Bill Moyers' tears should be shed by us all

OK, it sounds like it's long. But it *feels* short.

It's a 39-minute address to the National Committee for Media Reform by the astute journalist Bill Moyers.

Moyers is brought to tears more than once as he tells his audience how the dominant US media have not only become shills for "nonsense and propaganda" while real information slips by, but how they have also actively excluded information we need.

Namely, the truth. Something we need to have a democracy work - that's the point of the first amendment (Freedom of the Press).

Moyers outlines how, when the few media voices that cried foul when the Bush administration lied and lied and lied, day after day, week after week, month after month and now year after year about Iraq - now Iran, about Katrina, and so many other issues for which thousands of innocent and courageous and patriotic Americans have paid dearly in blood and in money - how those courageous journalists and media who tried to tell the truth were spurned, fired and excluded from essential governement information services.

Honest journalists spurned not just by the dishonest, deceitful adminstration, but by their own colleagues. Many of whom to this day continue to live in denial about their complicancy in those cruel, homicidal and greedy policies.

Nothing is mentioned about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis slain by US, Iraqi and Al Qeda forces. The hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis (and Americans) who are cannon fodder in the midst of an Iraqi civil war.

Why is it other nations know so much more than we do about our own government, military action, and policies that create near venomous dislike toward the us government?

Leading British and Canadian newspapers, upon the re-election of George Bush in 2004 filled half their front page with the headline addressed to American voters: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

Unless and until we start insisting on the truth from our journalists and media, chances are we are not going to get it. Listen to Bill Moyers talk about the lies that are finally being admitted to and proved even by the recent nonpartisan National Intelligence Estimate (that the Bush administration engineered an outright propaganda campaign using dominant media to push us into war with Iraq) and the solutions here.

As a journalist who left mainstream media because of my love-hate relationship with them for all the reasons cited by Moyers - namely that its promise is farther away than ever from being realized, resulting in actual harm to our nation - I found myself crying with him.

I do not believe dominant media can find its way to Integrity Avenue from the inside because there are too many main streams leading to deNile.

I found listening to his speech well worth my time.

I believe you'll find it worth yours as well.