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Banned
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"The Right" Unleashes Itself on Bill Moyers...
Here....they come ! Bill Moyers is back on PBS Frontline, and it appears that he is under attack. Are the attacks valid? Are the negative points that they make about Moyers and his reporting, accurate? Is the American public more informed by Moyers return to Frontline, and his reporting, so far....or, are conservative critics correct in what they are saying? Was PBS improved by republican appointed "leadership"....or not?
Quote:
http://washingtontimes.com/commentar...5842-9258r.htm
PBS: Back to bias basics
By L. Brent Bozell III
May 5, 2007
A few years ago, the left pulled several muscles exerting the strange theory that the Public Broadcasting Service was lurching dangerously to the right. When Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson had the audacity not only to speak internal profanities ("fairness" and "balance"), but to try to build on them, it became clear to them he was out of control and had to be stopped.
Mr. Tomlinson made several small but significant steps toward balance on our taxpayer-subsidized airwaves, nudging the creation of two right-leaning talk programs -- "Tucker Carlson Unfiltered" and "The Journal Editorial Report" -- and both suffered from the TV equivalent of crib death.
Liberals really erupted when they learned Mr. Tomlinson secretly hired someone to assess the political balance of some PBS and NPR programs. This initiative was doomed, not only because the internal bureaucracy would never tolerate it, but because proving liberal bias at PBS is beyond easy. It's like proving Rosie O'Donnell has a liberal bias -- is it really necessary to conduct a study?
The left maintains an iron grip on PBS with all the maturity and sophistication that a 4-year-old hangs on to a Happy Meal toy. The motto of its campaign against Mr. Tomlinson's alleged transgressions should have been: "Mine. Mine. All Mine."
Mr. Tomlinson is long gone, and Democrats now control Congress. But another step was necessary for classic PBS propaganda to re-emerge: the return of Bill Moyers. He was back to full-time fulminating duties April 25, with a special titled "Buying the War." The entire thesis of this 90-minute taxpayer-funded lecture? The national media were willing cogs in the neoconservative machine that took America to war.
How is this for PBS balance: Mr. Moyers didn't allow a single conservative, neo- or otherwise, to challenge this ludicrous idea. Oh, there were assorted clips of conservatives (myself included) speaking in the months after September 11, 2001, but only to "prove" his case for a noxious "patriotism police" that allowed no dissent.
He did invite far-left media critics like Eric Boehlert and Norman Solomon to echo his conspiracy theory that the major media were stuffed with sticky pro-Bush saps. But then, Mr. Moyers also added major media players, from disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather to former CNN boss Walter Isaacson, to agree with him that they were all woefully lacking in antiwar fervor.
In the same week, defense expert Frank Gaffney was telling a far different story -- in fact, the opposite story. Unlike Mr. Moyers, Mr. Gaffney had proof. Back in the Tomlinson era, CPB pursued the idea of a broad-based documentary series on how America would respond to the post-September 11 world. Mr. Gaffney's documentary proposal on "Islam vs. Islamism," focusing on moderate Muslims' efforts to challenge Islamofascists, was given a green light as one installment in the 11-part series called "America at the Crossroads."
But once Mr. Tomlinson was out, the permanent liberal bureaucracy kicked into gear. The series was shipped to PBS' Washington, D.C., superstation WETA. It promptly expressed horror that anyone would allow Mr. Gaffney anywhere near a PBS production because of his "day job" with a conservative advocacy group. They wanted Mr. Gaffney fired as an executive producer. When that didn't happen, they censored the film, refusing to air it.
This is a clear double standard. Take Mr. Moyers as Exhibit A. Even as he constantly produces PBS programming, he has an advocacy-group job, as well, as president of the leftist Schumann Center for Media and Democracy -- no one at PBS ever cared.
There was one "neo-con" film that did air in the series, titled "The Case for War," which starred conservative theorist Richard Perle. The PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler -- who, to be fair, has occasionally faulted shows for a liberal tilt -- came unglued that Mr. Perle was allowed so much access to PBS viewers.
