The Salon Interview: Bill Moyers

dahamsta

This is an interview with Bill Moyers, a former White House press secretary in Lyndon Johnson's administration. It's a Salon Premium article, but you can get a "one day pass" by clicking through a few pages of ads, and it's definitely worth it. The interview obviously covers the war in Iraq, but it also reviews a wide swath of topics explicitly or implicitly connected to the war and the current political climate. I'll post a few selected quoted below. The full article is here.

When you look around at American journalism right now, how are we doing on reporting the war in Iraq and its repercussions around the world?

If you look hard enough, you can find a variety of information and insight. But you have to look hard, you have to create your own kaleidoscope. That's what I think is both exhausting all of us and confusing all of us. If you watch the BBC you'll get a different approach from any of the American networks. But you have to watch those American networks in order to judge the BBC.

Then you have to turn to the Internet and the alternative press. It does seem to be a constantly turning kaleidoscope. If you keep turning it long enough, and you get the right angle so the light's just right, you get a good sense of the whole. But I don't know where the typical citizen, who's not working at what I work at all day -- trying to make sense of it -- turns to get an overview.

You have to watch Al-Jazeera, which I do here. You have to read Romenesko and you have to read the BBC Web site and the Washington Post, all of it. It's a full-time job, editing your own virtual newspaper every day. I go to Editor& Publisher, and I find help from their coverage of the media coverage. I go to some of the committed, ideological Web sites, whether it's Brent Bozell on the right or FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] on the left. I compose my own front page every day, and my own arts section and my own war coverage.

For a professional journalist, it's media heaven. But for the typical citizen, it must be very confusing. For those who settle on one thing, for those who settle on Fox News, where journalism becomes nationalism becomes chauvinism, if that's the only place you're getting information, you're not going to have any overall view. You have to work at it. It puts a great burden on the citizen. But the alternative is to have just three networks, as we did once upon a time.

My impression is that the buildup to the war, and the first few weeks of the war, were all driven by the government's mission and the government's definition of what is news. Most of us were letting the official view of reality set our agenda. As the war has gone on and news has happened out there, we're beginning to get more important pieces, pieces that are much at odds with the official view of reality.

You're saying that George W. Bush is a dangerous president.

This is a presidency that is fundamentally changing the nature and character of American government. It's the most anti-government administration of my lifetime. I believe in our collective responsibility. I grew up in an America where that made a difference to my parents, made a difference to my community, made a difference to my culture. You have to go back to Warren G. Harding to find an administration that so opened the doors to its cronies to come in and exploit the public resources. That's very troubling.

I don't have any personal feelings about George W. Bush, any more than I did about Bill Clinton. I looked at Bill Clinton from the standpoint of his policies, and I had a lot of trouble with them.

I think my life, and certainly my career in journalism, have been informed by two things. One was being a Southerner. Whenever you learned about Southern life, you realize that when we drove the truth-tellers out of the pulpits, out of the editorial rooms and out of the classrooms -- people who were telling the truth about slavery -- that politics failed and we wound up in the Civil War, from which we still haven't recovered. We were still dealing with the aftermath of the Civil War in the 1960s, when I was in government.

Looking ahead at the political calendar, it strikes me that the presidential primary process, which has always been pretty weird, gets worse every four years. Once upon a time, the primary season went from February well into May or June of an election year, and you got that sense of campaign-trail drama, where the candidates were tested in the public eye. Now they spend a year or more raising money, and the primary season has been packed into a ridiculous blitzkrieg of six or eight weeks. By the end of March next year, if not earlier, we'll know who the Democratic nominee is. And it's probably going to be the guy with the most money. Doesn't that sound like a democracy in danger?

I think democracy is in danger. I think democracy is gasping at the moment. The money people primarily determine who runs and wins in both parties. George W. Bush simply outspent John McCain in 2000; when Bush was in trouble in South Carolina, he was able to pour money in. Increasingly a small number of people determine who runs and therefore who wins. The participatory process is in paralysis. The mainstream press is largely owned by a handful of major corporations, so the debate is only on the periphery. It's on the Internet or out in the streets.

I do believe that the oxygen is going out of democracy. Slowly, but at an accelerating pace, the democratic institutions of this country are being bought off or traded off or allowed to atrophy. Political participation is one of them. There simply isn't any way for political candidates to engage in a true debate that people can watch and respond to. We don't hear many ideas anymore, just sound bites. Democracy is in great difficulty right now, and this troubles me about our country.

A lot of things stand out in the piece, and I've chosen some of the more in-your-face comments, but it really has to be taken as a whole to appreciate that it's not the usual leftist reactionist outpourings. The commentary on citizens effectively having a responsibility to inform themselves these days is one subject that really hit me though, particularly in Ireland where it could be argued that we're prevented from doing this.

adam

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