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Buying the War

FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] reports and reflects on a documentary shown on PBS a couple of weeks. If it weren't so serious one could be forgiven for laughing out loud. The sad fact is that the media failed, dismally, in doing what it ought to have - challenging, probing and putting propositions and political spin to the test.

"If you missed the April 25 airing of the Bill Moyers documentary Buying the War, there's good news: The full program and transcript are available online.

As Moyers explained in the introduction:

The story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those 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 program highlights the lonely efforts of several journalists who raised essential questions about the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq—particularly Charles Hanley of the Associated Press, and Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel. Their efforts stand in stark contrast to their mainstream media colleagues, who exhibited little interest in assessing the claims coming from the White House.

In one revealing response, NBC anchor Tim Russert explains his reason for not raising sufficient doubts about what Dick Cheney and others were saying on his program: the skeptics weren't calling him. "To this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them," he told Moyers. Do major media figures like Russert really think they've done their job if they just wait around for critical sources to come to them? And the idea that NBC's Washington bureau chief didn't have "access" to prominent skeptics like Scott Ritter and Daniel Ellsberg is just laughable."

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