Raging Red

Nerd that I am, this evening I’ll be staying in to watch Bill Moyers. (Yikes, it’s suddenly sinking in that I really am in my 30’s.) Jon Stewart and Josh Marshall are going to be on — how can I miss that?

You can watch a preview here. If you’re as much of a Jon Stewart fangirl (or boy) as I am, you can also watch Bill Moyers’ interview with him from 2003. In that appearance, Stewart brought up the absurdity of the press conference President Bush gave thirteen days before the Iraq war began. The press played along with the farce by raising their hands and waiting to be called on, even though Bush himself wasn’t trying to hide the fact that he was just reading their names from a predetermined list sitting on the podium in front of him. In fact, they all had a good laugh about it.

This is the same scene that lead off another Bill Moyers Joint, “Buying the War,” which aired on PBS Wednesday evening. While the 90-minute show didn’t necessarily reveal any groundbreaking new information, it was the best encapsulation I’ve seen (in any form) of the media’s actions from 9/11 to the beginning of the Iraq war. Liberal bloggers have been writing about this stuff for years, but what made “Buying the War” so compelling was hearing it from the journalists themselves. (The ones who weren’t too chicken to answer Bill Moyers’ questions.)

In that 2003 interview with Moyers, Jon Stewart said that he and the other writers on his show see themselves as very serious people doing a very unserious thing, while the government and the media are very unserious people doing a very serious thing. While watching “Buying the War,” that statement rang very true. The overall impression of the media that I gleaned from the program was that, generally speaking, they are (1) quite fearful and (2) anti-intellectual and/or lazy.

Dan Rather said that he and others in the media didn’t go after the Bush administration too hard out of fear that the right-wing slime machine would accuse them of being unpatriotic and anti-American. Erik Sorenson, former MSNBC president (who cancelled Phil Donahue’s show because he presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war“), said: “Any misstep and you can get into trouble with these guys and have the patriotism police hunt you down.” Hunt you down? Rather said they’d “hang a sign around your neck.” What they both really mean is “get you fired.” Job security was more important than actually doing the job.

In Office Space, Peter tells the Bobs:

That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Maybe it’s that mentality that explains why two reporters from Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) were nearly alone in actually doing the work of real journalists — you know, like picking up a phone or reading a primary source. While Tim Russert sat back and waited for people to call him, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay contacted sources who were experts on terrorism and/or the Middle East who provided them with information that ran contrary to the Bush administration’s claims. While Peter Beinart of The New Republic did “a lot of reading of other people’s reporting and reading of what officials were saying,” Strobel and Landay had the novel idea of actually reading the National Intelligence Estimate themselves and investigating the evidence it contained that the Bush administration claimed justified the Iraq war.

What Strobel and Landay did wasn’t extraordinary. Well, it was extraordinary in the sense that not many other journalists were doing it, but not in the sense that they were doing anything beyond the basics they learned in journalism school.

And the saga continues. Bill Moyers will be talking to Josh Marshall tonight, who has been fairly instrumental in pushing stories like the U.S. Attorney firings into the mainstream press. And Jon Stewart is still providing some of the best political commentary. From the preview of tonight’s show, this is how Stewart describes President Bush’s statement that Attorney General Gonzales’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee “increased [his] confidence” in Gonzales, when the absurd message of his testimony was: “I wasn’t involved, but I can assure you we did nothing wrong.”

It’s sort of like, you remember in Good Fellas? When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time, and Robert de Niro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset ’cause he thought Robert de Niro would be really mad at him, and de Niro comes up to him and he gives him a hundred dollars and he goes: “Ya got pinched. We all get pinched. But ya did it right. You didn’t say nuthin’.”

Great analogy. Somebody ought to give that guy his own show.