Are Journalism and Politics Inextricably Joined? 473
An anonymous reader writes "Retiring figure Bill Moyers makes his case in a recent speech delivered at the Society of Professional Journalists 2004 national convention. 'But I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined.' It is a deep argument, made poignant by the recently murdered Francisco Ortiz Franco of Mexico, Manik Saha of India, and Aiyathurai Nadesan of Sri Lanka, among others. It is a broad argument, touching on history from America's first best seller to yesterday's blog. Is it a convincing argument?"
Whew- (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm going to go off a bit (and get modded down), but here we go -
Anywho, does this mean that our quality of democracy is weakened?
Who (who defined loosely as the media) has pushed the envelope or sought more answers against the war on terror, or the Patriot Act? While the megacorps clamp down on individual rights, who goes after them? Who goes after Bush when science is thrown aside in favor of religion? When beauraucracies(sic) withhold information in the name of "protecting from the terror threat", who questions it? I mean, yes, there are a few investigative reports every now and then, but it's rare.......
"This "zeal for secrecy" I am talking about - and I have barely touched the surface - adds up to a victory for the terrorists."
Indeed.....An interesting read with a lot of insight into our current situation......Might be worth RTFA-ing this time around.....
-thewldisntenuff
Its bigger than just the Political portion (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many easy examples that do not involve the political arena. If you have been following the SCO case and made a decision to invest based on the mainstream reportage you would have been badly hurt. If you acted on the reporting and information present on Groklaw you would be laughing now.
SCO is an example where the presence of alternative sources of information has served to minimize the damage that would have been done. Most aren't so fortunate. In the 80's there was a scam that went by the name ZZZZ Best. It was a stock pump scam that managed to persist for quite awhile untill it was exposed by the then editor of Barons Alan Abelson.
There are also the clasic examples in the legal arena. Lawyers seem to be very fond of drumming up cases based on bad reportage. Examples include 20/20 rigging trucks to explode to prove mismanufacture, 60 minutes reporting volvo;s have an unexplained sudden acceleration. The perpetuation of junk science seems particularly popular witness the near miss that the cell phone companies took over brain tumors, or that cook thats continuing suing video game companies over violent behavior in children.
Its not that the democratic process that requires good reporting its that of governmental systems it makes unbiased reporting possible. It needs to go much further. We all lose when the news is manipulated.
Agree with parent (Score:3, Interesting)
The points made by the parent, while offtopic, are still both interesting and fairly valid. While I do believe that a person has free will to a point, I think that the majority of actions a person takes are dictated by forces outside of their control and thus the person is not really free to choose one way or another.
We have the illusion of freedom, I sit here and say to myself, if i wanted to, I could get up and murder my roommate while he is sleeping. But do I really have that option? Besides what the law mandates, as a person, the experiences and the values I have been raised with take that option in reality out of my range of choices. If I were to attempt to murder my roommate, I would find myself (as most of the readers on slashdot would) unable to do so.
The same holds true with getting up and flashing an entire stadium of people your twig and berries. You may sit there and think to yourself "Yeah, i don't do that because I choose not to." But in reality, do you really have that choice? All of our choices are a product of who we are as a person. As that is a result of both the enviorment in which we were raised and genetics, neither of which we really had a choice in. While one could argue that it results in a limited version fo free will, its still not even that because the full range of choices which would be availale in any given situation are not an option for you.
Our choices are driven by our upbringing and after that what we do is very much a cause and effect situation. You may sit there after reading this and say to myself "He's full of shit, watch, I'll do this and it'll be random" But remember, it will be neither random, nor your choice because you are doing this merely in reaction to what you have read and your values have instilled in you the desire to protect your freedom of will.
Re:Founding Fathers thought so. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Founding Fathers thought so. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the founding fathers were overly optimistic in this respect: I doubt they would have believed that a news station with such a viscious and pronounced bias could gather the market share it has.
Most people who dislike Fox news dislike it for the reason you said: Because they don't agree. But some of us dislike it because it's an unabashed propaganda outlet aimed directly at a potion of the populace that doesn't think too carefully about what it's looking at.
