Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report

Glenn Greewald does a really good job of telling us what we saw when we watched last night's Bill Moyers PBS special "Buying the War." I'll admit that I have been sitting here thinking "Yeah, I knew it was bad, but this bad?"

Greenwald takes the next step, which should have been obvious to me but wasn't until I read what he wrote:

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it). [Editor - highlighting is mine.]

Has America become so corrupt that it now subordinates the goals of building a better nation, better people and providing an environment of Freedom has become subordinate to greater money-making and building worldwide power? What has happened to the two century experiment in democracy on the North American continent?

Instead of a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people have we succumbed to the disease of Imperialist wars in support of an ever wealthier elite who gather all power to themselves? We have let them centralize control of the broadcast media and the daily and weekly print media. This gives the elite the wealth to rob the rest of us of any control of our nation.

So the wealthy American elite buy an all-volunteer military and send them on a fool's errand to occupy Iraq for the primary purpose of overawing the major oil supplying nations in the world. Control of the the flow of energy supplies allows those wealthy elite to gain greater power and wealth without spreading more than a minimum of that wealth to the mass of the people who actually create it.

Bush may have overreached himself when he has decided to ignore Congress and the American people in their desire to get out of the fighting in the Middle East. But why should he listen to the American People? He has the major media and the pundits on his side?

Is this what it means to say that our democratic institutions have become corrupted? Sure looks like it to me, when Bush can steal elections without having the media tattle on him, ignore Congress with signing statements and eliminate habeas corpus by Presidential decree.

The Romans didn't really recognize that the Republic had been destroyed and replaced by the empire until generations later. We may recognize the change here sooner, but can we then prevent it? What is happening to the two century experiment in democracy? Is it over now?

Tom Tomorrow quotes the pundits

Bill Moyers in his "Buying the War" last night made a major point that the pundits who actively pumped public opinion to support the preemptive invasion of Iraq and downplayed the risk are all still in business on TV and newspaper OpEd pages today. So Tom Tomorrow offers a cartoon panel that identifies many of the more significant offenders. Go read.

Moyers delivers the goods. The Washington Press corps should wear hoods and sunglasses.

The hour and a half PBS special "Buying the War" was on this evening and well worth the time to watch. He essentially documents the manner in which the Washington Press Corps lay down and let the Bush administration walk all over them, while burying all questions and doubts by either not covering them, or by putting the assertions from the administration on the front page while occasionally reporting the contradictions deep inside the paper. TV simply never bothered with the contradictions and questions. They just put the administration spokes-liars on and let it go at that.

If you missed the TV show, the video is available here.

Then over at Salon today Glenn Greenwald goes after the same press for the way they accepted the lies the military told about Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman and trumpeted those lies as great stories about American heroes. both did well as soldiers, but the stories the Army put out in each case was a pack of lies designed to ... who knows what? Cover up a screw-up? Create another photogenic American hero?

Back to Moyers - he makes it clear that the one press organization in Washington that got the stories it covered right was Knight-Ridder. They repeatedly got the real story and published it. No major media organizations joined them, to their perpetual shame.

So I have a question. About a years ago the financial markets determined that Knight-Ridder was not making enough money, so they forced the company to find a buyer. An even smaller chain called McClatchy bought the Knight-Ridder chain out, and now has sold off a few of the previous Knight-Ridder newspapers. Was Knight-Ridder forced to sell itself off because it was out of step with the major media organizations? Was this a way the other media organizations punished Knight-Ridder and got control of them so they wouldn't show them up as they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?

I find it suspicious that the one news outlet that was out of step with the major news organizations and showed them up is the one that Wall Street forced to be sold off.