moyers accomplishes something that the wing-nuts could only dream of: utterly demolishes the credibility of the New York Times and (to a somewhat lesser extent) the Washington Post as he details how they were punked by the Bush administration. (I deleted all of my WaPo and Times RSS feeds and replaced them with McClatchy's Washington Bureau feeds. The only reporters who actually dug into the story before the war worked for Knight-Ridder, and now work for McClatchy.)

This is also the story of the decline of journalism. Reporting -- finding out what is really going on -- is hard and expensive. Punditry and opinion is easier and cheaper. Even so, why George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, William Sapphire, and David Broder are still trotted out as "experts" or "authorities" on anything defies rational explanation.