"I personally find the decision to produce this film, as it has turned out, to be a stunning avoidance of the real crossroad that we are at and an abdication of journalistic principal [sic] on the most crucial issue of our time and our future," Mr. Getler protested on the PBS Web site. "This was not the subject or the time, in my opinion, on which to have a 'point of view' film controlled by an advocate." Mr. Getler added that the film had a "propaganda tone," and "it is structured so that Perle always has the last word and controls the flow."
To Mr. Getler, it is an abdication of journalism to allow antiquated and disproven conservative arguments on PBS. But how could Mr. Getler watch the Moyers propaganda special and not see how that spectacle was obviously structured so Mr. Moyers always had the last word -- the only word.
There is only one journalistic principle and one standard for the liberals who dominate PBS. It's mine. It's not yours.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center and is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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Quote:
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/04/2...elle-comments/
Video: O’Reilly catches Bill Moyers telling whoppers, Michelle comments
posted at 10:18 pm on April 24, 2007 by Bryan
This is good stuff: Bill O’Reilly nails, and perhaps goes as far as to pwn, leftwing documentarian and commentator Bill Moyers. Marvin Kalb and our own Michelle weigh in, Kalb for the defense and MM for the prosecution. It’s a longish segment, but worth your time. Note that the segment has been edited for brevity–on air it ran for about 12 minutes.
O'Reilly VIdeo Featured in Center of this Blog Post
Takeaways: When liberals hear other liberals tell bald-faced lies, being “puzzled” is evidently the proper response. Describing someone as “far left” is a pejorative, according to Marvin Kalb. If folks like Mr. Kalb get their way, at some point, literally any word or phrase that we use to describe someone else’s ethnicity, politics or religious beliefs or any other identifying characteristic will be defined as “pejorative.” For liberals like Mr. Kalb, the way out of uncomfortable questions is to plead ignorance. Watch Kalb use that trick when O’R asks him whether George Soros is far left or not.
All in all, a good segment. O’R had the goods, the boss brought the cogent comment, and Bill Moyers’ credibility is history. Finito. Done.
Now if we could just get his hands out of the public TV trough.
Quote:
http://www.newshounds.us/2007/04/25/...nly_senile.php
News Hounds
We watch FOX so you don't have to.
Malkin calls Moyers liar, O'Reilly thinks he's only senile
Reported by Chrish - April 25, 2007 - 92 comments
........O'Reilly then said well, Moyers said he didn't say it, we showed the tape that showed he did say it (only in the All-Spin Zone could that tape be construed as proving O'Reilly's wishful thinking), but O'Reilly is willing to cut the 76-year old Moyers some slack; "he doesn't know any more." Actually, Moyers will turn 73 in June, 4 days before Kalb will turn 77. I wonder how O'Reilly's audience, median age of 71, will like that little slap.
Kalb said he thought it would be beneficial to the program and to the American people if Moyers would come on the Factor, but just to condemn him, as BOR and MM are doing, is not fair.
O'Reilly reminded Kalb that "you go as far as the evidence takes you", and Kalb shot back that neither of them had seen the documentary. O'Reilly indignantly retorted that he read a review in Variety, and PBS wouldn't send him a preview - how about that! When the Harvard professor reiterated that they hadn't seen it, O'Reilly responded that "it doesn't matter." He stayed in the parameters of what Moyers said to RS, and what he said to Watters, and it wasn't true! Just like that, BOR believes he has single-handedly undermined and ruined the career and credibility one of America's premier journalists.
Kalb then said "What was true was that when the war was being set up, and in the first year or even two after the war got started, FOX and many othe people associated with FOX, the FOX point of view, let's put it that way, said all kinds of things in support of the war which were not being borne out by the facts...." O'Reilly overtalked at that point, saying he went on facts, and facts alone.
Giving Malkin the last word, he asked her
"Do you really feel that Moyers is a liar, that he's a rank liar, that the guy - he's had a pretty distinguished career - would just go on - I think he just doesn't know anymore. I think he's just in a fog, Michelle."
