Paid Propaganda

by Gregory Bresiger

Bill Moyers, the right hand man to one of the evil architects of the Vietnam War, has done it again. Moyers, a master of the rigged major media news show, on Monday presented the documentary, "Trade Secrets, A Bill Moyers Report Investigation on the Safety of Chemicals," which was telecast on PBS. Slick promos for his show urged people to "get ready to get angry" at the chemical industry.

Moyers, at taxpayer expense, used the deceptive and emotional techniques of the television "news" documentary in an attempt to smear an industry. For those viewers who don’t have the experience or the ability to analyze the television news product, without doubt, the case is settled. The companies of the American chemical industry – all of them – are now devils incarnate. After all, this is what the average viewer will likely conclude. With his ingenious use of the hocus-pocus of the tube, Moyers exposed the lies of another industry. Oh, how lucky we are to have this wonderful moral man on our side, the average viewer must have decided after a strong dose of Moyers news and entertainment values (There was lots of hokey music suggesting an evil intent when Moyers was railing against the industry).

But one must admit that Moyers presented a dazzling show. It was compelling, exciting, and fast paced, but unfortunately it was also one other thing: It was junk food for the mind, which is what usually happens whenever television tries to tackle any serious issue. Moyers, no science specialist, concludes, at the end of the first 90 minutes of the documentary, that there are high rates of cancer, especially among children. In the context of just spending an hour and half excoriating the chemical industry, he suggests it is the chemical industry’s fault that cancer rates are as high as they are. But how do we know this? On what science is this based? More importantly why doesn’t the viewer – in the documentary part of the show – hear from chemical industry to answer these serious charges? Why aren’t its representatives given a chance to answer the many charges, to comment on the use of emotional pictures that lead any human being to conclude that they are a cross between Hitler and Stalin?

The documentary was followed by a thirty-minute discussion, with two representatives of the chemical industry, who were put on a panel with two of Moyers’ favorite sources from the documentary. Moyers presided over the discussion, which made it three against two. The first words out the mouths of one industry’s spokesmen was a complaint that the documentary was biased; that they had no opportunity to comment on the documentary during this filmed indictment of the American chemical industry over the last half century.

For Moyers to call any of this fair is to accept the old Pogo saw: "Everybody deserves a fair trial before being shot." Moyers documentary is the same old so-called "news" game that we have seen many times on the tube, which unfortunately too much people rely on to find out about their world.

Who is Bill Moyers? And are the investigative techniques he used in this documentary fair and should they be used as a basis for deciding a critical issue such as the safety, or lack thereof, of the chemical industry? First, let’s remember that Bill Moyers was a press aide to president Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose despicable promises to keep the U.S out of Vietnam War as he campaigned for the presidency in 1964 were redeemed with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans. Moyers served this lying man who clearly stole his way into the Senate in 1948.

I have never heard Moyers – who has a reputation as the great moralist of TV news – utter a critical word for LBJ or the disasters he imposed on this nation. Moyers helped run a dirty campaign against Barry Goldwater, whose feuding Republican party had no chance of winning the election of 1964. So all the dirty tactics of the election – the famous A-bomb television ad that charged that Goldwater would start World War III, the planted phony reports that Goldwater was meeting with European fascists – were all ridiculous and superfluous.

Dredging this up may seem unfair, but it matters. Character matters in the men and women one trusts to produce and report news documentaries that influence tens of millions of Americans, many of whom, lamentably, don’t read and depend on the box as their primary source of news. It is easy to confuse many of these folks, unless they learn to be more critical of what they see and unless they read more, developing independent sources of information that challenge the official PBS line, which usually has a strong liberal/socialist bias.

First of all let me confess: Before I became a journalist, some 25 years ago, I believed much of what I heard, saw and read. I regularly watched "Sixty Minutes" and other such tube drivel. But after a few years in this business, I understood what Bismarck, a 19^th century German chancellor meant when he said that, "There are two things people should never see being made: laws and sausages."

I realized, after years in the business and seeing the sausages being made, that the careful manipulation of images – the staple of television news – combined with sympathetic interviewing of favored sources along with hostile interviewing of other sources was the stuff of great ratings and even better propaganda by elites who don’t to just report news, but twist it.

In the case of Moyers’s Monday documentary there was a ninety-minute documentary with no sources who contradicted Moyers’ party line. Indeed, Moyers repeatedly talked to about 10 sources over and over again in the 90 minutes. Moyers’ work so obviously relied on these favored sources that they virtually took over the show. Moyers seemed, at times, as though he was almost rehearsing the interviews when he talked to the friendly sources.

This is a familiar technique of tube news. Allow people you like – who will advance your agenda so you can use that lame line that, "I’m only reporting the news" – to speak without interruptions. Give these friendly sources long cuts. Speak to them in a sympathetic way as though one is talking to a friend. When you cut up the interview make them look brilliant. Also, have a lot of reaction shots of the reporter looking concerned and taking notes (Although it has been my experience as both a print and radio reporter that most TV news types never take notes. I think it because many of them have made up their minds what the story is going to be before they conduct any interviews).

By contrast, when one is interviewing a subject one wants "to get," take a hostile interviewing stance. Interrupt them as much as possible. Have your camera people use unflattering shots. And try to depict them as fools or pick comments that make them look silly or are so abbreviated that they lose their force. (In a famous rigged CBS documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy," a friendly "source" was put on the payroll and interviews with people whose ideas CBS wanted to push were allowed to speak their parts a second time when the interview didn’t come out as planned. Later, when the target of the documentary, General William Westmorland, had a better than one hour interview, but didn’t say what the CBS propagandists wanted him to say, only a five or six second cut of his interview was used in the news show).

Moyers, in the past, has, sin duda, used many of the above techniques. But this time was a little different. He didn’t even make the pretense of trying to achieve objectivity. For instance, he claimed that many of the officials of the Reagan administration were in on this skullduggery with the chemical industry, yet there was not one interview with a Reagan administration official. Why? There’s plenty of those people still around. Why weren’t any of them on camera? Did Moyers and his gang of propagandists even try?

As I say, this was a new low, even for a guy who so capably served LBJ, which to me is the moral equivalent of having happily served Richard Nixon. This time there wasn’t even the usual slanted techniques of letting someone dispute the devil thesis. Finally, I want to say that the purpose of this piece is not to exonerate the chemical industry. Or damn it.

I don’t pretend to know whether it is guilty of all the charges brought by our amok television prosecutor, who, in a better world, would be disbarred. It is critical that such an important subject be looked at by someone who has some science background and not some television personality who has traded on his closeness to a discredited president to jump ahead in journalism (Maybe the greatest problem of journalism today is that too many are generalists and celebrities. They do not have the knowledge and background to cover stories that call for specialized knowledge, yet they "look so good" on camera, they deliver their scripts – often written by other people – in such a feeling manner that one wonders why there isn’t a special Oscar category for them. That is how we end up with people like Sam Donaldson covering the Persian Gulf War, even though he had none of the languages and none of the background to cover the war). The journalist who would write this documentary about the chemical industry should weigh every charge and ensure that whoever is the one indicted should have a fair chance to answer each charge. And he or she should not be buddies with either side.

One of Moyers sympathetic sources says "it’s easy to distort" medical science. But it’s even easier to distort truth and journalism when Moyers is around.

Gregory Bresiger, an independent business writer and editor, has written for LewRockwell.com and The Free Market.

Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com

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