Duplicity in the Press

"Scrap the Constitution" Copyright © Austin Cline.

Bill Moyers, whose babies I would have, was back on PBS last night, doing what PBS and Bill Moyers do best, telling people the truth.

I didn't get to watch all of it because of the time constraints, but I did see the first 45 minutes and believe me, it was pretty devastating.

Basically, he showed how the American press, led by the New York Times (and especially Judith Miller, who actually did time for failing to name her sources about the Valerie Plame thingie, which she never did an article about anyway), CBS, ABC, NBC, Dan Rather, the Washington Post, CNN and a host of other mainstream media (it goes without saying that Fox was in on it, too) rolled over, played dead, got in bed with, lubricated themselves freely and took it straight up the ass from the Bush Administration in terms of buying into and, worse, convincing the American public to buy into, the war in Iraq.

He was unrelenting, merciless and didn't gloss over anything. He followed the trails. The only "heroes" he could dig up were

Bob Simon of 60 minutes

and

Knight Ridder News

Apparently nobody at Knight Ridder was buying all the "WMDs" and "aluminum tubes" crap from the get-go and Bob Simon was able to easily find and call up CIA colonels to find out that Hamabi, who led the so-called Iraqi National Front, was basically a high-paid CIA fraud, telling lies to anybody who would listen, in order to get a check from the US government in the amount of $350,000 a MONTH.

The neocons got raked over the coals.

According to a piece by Greg Mitchell, dated April 21st, on the website EditorandPublisher.com, at the close of the show Moyers mentioned some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for the program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

That same piece went on to say:

"Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that 'so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media.' He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, 'We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.'

Then he explains: 'The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.' He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."

God help the United States of America.