Buying The War

by tristero

Shamefully, the New York Times, and presumably other media outlets have refused to highlight Bill Moyers expose of the American press during 2002 and 2003. Of course, that hasn’t stopped liberal bloggers from talking it up, not only Digby here, but Glenn Greenwald and many others. And well they should.

Moyers’ show is an excellent introduction to some of what happened and you really should see it and tell your friends to see it as well. Like Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, “Buying the War” helps sketch out a narrative for an exceedingly complex tale. Eventually, multi-volume academic treatises will be written on the media cave-in of 2002/2003 with titles like “The Misused Analogy of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Bush Administration Propaganda for Invading Iraq.” Or “The Missing Millions: Press Coverage of the Feb 20, 2003 Antiwar Demonstrations.” Or “What Happened to Turkey? How American Media Misreported the Bush Administration’s Failure to Launch An Assault From the North. “And so on. But like “The Looming Tower,” the Moyers documentary is a great place to start.

Dont’ get me wrong, please! I’m not criticizing Moyers, my God, the show is terrific and long overdue. Let’s just not forget that “Buying the War,” despite presenting evidence of an overwhelming amount of failure and cowardice by the American media in the runup to what is among the the stupidest and most avoidable mistakes ever made by an American president – if not the absolute worst – provides only a small crossection of how poorly the American press behaved. As damning as the documentary is – and it is very damning – in reality, the way the press reported on the Bush administration and its critics in the run-up to war was far, far worse.