Bill Moyers on the media coverage of the run-up to the war

/ 27 April 2007

Take the time to go and watch Bill Moyers’ report on “Buying the War.” It’s available free, streaming online in a variety of formats. This show makes it much more understandable how so many Americans could be so drawn into the White House fantasy version of reality. It points out some of the major problems with our current media scene, and also makes clear that there was credible evidence FROM THE BEGINNING that the White House was intentionally misleading the country.

It's a powerful story, whose primary theme is that the further away you get from the DC press corps the more likely you are to get accurate information. But the show waits until its final minutes to start doing something that I think would have been very helpful: pointing beyond the US press to the international press.

I remember in the run-up to the war that most of the information that I read that contradicted the White House came from international newspapers: The Guardian in England, The Age in Australia, even Ha'Aretz in Israel. These are English-language papers, and much of the reporting I was reading was linked through to the Common Dreams website (making it easy to access).

Notable comments include Dan Rather saying something to the effect of, "even I asked, who was I to question the president?" and Bill Moyers closing by noting that more soldiers have been killed in this war than people who died in 9/11, and we've been at war there longer than it took to defeat the Nazis.

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