GOOD INTERVIEW OF BILL MOYERS

The transcript is on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.

Some highlights:

The Kool Kidz let us down again:

BILL MOYERS: I was most surprised at the marvelous work being done by the Knight Ridder bureau in Washington -- Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel -- [NOTE: it's now McClatchy instead of Knight-Ridder] who were onto this story about the flawed intelligence and the forged documents and the invalidity of what the administration was saying before anybody else. But because they don't have an outlet in Washington and New York and because they don't have -- they don’t play the game according to the Beltway rules, their reporting was marginalized. Their reporting was put aside, shut aside. You’ll see them in the broadcast tonight. They’re marvelous journalists, totally devoted to finding the facts and getting them to the American people. But because they were not celebrities, they never got on television. Because they were not stars, they didn't get on Meet the Press and places like that. So their reporting was blunted by indifference. That’s the thing that surprised me.

WALTER ISAACSON: The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that intelligence is not very good. We should have all been doing that. [NOTE: Isaacson was chair and CEO of CNN during the lead-up to the war in Iraq.]

BILL MOYERS:...Washington is a company town. What’s the company? What’s the industry? Government. Who are the satellites? The press. And it’s such a small community, relatively speaking, and its interests are so much the same that people unintentionally lose the power to differentiate. And I am troubled today by the intimacy that seems to have developed -- and you’ll see it on our broadcast tonight -- between the stars of media and the powers of government. They are too close for comfort.


BILL MOYERS:...Washington is a company town. What’s the company? What’s the industry? Government. Who are the satellites? The press. And it’s such a small community, relatively speaking, and its interests are so much the same that people unintentionally lose the power to differentiate. And I am troubled today by the intimacy that seems to have developed -- and you’ll see it on our broadcast tonight -- between the stars of media and the powers of government. They are too close for comfort.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, the most successful recycling industry in America is among the handful of elite journalists and public officials. They just keep recycling themselves. You know, I saw Newt Gingrich on George Stephanopoulos last week blaming what happened in Virginia on liberal. I saw the discredited Tom DeLay --

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. I saw Tom DeLay, totally discredited by his conduct, on all the talk shows, you know, on PBS and other places of the day. It’s a recycling business.

Some influential war whores refused to go on Moyer's show:

BILL MOYERS: No. We asked Judith Miller, but she declined, because she’s been involved in this legal quarrel, called by the government to testify in the Libby trial, so she didn’t want to talk. A number of the early players in this war, I asked to be interviewed, people who had gone along with the war, who helped promote the war, people like Roger Ailes, the president of FOX News; columnists like Charles Krauthammer, who was one of the hawkest of the -- one of the most ferocious of the hawks; William Kristol, who edits the Weekly Standard, which had become a kind of mouthpiece of the Pentagon and the neoconservative argument for war. They didn’t want to talk. They prefer to go on friendlier environments to talk about it.