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BUYING THE WAR. Karen Tumulty on the Swampland blog gave a short assessment of Bill Moyers' recent PBS documentary, and also pointed to another blog post by Jim Poniewozik who says something quite interesting:
Moyers is bringing a lot of threads together here, and there are angles I would have liked to see more of. The report focuses a lot, for instance, on the influence of post-9/11 patriotism and journalists relying too much on a close, clubby circle of sources. But he could have followed the money more, giving more of the financial context that, unfortunately, has so much to do with how reporting is done.After 9/11, the country was in recession, and media was practically in a depression--advertising plummeted, layoffs spread and the business has never really recovered. In that environment, media institutions are under ever more pressure to ingratiate themselves with their advertisers and audiences. Look at MSNBC, which canned Donahue, but loves Keith Olbermann now that the political winds have shifted. (Moyers does make some good points about how cutbacks have led TV and print to rely more on pundits over expensive reporting.) And the report sometimes conflates Washington hard-news reporters with Washington pundits. (Neocon pundits may have been tremendously wrong on the war, but it's not unusual that they would have views reflected by a conservative administration.)Interesting, because the documentary is titled "Buying the War." So who paid for all the patriotism in actual dollar terms? And more generally, which journalists were fired for their bad reporting? --J. Goodrich
