Moyers is certainly not lacking in populist credentials. No less a progressive than Ralph Nader has called on him to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1028-24.htm , although Moyers himself has flatly denied any such aspirations. As such, he unabashedly tackles the one issue that even so-called liberal media outlets won’t touch—that is, their own credibility. As a former pastor from Texas who cut his political teeth working for first Senator, later President Lyndon Johnson, Moyers is well placed to counter conservative charges that PBS is a bastion of the liberal élite, out of touch with the “real America.” He’s a Michael Moore who doesn’t need the artifice of a baseball cap to be a muckraker, and commands the respect of high-profile media personalities who are used to being on the other end of tough questions.

Or are they really asking such tough questions? The film starts off with a moment that devastatingly unmasks the behind-the-scenes artifice of the media circus. At one of the first press conferences in the Fall of 2002 in which President Bush attempted to make the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, Moyers reveals that questions have been planted in the audience in advance, resulting in such hardballs as “Mr. President, how does your faith guide you?” But the orchestration of the event doesn’t stop at these hand-picked few—even knowing that they had no chance of being called on, every journalist in the room engages in frantic hand-waving in between questions. Rather than fulfilling their ideal role as a fourth estate, Moyers suggests that the mainstream media were complicit in the hoodwinking of the American public, and by extension implies that if the media had not been willing pawns of the Administration, we might not be entering the fifth year of the current seemingly intractable conflict.

Significantly, Moyers does not spend much time flogging a dead horse, that is, pointing out the utter falsehoods propagated by Fox News. He reserves his most damning indictments for centrist and liberal news outlets. Peter Beinart, the 28 year-old editor of the liberal New Republic, as a liberal war hawk, provided the appearance of bipartisan consensus on the issue. The New York Times ran multiple pro-war editorials from conservative commentators like William Safire, and regularly ran front-page stories by Judith Miller based only on the information of “anonymous sources in the Pentagon.” Moyers describes in great detail how Administration sources could leak a story to the Times on the very same day in which Administration officials were scheduled to appear on Sunday talk shows. These officials could then cite the Times story as evidence for their claims—the nation’s paper of record became implicated in a self-sustaining loop, in which the Administration could conjure seemingly legitimate arguments out of thin air.

Why was more not done to crosscheck outlandish claims about the state of Iraq’s nuclear program or to investigate Iraqi defectors’ contradictory statements? Put simply, the media have replaced journalism with punditry, and its effects on our foreign policy are devastating. In an age of cost-cutting, papers are closing overseas bureaus at an alarming rate, and the implications for diversity in media are sobering. Reporters are supposed to be accountable, but, as Moyers notes, “Being a pro-war pundit means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Moyers spends a fair amount of time praising the audacity of two dissenting Knight Ridder reporters, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, whose skeptical stories were relegated to the back pages in a media environment dominated by groupthink. What he does not cover, however, is the many dissenting voices of the alternative media, and the power that they had in mobilizing antiwar sentiment in the run-up to the war. He notes the relative media silence on the largest prewar peace movement in history, yet fails to note the power of alternative media in mobilizing such a force in spite of official conformity. Despite such omissions though, “Buying the War” is a spot-on critique of an institution that rarely turns its critical gaze inward. We can only hope that Moyers’ presence on PBS will help to invigorate it as the independent force that it ideally should be.