Bill Moyers....On Journalism And Democracy (TomPaine.com)

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On Journalism And Democracy
Bill Moyers
April 25, 2007


Bill Moyers is chairman of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and an independent journalist with his own production company. He is launching a new weekly series on PBS in April, and his documentary "Buying the War," about the press and the buildup to the war in Iraq, airs tonight on PBS.This interview first appeared in The Christian Century.

You were part of the Johnson administration during its escalation of the Vietnam War. What perspective does that experience give you on the current administration and the war in Iraq?

Both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush made the mistake of embracing a totalistic policy for a concrete reality that requires instead a more pragmatic response. You shouldn't go to war for a Grand Theory on a hunch, yet both men plunged into complex local quarrels only to discover that they were treading on quicksand. And they learned too late that American exceptionalism doesn't mean we can work our will anywhere we please. While freedom may be a universal yearning, democracy is not, alas, a universal solution—there are too many extenuating circumstances.

Both presidents rushed to judgment on premature and flawed intelligence—LBJ after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Bush in conflating the terrorists attacks of 9/11 with the activities of Saddam Hussein. Each thought anything less than all-out victory would stigmatize his presidency. And in both wars, as the American people watched

the casualties mount and the horrors unfold—Abu Ghraib had its precedents in Vietnam—they saw the abstractions invoked by each president to justify the conflict confounded by the coarseness of human nature laid bare by war.

...(snip)...

Can you name a single issue that concerns you the most these days?

Inequality. Nearly all the wealth created in America over the past 25 years was captured by the top 20 percent of households. Meanwhile, working families find it harder and harder to make ends meet. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less and less security for a lifetime's labor. We are racially segregated in every meaningful sense except the letter of the law. And survivors of segregation and immigration toil for pennies on the dollar compared to those they serve.

None of this is the result of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" creating the greatest good for the greatest number. It's the result of invisible hands that write the checks to buy political protection for privilege. There's been a campaign to organize the world economy for the benefit of corporations. Whatever its benefits, political and corporate efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II.

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow is not a man given to extreme political statements. He characterizes what has been happening in America as nothing less than elite plunder: "The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful."

This wasn't meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Read the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address. We were going to be a society that maintained a healthy equilibrium in how power works—and for whom. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/25/on_journalism_and_democracy.php