Friday, April 20, 2007

Keepin' it Light

When and why did the American News media become Pravda staffed by spokesmodels?

Bill Moyers is set to explain all of that on a PBS documentary entitled 'Buying the War'. Certainly, corporate advertisers and White House pressure are partly to blame for the truly startling fact that, of ''Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept.'' But we still hear this horseshit about the 'anti-American liberal media' from citizens who should know better. Of course, that's part of the problem too- a public that outright demands to be coddled and lied to about war, and everything else, for that matter. The media, reflecting their audience, isn't anti-American; they're anti-seriousness.

Here's a startling section of Moyers' interview with CBS's Bob Simon:

Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way, explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn't seem ridiculous."

Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light."

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