The Fourth Estate

I watched Bill Moyers' program last night on the run up to the invasion of Iraq. (I have concluded the Tigers only win when I do not watch.) Not a lot of new material here, but a few great concessions from people in the news industry:

• CNN's Walter Isaacson admitted that he told his news staff to minimize coverage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, and if such coverage was necessary, make sure that 9/11 was mentioned. Isaacson told Moyers he did this in response to complaints from "some powerful men in powerful corporations."
• Dan Rather stated that he was "ashamed" of his failure to do his job after 9/11.
• Phil Donahue stated that MSNBC had a policy in place that any single anti war voice on the network had to be "balanced" by two pro war voices. Moyers also discussed a memo from MSNBC indicating that Donahue's firing was, in part, traceble to the fact that other news agencies were questioning his patriotism.
• A reporter from the Washington Post walked through the placement of pieces supportive of the rationale for war (front page) as opposed to pieces questioning the rationales (back of the first section). Often the back page pieces completely undermined the material presented on page 1.
• Moyers also showed footage of a Bush press conference that strongly suggested the whole thing was scripted. That is, the President had a list of who to call on and what question they would ask.

Like a lot of folks, I believe that the press in this country has completely fallen down on its job, but I always though their efforts were undermined in very subtle ways. Moyers posits that Washington became the victim of groupthink and the "cool kids" were not questioning the rationale for war. If you wanted access, to get ahead, or make influential connections, you did not ask any hard questions. Moyers demonstrated that sometimes, this whole process was not so subtle.