Re:No, sorry. (Score:3, Interesting)
Security tends to bring in stagnation, because people are afraid that if their security is affected, their life will enter a state of turmoil. Therefore, everyone (the society as a whole) chooses a safe path -- and as we all know, a safe path will always lead down stagnation.
Whereas, if you consider Srilanka or India or Bangladesh, there is security, but it's gotten at a price. And people realize that in order to hold on to that security, freedom of speech should be upheld -- remember, these places were colonies that were supressed until about 50 years ago. And so, the complacency that's seen in the US is not quite seen there, particularly since they cannot expect safety, they have to earn it.
While here in the US, security is largely taken for granted and expected.
(I've lived in Jammu & Kashmir, so I do know what is it that I'm talking about).
It's impossible for the governments to BUY out the media in these countries simply because of the diversity -- I'll paraphrase from an old Times of India article --
"...India will now have a (caucasian) Christian Prime Minister to go with a Muslim President (a widow and a bachelor to boot). The bastion of democracy, religious freedom and human rights -- the mostly white Christian United States, to paraphrase the description of India by western correspondents -- is set to elect its 44th President -- another Christian white male."
(ofcourse, the Prime Minister ended up being a Pakistan born Sikh Prime Minister [wikipedia.org] from a province that 20 years ago wanted to segregate away from India, but that only strengthens the argument).
With that kind of diversity, it is hard for any set of corporations or the government to control the media, and any attempts at doing so will only add fuel to the fire and start a chain reaction that will backfire. Which is why, media in the US is so screwed up with almost no sense of ethics or morals, while the media in the third world has a more reliable (albeit sometimes prejudiced) and true freedom-ish slant.
Oh well, just my two cents!
Re:No, sorry. (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, the amount of our political discoure that is decided by the radical right and left is ridiculous. Most of us are neither, yet look at the big issues: Abortion, gun control, prayer in schools. Jesus.
And god, so uninformed. I'd like to see a day where you had to answer a five question multiple choice test about each candidate you vote for, and if you blow more than one, NO VOTE FOR YOU! No doubt the people putting the test together would run statistics and try to weigh the test against people who vote for their opponents.
Human nature sucks.
Great Quotes: Whats Wrong with the Mainstream Medi (Score:4, Interesting)
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone
of any significance in the major media."
- William Colby, former director of the CIA
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity
and obedience of the media"
- Noam Chomsky
"Truth is the greatest of all national possessions.
A state, a people, a system which suppresses the truth
or fears to publish it, deserves to collapse."
- Kurt Eisner
"Whoever controls the media--the images--controls the culture."
- Allen Ginsberg
"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things
the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't.
I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take
legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press
can decide whether to print what it knows."
- Katherine Graham, late owner of the Washington Post,
in a speech to CIA recruits in 1988.
Re:No, sorry. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Freedom of Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
And when these mega-corps are involved with other corporations and lobbying politicians, how can the actually report objectively when they're taking part in the news-making.
That quote was from Jeffrey Immelt, who became Chairman of General Electric shortly before 9/11. GE owns NBC and also happens to manufacture weapons. It's also a major contractor in Iraq right now. Can you honestly believe that they would report on themselves and activities in which they're generating income with complete objectivity?
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/C
Re:No, sorry. (Score:4, Interesting)
Good luck!
Some people in Florida were so stupid that they failed to punch their voting card properly. Let alone answer 5 questions.
I sometimes agree with your sentement - but unfortuntly such tests have historically been a used a bludgeon against the less powerfull.
For example: we use to have a literacy tests - but all to often they were only used to exclude minorities.
Re:Quick Synopsis (Score:2, Interesting)
Journalists don't let the government tell them what they can and cannot know -- they let their corporate masters tell them that. If they didn't, they'd quickly find themselves without a job. Their corporate masters are now so firmly in control of the government that there's little difference, but what little difference exists is of vital importance.
Their corporate masters are in firm control of the government because you simply cannot (meaning the odds are so low that they're not worth considering anymore) get elected to a national position in the U.S. today without "help" from those same corporate masters, since those corporate masters control what gets published by the mass media and what doesn't.
This is a situation that has no solution short of revolution, and today revolution can't succeed because the government has millions of times more firepower than the citizenry.
Welcome to the 21st century, citizen. Enjoy your stay. Just remember to do what you're told.
