Bill Moyers joins Bill O'Reilly's enemies list

A couple of nights ago in this Talking Point Bill O'Reilly identified Bill Moyers as another cog in the nefarious George Soros far left S-P conspiracy. The reason O'Reilly did this is because Moyers recently produced a documentary for PBS - Buying the War - about how the mainstream press failed to critically challenge the propaganda that the Bush administration disseminated to sell a war with Iraq. Not surprisingly, the documentary was particularly critical of Fox given that its viewers were more misinformed about the war than Americans that got their news from other sources and during the period Fox anchors and pundits were extremely jingoistic and questioned the patriotism of anyone who did not offer blind allegiance to the administration. [Blogger's Note - the documentary can be viewed at the link above]

Typical of O'Reilly, he denied he did any such thing and then proceeded to chalk up the Moyers documentary to being the product of Soros funded S-P propaganda (more paranoid conspiracy.) As you can see from this link at Newshounds, O'Reilly was wrong again. I don't really feel like wasting time delving into the wrongness of O'Reilly (or his go to "liberal" basher guest Michelle Malkin) so I'll just here link to the NewsHound coverage (see here and here.)

When I mentioned O'Reilly's making out Moyers to be an S-P minion of Soros over at Orcinus in this thread where Mr. Newiert does a round up of the various movement conservative hate-mongers blaming "liberals" for the Virginia Tech massacre (including Rush Limbaugh saying that the killer himself was a "liberal") one of the commenters pointed out that O'Reilly is obviously oblivious to the fact that Moyers is a former preacher and Baptist seminary graduate.

That's the point. O'Reilly is oblivious to facts that would get in the way of his personal crusade to rid the world of Bill O'Reilly critics. Either you're on board with O'Reilly or you are a far-left socialist America hating secular-progressive God hater who wants open borders and to surrender to Islamofascists. Any inconvenient facts, such as Moyers being a preacher, that get in the way of that can be bulldozed over ad hoc rationalizations. Hell, not to long ago the Pope had taken a position on some issue that O'Reilly routinely characterizes as being a "S-P" position but not even that managed to put a dent into his paranoid delusion of an rabid S-P plot to overtake the United States of America.

But back to Moyers. I have not yet had a chance to catch the documentary, so I will direct the reader to Mr. Greenwald's blog entry about it:

If you didn't watch Bill Moyers' documentary last night regarding the joint, coordinated behavior of our government and its media in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I can't recommend it highly enough. You can watch it here.

For those who have been following these issues, there was no single, specific blockbuster revelation that was not previously known, although Moyers' focus on the superb (and largely ignored) pre-war work of Real Journalists at Knight-Ridder (now at McClatchy) does cast a new light on the profound malfeasance of our most influential media outlets. Most of all, the documentary very powerfully compiles some of the most incriminating facts, and it unapologetically identifies many of the guiltiest and most destructive wrongdoers in our government and in the press.

For that reason, the documentary is -- in one sense -- a very valuable historical account of the corrupt behavior by our dominant political and media institutions which deceived the country into the invasion of Iraq. But on another, more significant level, it illustrates the corruption that continues to propel our political and media culture.

After going on to explain that the documentary has revealed how deeply corrupted our press has become and how unwilling it is to admit its errors and take the necessary steps to start performing its proper function as a guardian of democracy, Glenn notes

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it).

They will almost certainly dismiss Moyers as a liberal partisan, not a real journalist, and continue to insist that they are doing a superb and even-handed job. They will continue to revere the most guilty parties responsible for the deceit and destruction of the last six years.

I here quote myself from the comments:

During the Nixon administration Moyers was put on Nixon's enemies list for doing what journalists are supposed to do: perform a watchdog service for the public by questioning authority and making sure they're honest.

It was at this time that the conservative movement came up with it's wedge strategy of attacking the media for a "liberal bias" (this is documented in Brock's Republican Noise Machine). Moyers became the symbol of the hated "liberal bias" and its why he's been targeted ever since. He has become an Eternal Enemy of the movement. And of course, the movement's Eternal Enemy is synonymous with "far left liberal/socialist/communist".

And it is no coincedence that when the veterans of the Nixon administration came back into power in this current administration, Moyers again became targeted as an example of "liberal bias" and was actually driven off of Now for being insufficiently patriotic after 9/11 ("patriotic" here being defined to mean blindly loyal to George W. Bush.)

For the conservative movement, "liberal bias" is what actually is normal journalism. Or rather, it's anyone or anything other than propaganda for the conservative movement. But what is interesting is that the mainstream media, the supposedly "liberally biased" media, has begun to adopt the approach that Stephen Colbert lampooned so succinctly a while back (I took this from this Greenwald post)

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished.

Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home.

Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!

In the future I hope to start explaining this phenomenon as a consequence of the movement's "liberal bias" wedge and the media consolidation that was kicked off during the first Reagan administration.