There has been much discussion both here and on the rest of the interwebs about the quality of journalism by one of the recently deceased and that subject has been flogged to death over the last few days, so rather than continuing to discuss whether the equine in question is in fact deceased, I thought it might be nice to take a look at what quality journalism looks like from one of the still living who's been keeping America informed for over four decades-Bill Moyers.
Bill Moyers gave an address recently to the National Conference for Media Reform discussing the problems inherent in our current corporate-owned media which can be read in its entirety here.
In one article, Mr. Moyers has summed up the problems in our current media climate and explained how the disinformation which is spread contributes to all the opther ills facing our nation such as imperial wars, crumbling infrastructure and politicians stealing our very democracy out from under us. He hits the nail on the head with this key graph:
We needed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved thousands of American lives and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in the American economy and infrastructure. But as Knight-Ridder reporters told us at the time (one of the few organizations that systematically and independently set out to challenge the claims of this Administration, by the way), as my colleagues reported in our documentary on PBS "Buying the War," as Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed just this week, this Administration — with the complicity of the dominant media - conducted a political propaganda campaign, using erroneous and misleading intelligence to deceive Americans into supporting an unprovoked attack on another country, leading to a war that instead of being "quick and bloodless" as predicted, continues to this day.
Emphasis added by myself.
Bill Moyers does not simply present arguments and counter arguments as equally valid-he weighs the facts from both sides, decides who is telling the truth, and lets his readers and viewers know about it. During the course of the Bush administration this journalist has fought every single day to prevent even greater media consolidation. He has run story after story about how the public is ill-served by the corporate media which leads to uniformed decisions by the voters and has encouraged his viewers to contact the FCC. Hundreds of thousands have made their voices heard and the FCC has been unable to proceed with their most ambitious plans for more consolidation thanks in large part to the efforts of Bill Moyers. Even the weak-in-the-knees US Congress has had to take a step back and re-evalute their plans for more consolidation due to overwhelming public response against it.
So rather than lionizing journalists who probably didn't deserve the praise simply for the sake of some unguided sense of decorum, listen to Bill Moyers when he says:
And you know what we need to know.
Go, now, and tell it on the mountains and in the cities. From your Web sites and laptops, tell it. From the street corners and the coffee house, from delis and diners, tell it. From the workplace and the bookstore, tell it. On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary, and mosque. Tell it. Tell it where you can, when you can, and while you can. Tell America what we need to know — and we just might rekindle the patriot’s dream.
Please read the whole article.
And when your done, click here and send a little love to one of the best journalists this country has ever seen and a true patriot to boot.