Musings from the Half Awake

It looks like the first reviews of the Moyers TV show are starting to come in, and not all of them are positive. It turns out that the Washington press corps is rather thin-skinned, and they don't like how they're mostly portrayed here. Well, maybe they should've showed more spine when it counted.

Mark Knoller of CBS News did the classic "complain about a single part, thus drawing fire from other valid points" strategy. Moyers used a single, specific presidential press conference as a symbol of the impotence of the White House press corps. Intended to set up Bush's case for war in Iraq, the March 6, 2003 press conference was a total charade. Bush himself said that it was scripted, and he had a list of who to call on when, but the reporters played along, giving it the appearance of a free-wheeling exchange of ideas. Moyers said that the press corps asked no hard questions. Knoller, who participated in the press conference, attempts to refute Moyers's point, describing (but not quoting) the questions asked. Atrios helpfully stepped in to provide the official White House transcript of the questions, which weren't quite as hard hitting as Knoller had implied. The reporter was quickly taken to task in his own comments section. Knoller's response to critical comments is to retort, "Oh yeah? Well, how could you guys do it any better?" Rhetorical arguments don't get much more intellectually bankrupt than that.

Glenn Greenwald also does a run down of some of the complaints from other sources. If you're not sure whether you believe Knollers's attack deserves a defense or not, you may want to reacquaint yourself with the original broadcast. Moyers has plenty of criticism to spread around.

(Edited to strengthen the coherence of an ill-advised middle-of-the-night post.)