Re:STUPIDEST QUESTION EVER. (Score:1, Interesting)
"..access to better facts.."
There is the truth and there is everything else. When it comes to news there is no substitute for the objective facts, everything else is opinion.
There is no such thing as a 'better' fact. There are just facts. We have become weak with subjective liberalism to the point we will entertain two irreconcilably conflicting views of the same event and try to attribute some merit to both, as if that were true moderation. The belief that objective truth is the vector sum of many weak subjective standpoints is flawed. The problem is that we usually dont know which of the competing news is fact until the truth comes out many years after the event, and as such have no fast feedback mechanism to discern good from bad sources. Also , people quickly forget who told them the truth and who lied. They too easily forgive jounalistic 'mistakes' believing that journalists do a hard job the best they can (rather than that they have an agenda and will lie without morals) The list of mainstream sources I have rejected and no longer consider good sources is pretty much the lot of them these days. I tend to be cynical to the point of no belief in media whatsoever since almost all have blatently lied or knowingly propagated lies in my recent memory.
Um, $everything =~ m/politics/i (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Objectivity in question (Score:3, Interesting)
The days of the press turning a blind eye to Presidential mis-behavior are thankfully over. Thats why Clinton got hammered for what was ignored, and done a hell of a lot more often, by JFK.
Of course all networks have found that they have to cater to their advertisers. The people paying the bills are more in charge than ever, and thats not always a good thing. Just another special interest problem.
True objective news reporting can only be had by watching Fox and CNN, then figure out the middle between them.
Audio link of Moyers giving ~the same speech (Score:3, Interesting)
Part 1 [mac.com]
Part 2 [mac.com]
Not Journalists: CBS, Boston Globe & SlashDot (Score:3, Interesting)
And to quote a Boston Globe reporter on journalistic honesty is almost as funny. Next on to Rather and CBS, the Boston Globe was the most aggressive at defending those forged memos with bogus claims they could have been churned out on an early 70s typewriter.
The day after this now discredited CBS expose, Google news listed over 1000 stories in papers around the world. In none that I read did the reporter make even a cursory examination of those memos. They simply repeated CBS's doctored tale like parrots.
Into the breach stepped a handful of blogs, notably Powerline [powerlineblog.com] and Little Green Footballs [littlegreenfootballs.com]. In less than a day and using the expertise of their readers much like open source and Groklaw, they demonstrated that the memos were clumsy forgeries done with a recent version of Microsoft Word. Five years ago, perhaps even two years ago, that would have been impossible.
It was easily the biggest Internet story of the year. A handful of blogs take on a powerful TV network, charge it with using forged documents, and win. It demonstrates perfectly the democratic, leveling influence of the Internet.
But those depending on Slashdot for their window on the world would have heard almost nothing about this amazing development. A story that should have been shouted from Slashdot's main page and updated several times a day, was buried on the politics page.
The select few that determine what stories Slashdot displays are free to vote for whoever they want in the November election. But they're not free to caption their pages with "Politics for Nerds. Your vote matters" and expect us to trust them. If they want to champion Kerry by burying contrary stories, they should change that slogan to "Partisan Politics for Nerds. Vote for Kerry."
--Mike Perry, Inkling blog [inklingbooks.com], Seattle
Re:STUPIDEST QUESTION EVER. (Score:2, Interesting)
Such as: War decisions (going to war, progress in the war, etc), homosexual marriage, abortion rights, seperation of church and science, FDA, supreme court judges, etc.
Although a president is limited in actual power, he is a strong influence to either encourage or discourage movements.
Formally, I used to say the same as you did, that our country changes very slowly. But lately everything has been changing very quickly.
Re:Founding Fathers thought so. (Score:5, Interesting)
In as far as this question goes, your statement can't be moderated high enough. (as of this post, you're at +4; let's see what the moderators with a chip on their shoulder do to your comment)
The press is the only business that I'm aware of that is protected explicitly by the U.S. Constitution. With that protection comes a huge amount of responsibility. As Thomas Jefferson said, if he had a choice between a free government and no press and a free press and no government, he'd take the latter. The reason this is important is because people can't make smart decisions unless they have the right information.
