Liberal Talk Radio

Many bloggers have been saying this, but if, for some reason, you get your news exclusively from BATP (shudder!!), definitely find some time to watch Bill Moyers’ show on the selling of the Iraq war. It’s a comprehensive, start-to-finish case on how the media completely fell down on the job covering the Iraq war.

Overall, the portrait is painted of a media too jittery of being tagged as unpatriotic to question the assumptions of the war. This all we knew, but it’s great to see it laid out so clearly and convincingly. The notable exception is Knight Ridder, who doggedly questioned the administration’s account of WMD. But Ridder has no Washington or New York bureaus, so their findings never penetrated the elite media’s consciousness.

Anyway, the highlight — for me — comes about 45 minutes in, when Moyers talks to Tim Russert. The subject is Russert’s October 2002 interview with Dick Cheney. Here’s the Columbia Journalism Review’s interpretation of that interview:

Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to brandish Saddam’s supposed nuclear threat. Prompted by a helpful Tim Russert, Cheney cited the aluminum tubes story in that morning’s New York Times — a story leaked by Cheney’s White House colleagues. Russert: “Aluminum tubes.” Cheney: “Specifically aluminum tubes.” This gave the “six months away” canard a certain ring of independent confirmation: “There’s a story in The New York Times this morning,” said Cheney. “And I want to attribute the Times.”

When confronted by this, Russert says something to the effect of “what really troubles me is that no one inside the government called me and told me they knew it was a lie.”

Moyers cuts away to the next scene, an interview with 60 Minutes’s Bob Simon, with the voiceover, “One reporter didn’t wait for his phone to ring.”

Translation: Suck it, Russert!

Seriously, though, watch the show if you can. PBS is re-running it this week and next. It made me almost want to cancel my New York Times subscription, it made me so mad at them. But their sins are somewhat mitigated since they ultimately argued against the war in their op-ed pages, unlike the Washington Post.