http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A30857...
On the Richter scale of history, Watergate and the McCarthy hearings were mild tremors compared to this globe-rending, nation-grinding earthquake with its epicenter in Iraq. Is Bob Woodward, who knows that, too frightened to come clean? There are better role models, other examples besides the sorry one he set in Chapel Hill. The other night in Greensboro I had a conversation with Bill Moyers and heard him address a large audience of North Carolinians who share his misgivings about the White House and its war. Moyers, for my money the most significant broadcast journalist of his generation, is in the Paul Revere phase of his career. Frozen out of network TV by the dumbing-down of news shows, hounded toward retirement by the right-wing administrators of public television--not for editorializing, but for asking hard questions and tackling issues neutered newsmen and women avoid--Moyers has reached the end of his patience.
Impartial? Think instead of Tom Paine, of Martin Luther King Jr.--of Martin Luther. Moyers has at least 95 grievances to nail on the door of the White House; his hammer is raised and ready. He sees bad faith, arrogance, atrocious judgment and irreversible damage. The media and the Democrats, he believes, are nearly all intimidated or self-servingly supine. It breaks his heart to see Americans accept deceit and abuse from an empty suit like George Bush, whom every unposed photo seems to expose for what he is--an inept con artist, a furtive low-rent hustler about to be caught in the act.
The soft-spoken Moyers, with his East Texas Baptist roots, was always committed to civil dialogue, always more interested in principles than politics. But in speeches like the one in Greensboro, sponsored by the Quakers of Guilford College, he embraces dissent and resistance and puts his professional reputation on the line. He will never be invited to visit with the president. Comparing Moyers' exile to his own exclusive access, is Woodward still proud of the 500 questions he was allowed to ask George Bush? (One question--"How in hell ...?"--might do for me.) Does he think the stories Bush tells him are the ones his poor readers need to hear?
As Murrow demonstrated in 1954 and Moyers is telling us now, any journalism of substance has a moral, judgmental component. Two sides, sure--but rarely two sides of equal merit. And at the point when the side with the power begins to ignore the facts, the laws, and other people's rights--a point Bush passed years ago--anyone with special knowledge, access or influence is ethically obligated to tell the public what he knows and what he thinks. No matter who proclaims it, "objectivity" that ducks this responsibility is a contemptible sham.
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