However, as of late, I think the press is abdicating their constitutionally protected role. I ran across a scary, but telling fact. The Christian Science Monitor reported that after the 9/11 attack only 3% of people polled thought that Iraq was behind it. However, a steady drumbeat of the Bush administration insinuating that Iraq was behind the attacks turned this around. For example, during Bush's prime time press conference during March of 2003, he mentioned Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in the same sentence often, talking about 9/11 eight times trying to make his case in going to war in Iraq (while simultaneously forgetting he was going to find Osama bin Laden dead or alive). The White House's misinformation campaign worked. Just before the war, 44% of people polled in a Knight-Ridder poll said that some or most of the hijackers were from Iraq. In Sept 2003, the Associated Press reported that 70 percent of people believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. The truth is Iraq had nothing to do with Sept 11, and 17 out of 19 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
If the press had been doing its job, we wouldn't have seen 70% of the American people believing in a lie.
Re:The courage of his convictions? (Score:5, Interesting)
The big media outlets are not left-wing. They are the corporate media, and their only true bias is the bottom line and the status-quo.
Re:News vs. Controversy (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only is the press lazy, they have become self-asorbed and believe themselves to be the un-elected fourth branch of government. Well, fuck them, I did not elect them and they do not speak for me!
A prime example is Dan Rather's mental contortions to explain their manuafacturing a story and/or getting duped and/or producing forged documents. Wipe the shit off your nose and the cum off your lips Dan, it's distracting...
The press is SO unobjective and so far away from the ideals of journalism. It's sad, not even George Orwell could have predicted this. It's not even newspeak, it's lame because it is so transparent, so partisan, and so shrill. I don't understand how these people can call themselves professional.
Re:Agree with parent (Score:3, Interesting)
well said (Score:3, Interesting)
However, one has to have a good idea of what one thinks needs to be done before a cohesive plan of action can be devised.
the only thing is, i think some people spend their entire lives looking for a perfect action plan about a problem where no such perfect action plan exists.
in other words, on some problems in life, all possible choices are risky and carry some chance of utter failure. yet, irregardless, action is still prudent, necessary, and inescapable. so if you hold the bar to high on the action plan you will choose when it presents itself, you will wind up never acting and always waiting.
some people then become locked in this ivory tower of inaction because of idealistic standards.
and i'm not accusing you of this, i'm just riffing on your observations.
we are both familiar with the concept that action without thought is dangerous and ultimately self-defeating.
my assertion is that thought without action is equal to that in self-defeat and danger.
and i see just as many people frozen in idealistic inaction about nasty problems in this world as those who are ready to shoot first ask questions later.
I guess Moyers would know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Eyes and Ears. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the situation whether we're talking about WMD's the Iran Hostage 'crisis' (my first media beef), health care or whether Kerry's medals are more important than Bush's lies about Iraq.
When the press is more interested in Janet Jackson's nipples than world affairs and local politics, that's rather like me watching the butt of the girl that just passed me and walking into a light pole (or traffic).
It's the same thing for intelligence services... It's the reason why the US Military was so interested in satellite-killer technology; stealth aircraft and GPS selective-service. It's also why, when they went into Iraq in 1991 radar installations were pretty much the first things to be taken out followed by missile sites and air bases.... If the enemy can't see you, they can't defend against you.
Similarly: When Bush and Blair got so pedantic about wanting 'proof' of WMD's that their respective intelligence services started ignoring their own rules of intelligence triage, they put their own countries into a delusional state and left the rest of the world seeing double.
It's why The US put so much money into VOA during the cold war and why propaganda is considered a tool of war. The truth is nowhere as important as what you can get your enemy to believe.
As our media sources get distracted by the hunt for money, our societal eyesight gets fuzzy. If you want a healthy society, you need a healthy and independent media. A democracy making decisions based on bad media is like a blind man driving in traffic: If traffic is light or you're driving a tank, you'll be OK until you find a cliff. I think that the US has been like this... The country is essentially a tank. The countries that have gotten run over so far have been felt like bumps. Iraq may be the first sign that there's a cliff up ahead, or a deep lake.