Malkin thinks that is "generous" and says he is far more a propagandist than he is a neutral journalist. Addressing Kalb, she accuses Moyers of pejoratives "for the way he talks about FOX News in particular as some uniform, right-wing radical mouthpiece of the Bush administration, when clearly that is not true." If he watched O'Reilly's program over the last several years, he'd know that's not true; it's Bill Moyers who has the projection problem.
O'Reilly wraps up saying Moyers certainly has a credibility problem; his credibility is shot.....
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Quote:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...k/4770126.html
May 2, 2007, 8:42PM
Moyers left out his part in Vietnam disinformation
Documentary on media and war had a glaring gap
By PAUL MULSHINE
In his public television special Buying the War, Bill Moyers decries the tendency of the media to help the White House sell war to the public.
Moyers should know. He was quite a salesman in his day.
Moyers served as press secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. In that role, he employed all the tools of modern-day public relations, from schmoozing reporters to intimidating them, to get the press to go along with a war "so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster."
In the documentary, Moyers applies that description to the Iraq war. But the parallel to Vietnam is inescapable, right down to the arrogance and cluelessness of the Texan in the White House.
"The story of how high officials misled the country has been told," says Moyers. "But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on."
A compliant press? Propaganda? Is the man having flashbacks to the 1960s?
Morley Safer would no doubt think so. Flashback was the title of Safer's memoir of covering the Vietnam War for CBS. In it, Safer details how the Johnson White House pressured TV executives to tone down criticism of the war effort. Safer writes how in 1965 Johnson summoned CBS president Frank Stanton to a meeting attended by Moyers during which "Johnson threatened that, unless CBS got rid of me and 'cleaned up its act,' the White House would 'go public' with information about Safer's 'Communist ties.' "
The Moyers documentary is replete with tales of similar pressure from the Bush White House against the networks. Somehow, he left out his own history in that regard. That's unfortunate. If he'd included his own experience, Moyers could have offered some insight into how easy it is for a president of either party to sell a war to the public based on high-flown rhetoric.
Note President Bush's words from his final address just before the war began in 2003:
"In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror."
Who could argue with that? Certainly not the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post. It was left to Pat Buchanan to voice a critique of the war.
"We are not going to be out of there in a year," Buchanan said just before that speech. "We'll be there five years at the minimum because the president is going to tell the country tonight that we are basically, folks, on the road to empire."
That was just what he did, though few understood it at the time. Liberals are always suckers for schemes to depose dictators. Meanwhile, conservatives were taken in by the Bush administration's exaggerations about Saddam Hussein's threat to the United States and his links to al-Qaida, both of which were nonexistent.
Moyers does an excellent job of pointing out the gullibility of the media on the question of so-called "weapons of mass destruction," a term of art that never would have entered the national dialogue if journalists had been doing their jobs. But the real story the media missed was the absence of a link between Saddam and al Qaida. Moyers quotes CBS News' Bob Simon on "the absurdity of putting up a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida."
"Saddam, as most tyrants, was a total control freak," said Simon, who had been imprisoned by Saddam for 40 days during the first Iraq war. "And to introduce a wild card like al-Qaida in any sense was just something he would not do."
In fact, the militantly secular Saddam was a natural enemy of Islamic fundamentalists. And as they say in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
That alone should have made the pundits, especially the conservative ones, suspicious of the Iraq war.
With the exception of Buchanan, though, they bought the neocon line. And many still buy the flawed premise of the so-called "war on terror" — that it is the proper role of the federal government to administer the nations of the Mideast.
But the federal government can't even run the District of Columbia. As for the Iraq war, it is merely another example of bungling by a Texan who came to the White House with no expertise in foreign affairs.
Moyers has impressive credentials in that area. His documentary would have been even better if he had employed them.
Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.
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I think the criticism of Moyers from the right, is buttressed by this:
Quote:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110006987
Hoover's Institution
Anecdotes from the FBI crypt--and lessons on how to win the war.
BY LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN
Wednesday, July 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
....Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files.
When the press reported this, I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed that this was another example of the Bureau salting its files with phony CIA memos. I was taken aback. I offered to conduct an investigation, which if his contention was correct, would lead me to publicly exonerate him. There was a pause on the line and then he said, "I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?" And then he rang off. I thought to myself that a number of the Watergate figures, some of whom the department was prosecuting, were very young, too. ....
