Bill Moyers on Iraq and the News Media

The National Security Archive has posted the full text of Bill Moyer’s address for their 20th anniversary on December 9, 2005. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Two years ago, prior to the invasion of Iraq, I said on the air that Vietnam didn’t make me a dove; it made me read the Constitution. Government’s first obligation is to defend its citizens. There is nothing in the Constitution that says it is permissible for our government to launch a preemptive attack on another nation. Common sense carries one to the same conclusion: it’s hard to get the leash back on once you let the wild dogs of war out of the kennel. Our present Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a plaque on his desk that reads, “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” Perhaps, but while war is sometimes necessary, to treat it as sport is obscene. At best, war is a crude alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy and the forging of a true alliance acting in the name of international law. Unprovoked, “the noblest sport of war” becomes the slaughter of the innocent.

Moyers also criticized the Bush Administration's misuse of the news media:

This is the administration that has illegally produced phony television news stories with fake reporters about Medicare and government anti-drug programs, then distributed them to local TV stations around the country. In several markets, they aired on the six o’clock news with nary a mention that they were propaganda bought and paid for with your tax dollars.

This is the administration that paid almost a quarter of a million dollars for rightwing commentator Armstrong Williams to talk up its No-Child-Left-Behind education program and bankrolled two other conservative columnists to shill for programs promoting the President’s marriage initiative.

This is the administration that tacitly allowed inside the White House a phony journalist under the non-de-plume of Jeff Gannon to file Republican press releases as legitimate news stories and to ask President Bush planted questions to which he could respond with preconceived answers.

And this is the administration that has paid over one hundred million dollars to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers and disguise the source, while banning TV cameras at the return of caskets from Iraq as well as prohibiting the publication of photographs of those caskets - a restriction that was lifted only following a request through the Freedom of Information Act.

Moyers also had many other interesting points, including a discussion of the Bush administration’s attempts to suppress PBS.