Apt thoughts on the retirement of Bill Moyers from journalism, who was, of course, widely denounced by reactionaries, who can not tolerate an honest man:
During his 30 years in public television, Moyers displayed outsized courage in tackling controversial issues. He didn't lighten up when he made his farewell broadcast on Dec. 13, lacing his parting shots with some tough observations on the state of the broadcast industry today and journalism in general.
"The biggest story of our time is how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee ... and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line," Moyers declared. "Therefore," he added, "we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."
He ought to know, having witnessed the dumbing down of broadcast journalism, the mixing of entertainment and news and the dominance of talk shows hosted by raucous conservative commentators posing as journalists....
In an interview with BuzzFlash.com, Moyers said it is harder for reporters to get to government sources these days except when the officials "want to leak or spin."
"And a phalanx of conservative publications and right-wing radio and television talk shows has created a cavernous echo chamber for a Republican agenda, with no real-time opportunity for rebuttal of the propaganda or refutation of the lies," he declared.
Moyers also bemoaned the fact that the public is getting "so little coverage of the stories that matter to our lives and our democracy: government secrecy, the environment, health care, the state of working America, the hollowing out of the middle class, what it means to be poor in America...."
As for coverage of the Iraqi war, Moyers said the media were "at the mercy of the official view" that Saddam Hussein was "an imminent threat without any reliable information to back it up...."
He said Secretary of State Colin Powell's "discredited speech to the U.N. was hailed at the time as if it were an oration by Pericles."
Moyers said he was astonished "at the imbalance of The Washington Post -- with something like three-to-one pro-war columns on the op-ed page" in the run-up to the war.
Some people, "other than those in the establishment should have been heard," he said.
Moyers quotes Eric Alterman, media critic for The Nation magazine, that the "red meat strategy" to intimidate the mainstream press is to accuse them of "liberal bias" while other institutions, including the military, organized religion and corporate America, "all ideological bastions of influence, escape scrutiny...."
I have observed that whenever a major news outlet is stung with the label "liberal" and feels the hot breath of ultra-right critics on its neck, it circles the wagons and hires yet another conservative commentator.
Take PBS, for example.
Running scared after giving Moyers the spotlight over the years, PBS made amends by hiring two conservatives: Tucker Carlson, CNN conservative commentator, and Paul Gigot, former columnist and the editor in charge of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
Guess that should appease the conservative critics in the wake of Moyers' departure.
It is, of course, true that on a range of social issues, much of the media is still more liberal than the Texas Taliban. On every other issue, the mainstream media in the United States--from CNN to The New York Times--is far to the right of cosmopolitan opinion in other civilized nations (one need only peruse a mainstream newspaper in London or Toronto to notice the difference). That the myth of the "liberal media" continues to resurface--and especially at a time when openly fascistic psychopaths like Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly reach tens of millions through major media outlets--is just further confirmation of how morally and politically deranged America has become over the last two decades.
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