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To my knowledge, Moyers have never publicly commented on Silberman's accuations and Silberman's "I was very young".....purported quotes of Moyers.
It's certainly possible that Moyers did do, in 1964, what Silberman says that the Hoover memo indicates that Moyers ordered.....but, with a resume like Silberman's....it was probably wise of Moyers to just ignore Silberman:
Quote:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/1990s/consor34.html
October 25, 1998
The Impeachment Conspiracy
By Robert Parry
........As the evidence spills out, Starr appears to have been a kind of point man not only for Republicans who desire Clinton’s removal, but for conservative lawyers and jurists whose appointments to the bench depend on who occupies the Oval Office.
Though the media may focus on Gingrich and Hyde and Hatch, many of the key players in the Clinton drama have worn black robes. Indeed, Clinton’s impeachment could be viewed, in part, as a judicial coup.
One of President Reagan’s strategies for putting his conservative stamp on the government was to place right-wing judges on the federal courts in Washington, especially the U.S. Court of Appeals where many low-profile constitutional decisions are made.
The strategy served Reagan well when the two most prominent Iran-contra convictions -- of Reagan’s national security aides Oliver North and John Poindexter -- were on appeal.
The North case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1990 and the Poindexter case followed in 1991.
Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a Republican himself, encountered what he termed "a powerful band of Republican appointees [who] waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army."
Walsh recognized that many of the appeals judges held a "continuing political allegiance" to the conservative Federalist Society, an organization dedicated to purging liberalism from the federal courts.
"It reminded me of the communist front groups of the 1940s and 1950s, whose members were committed to the communist cause and subject to communist direction but were not card-carrying members of the Communist Party," Walsh wrote. [For details, see Walsh's Firewall.]
A leader of this partisan faction was Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a bombastic character known for his decidedly injudicious temperament. Silberman had served as a foreign policy advisor to Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and had joined in a controversial contact with an emissary from Iran behind President Carter's back. [See Robert Parry's Trick or Treason.]
On the appeals court, Silberman took hardline conservative positions and demonstrated an animosity toward Walsh during a hearing on the constitutionality of independent counsels.
Silberman also lashed out publicly at U.S. Appeals Court Judge George MacKinnon, an old-school Republican who ran the three-judge panel which had picked Walsh to investigate the Iran-contra affair in 1986.
"At a D.C. circuit conference, he [Silberman] had gotten into a shouting match about independent counsel with Judge George MacKinnon," Walsh wrote. "Silberman not only had hostile views but seemed to hold them in anger."
To Walsh's dismay, Silberman and another conservative judge, David Sentelle, were two of the three judges to hear the appeal of North's conviction.
A North Carolina protege of Sen. Jesse Helms, Sentelle was not as obstreperous as Silberman. But Sentelle carried with him a pugnacious pride in his Republican conservatism.
Sentelle had served as chairman of the Mecklenburg County Republican Party and had been a Reagan delegate at the 1984 GOP convention. He named his daughter, Reagan, after the president.
Though normally law-and-order judges, Silberman and Sentelle overturned North's conviction by expanding the protections that a witness receives from a grant of limited immunity.
In 1991, Sentelle again served with another Republican judge as the majority on the Poindexter appeal. This time, the GOP judges overturned the convictions by applying a novel argument: that lying to Congress did not constitute the crime of obstruction.
Ironically, by expanding the rights of defendants, Sentelle became a conservative judicial hero. Sentelle also wasn’t shy about joining the ideological battle against the left.
In the winter 1991 issue of the conservative Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Sentelle praised the writings of right-wing jurist Robert Bork.
"Leftist heretics perceive our system of separated and federated powers as a stumbling block to their goal of remaking the Republic into a collectivist, egalitarian, materialistic, race-conscious, hyper-secular, and socially permissive state," Sentelle wrote.
Sentelle and Bork shared the view that the American left was riding roughshod over the nation. "Modern liberalism," according to Bork's 1996 book, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, "is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming a mass movement."