Well.... (Score:2, Interesting)
When you sandwich a "Talk Show Host" between two news programs on a 24 hour news channel, and he spends his entire show talking about the news, you can't claim that he doesn't count, though many Fox people do, in an attempt to pretend that they aren't utterly biased.
I have a similar contempt for liberal pundits (Michael Moore leaps to mind) and if Moore was on a news channel with Franken and Mahr and some feckless moderate passed off as "conservative" I'd hold that channel in the same sort of towering contempt I have for Fox News. As there doesn't seem to be such a station yet, I get to focus on Fox. Unfair, and Unbalanced. I wouldn't let my dog watch that station.
Re:Freedom of Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
Corporate media outlets fight to meet shareholder expectations of better bottom lines, etc... . One way to increase your bottom line is to diversify your revenue stream and consolidate your redundant expenses. To normal people, that means you buy newspapers, radio stations and television stations and cable companies and anything you can then get rid of any overlap you can. For newspapers (and let's face it, the super-vast majority of any real news gathering still happens through newspapers), that means getting rid of reporters (usually through attrition, so it's not ugly) and replacing the stories they would write with wire service (AP, Reuters, NY Times, etc) stuff. Own multiple papers in the same state? Make them all cover the statehouse with the same reporter. Fill with stuff from the wires. National coverage? One Washington man can handle the needs of five or six papers, right? Fill with stuff from the wires.
I watched the Wichita Eagle newsroom go from a 130-person newsroom to 85 in less than seven years. Only a half dozen people got downsized out of a job. But when I left, the old guys who could not only name every county in the state but could tell a long story about each one (that inevitably involved a pickup truck and the county seat) were gone. The Eagle used to have three state house reporters and one in Washington; now (or at least, the last time I checked) it has one state house reporter that it shares with the Kansas City Star (same parent company) and one in Washington that is shared with five other midwestern states. And the Eagle is lucky, because those really are Eagle guys there; the other papers get seconds.
The average age and experience had dropped by about 20 years and the bulk of the journalists in the room were imported from other states, because no one goes up at their own newspaper but jumps paper to paper to climb the ladder. There were actually more people from North Carolina in charge of Kansas' largest newspaper than than there were Kansans.
They didn't know shit from shineola, except to take marketing surveys to find out what people _wanted_ to read. They took the bias of the market and reflected it back on itself. There was no "corporate" bias besides giving people "what they want."
And that's bullshit.
Reporters are, by nature, more liberal than the population. That's a given: People who want to be journalists and expose the truth and do all the heroic things that they go to journalism school for are, in some way, upset with the status quo. They want change.
Editors, however, are much more conservative than their reporters. They have to deal with the consequences of upsetting the status quo. They used to be reporters, but they've grown up and understand the needs of the corporation. Corporate editors tend to actively stifle controversy that isn't absolutely necessary. They won't (usually) walk away from the giant corruption scandals, but they won't take unnecessary risks on seemingly trivial points. Those scandals have to fall in their laps.
So, again, you have this corporate pressure to cut redundancy and a local pressure to resist controversy and lean, when it can, towards what it thinks the public wants to hear.
With fewer sources to choose from and even a slight bias about what gets reported, the public is easily mislead.
Reporters don't waste time on things they think the editor will spike anyway; politicians can spin control and get away with lies because there tell fewer reporters to deal with; bias is magnified by reporters second guessing what the editors will want and editors second guessing what people will want.
In the end, we're lucky we know anything at all.
Moyers has more than paid for his sins (Score:4, Interesting)
Since that time Moyers has demonstrated, through his PBS work specifically, a desire to see more clearly and chart more honestly the nature and exercise of American power. And he has come to understand, better than he did as a willing flunkie in his youth, what costs are paid when our journalism is left in the care of corporations.
He laments the backlash in our present reactionary period. "Journalists who try to tell these (critical) stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged, and dismissed," he writes. True, however it's hardly a new phenomenon. Things have not simply gone sour since 9/11 or since Rupert Murdoch's ascension. Reading corporate US journalism from the 1960s is little different to reading the current product today: both are bland, dependent on elites for their least utterance, concerned foremost with selling a product, careful not to offend, sure to look the other way when their masters might be embarrassed. (The 60s and 70s also saw a burst in critical journalism that sometimes--as in the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers or Watergate--reached the mainstream, but what survives of that vigor is now mainly to be found in the alternative press. Blogging is a hopeful sign, little more.)
Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life; well, Moyers has had one. He quit the browbeating game and went on to become critical, passionate, and curious about our world. Today the dire shape of the Republic may well be as due to malfeasors in office as to yes-men and yes-women in journalism, but we cannot say that people like Moyers haven't been there to show us how to do it all better.
Watered Down Politics (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't lessen the importance of what the man was trying to say by substituting your words for his-- "the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined." Perhapse it's just me, but that entire story (or novel) was more than just concern for something as pale as 'politics'. His article tried to go several levels higher than a concern on mere political saber rattling. We're talking about democracy, the will and freedom of the people and their lives, not simply who will be elected in 2004 or the party platform. Nor was his article merely covering the topic of 'politics'. Most of it had to do with the welfare of the people and how the quality of journalism was a direct representative of that.
I may disagree with his 'half-empty' focus on the state of affairs, and even some of his conclusions; But don't dilute his thoughts and exact words with such an inadequate replacement just to fit into an easily noticed Slashdot shoebox topic when he obviously meant so much more.
A where do you get your ideas from??? (Score:3, Interesting)
The vast majority of people in this country get their ideas handed to them by the warm glowing box in their living rooms. Yes, I know there're a growing number of younger folks who don't allow that banal appliance, to limit or control the content of their minds or their imaginations, but the polls would at least suggest that >50% of the American public get's their quasi-truth predigested and sanitized for their convenience, through video.
The American media is owned by an ever shrinking handful of multinational conglomerates who would be just as happy if there was only one super-duper-hyper-megacorp that owned and controled every sound, image, thought, and the means by which to transmit, communicate, store, and deliver said IP.
Once in America, there was a plethora of privately owned publications, with different views, opinions, perspectives, and takes on the truth. This didn't seem to alter the fact that as a whole Americans have pretty much done as they bloody well felt like doing and damn the hindmost, but at least you couldn't say you went to hell blind and stupid. Today it's almost impossible to find a fact that hasn't been so thoroughly masticated by people who have one agenda or another to foist upon their readers, that truth has become kind of Orwellian double-speak for propagandist excrement.
The internet has indeed been at some level relief to the nauseating trend of politicizing and comercializing the truth as though it were some informational of comodity. The problem with the internet is that it's the gourmand to finer journalisms gourmet. The internet is an open pipe that mixes (without consideration) the finest delacacies with equal parts raw untreated sewage, and if "Caveat Emptor" is the rule for the open market, it's a bloody sacrament on the internet. That, and as a few have already pointed out, one can justify any point of view with the right filter or Google search. A greater mass doesn't make feces any finer a thing, nor BS any closer to the truth.
This was the whole point of a forth estate. After disasters caused by yellow journalism, people demanded men who they could trust without question. The kind of journalists so committed to truth, justice, and the American way, you could gladly bet your ass they were more dedicated to delivering the goods, then you were dedicated to breathing tomorrow. The last century saw giants, men who you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt had no capacity to lie, who would stand before the nation bare-assed naked if need be, to deliver the unadulterated truth. Edward R. Morrow, Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Kronkite, and a handful of others came into people's home, and you could bet you last dollar, they would tell you precisely how it was, straight up, no spin, no doctoring.
Somewhere between then and now, we went from news to infotainment. Then added the kind of mud sucking pandering to lowest common denominator mouthbreathers that could only be provided by the British then U.S. tabloids (any sense of dignity went flying straigt down the toilet.) Now in the beginning of the third millinium, we have government crossbreeding with what's left of journalism, and their bastard child half politician, half wallstreet marketing spin doctor, has replaced all but the holiest journalistic bastions (can you say PBS.) I can totally understand why Bill Moyers is retiring, hell, I'd be putting on asbestos underware and looking for a good bomb shelter. People, we've let the criminally stupid, and morally corrupt steal our society away from under us.
I don't know if this is to paraphrase Jefferson "A time refresh the tree of liberty with either the blood of patriots and/or tyrants...", but it's getting pretty dang certain that good men of conscience can ill tolerate what's passing for truth and justice these days.
Genda