Only "the rise of an energetic, optimistic and politically sophisticated religious conservatism" can counter "the extremists of modern liberalism," Bork argued. [For an examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the new religious conservatism, see The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 11, 1998.]
Unlike Bork, however, Sentelle had the opportunity to do more than fume about a domineering left.
After the North and Poindexter reversals, Sentelle caught the eye of another Reagan appointee, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Amid mounting Republican anger over Walsh’s Iran-contra probe, Rehnquist removed MacKinnon, the judge who had picked and protected Walsh.
In an interview, Walsh told me that he received a call from MacKinnon in early 1992. MacKinnon, who like Walsh was an Eisenhower-type Republican, had troubling news: Rehnquist was appointing Sentelle to head the three-judge panel that chooses and oversees special prosecutors.
"He was giving me a heads up," Walsh said, adding that it was clear that MacKinnon would have liked to continue in the post. "He really loved that job."
MacKinnon died in 1995, but his widow, Elizabeth, confirmed Walsh's account that her husband did not want to be replaced. "If Rehnquist had asked him to stay on, he probably would have," she told me.
Rehnquist has never explained publicly why he replaced MacKinnon with Sentelle. But the Sentelle choice was unusual in several respects.
First, the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, which created the independent counsel apparatus, specifically stated that "priority shall be given to senior circuit judges and retired judges," a stipulation that was meant to minimize partisanship and careerism.
Unlike the senior judges who had filled the slots since 1978, Sentelle was relatively young, in his 40s. Sentelle also had a reputation as an active Republican, while most of the judges on the panel were known as relatively non-partisan. "They were reformers first and party members second," commented Walsh.
Sentelle's choice reversed that pattern. Ted Arrington, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said Sentelle "takes politics seriously enough that he would do what it takes to make sure his party comes out on top." [Legal Times, March 24, 1997]
In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary for 1998, lawyers described Sentelle as a staunch conservative. Sentelle "has a very conservative outlook," said one lawyer. "He is conservative and very opinionated," commented another.
The elevation of Sentelle to be chief of the independent-counsel panel effectively gave the Republican Right control over who would get to investigate crimes in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Not surprisingly, Sentelle's panel has steered nearly all sensitive investigations into the hands of reliable Republicans. When the Bush administration was caught searching Bill Clinton's passport file in 1992, Sentelle gave the job to Republican stalwart Joseph diGenova, who found no wrongdoing.
Yet, after Clinton took office, alleged Democratic miscreants found themselves pursued by aggressive Republican prosecutors, even for relatively minor offenses.
When Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros was accused of understating how much he paid a mistress, Sentelle picked David Barrett, who had run Lawyers for Reagan in 1980. Barrett racheted the alleged false statements into an 18-count felony indictment.
The Whitewater investigation began in 1994 during a lapse in the special prosecutor law, so Reno named Republican Robert Fiske to investigate. Fiske, however, offended Sentelle's ally, Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., by concluding that White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster had committed suicide. Faircloth suspected foul play.
After the special prosecutor law was reinstated in summer 1994, Sentelle lunched with Faircloth and Helms. Sentelle then fired Fiske and replaced him with Starr, considered a far more conservative Republican. The three North Carolina Republicans denied that they discussed Whitewater over lunch.
Nevertheless, the Starr appointment raised eyebrows. Besides political differences with Clinton, Starr had been working on a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who had filed a conservative-backed civil suit against Clinton for alleged sexual harassment.
At the time, however, Starr's defenders argued that the Jones matter was separate from the questions about Clinton's personal finances raised by the Whitewater controversy........
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IMO, as Clinton was....Moyers is in the periphery of the center of a political struggle that is nearly 50 years old. The republican "side" seems incredibly united and aggressive. "Passive" republicans like Iran/Contra Judge, Walsh and the first Whitewater special counsel, Robert Fiske, are easily dismissed by the more conservative branch of republicans, and I am sure that Moyers knows this. He probably is emboldened now, because of his advanced age, to take them on, via his "bully pulpit" at PBS Frontline.
I am glad to see that Moyers is back.....and you? |