http://www.independent.com/cover/Cover953.htm

extract

The mainstream news media, Moyers laments, has taken a dive at a time
when the power of the Republican Party has never been more absolute and
more morally bankrupt. As a result, public discourse has been reduced to
a scream-fest dominated by such unabashedly conservative media giants as
Fox, Clear Channel, and Sinclair, who’ve become “echo chambers” for the
Bush administration, if not outright propagandists.

*****
‘I never took him as a compassionate conservative.
I’m a Texan. I saw what he had done to Texas and I knew he would do to
the nation what he had done to Texas.
And by God he’s done it.’
— Bill Moyers
******
Q)In your parting shots prior to going off the air, you accused
conservative news outlets like Fox of being a propaganda arm of the
administration — or at least a vast echo chamber. These outlets are
incredibly popular though, bringing to mind Al Capone’s famous line,
“I’m just giving the people what they want.” So when you look at the
ratings, why shouldn’t we conclude that Fox and O’Reilly are what the
people want?

R)I don’t dispute that. It’s certainly what the people who watch that
want. I’ve never challenged that. They’re giving their ideological
audience what that ideological audience wants. They bought into a belief
system that can’t be challenged by any evidence to the contrary.

*****
I think mainstream journalism has been driven to the lowest priority on
the scale of values of the mega media companies that own them.
Journalism and the news business don’t always mix. And we now have big
media companies that own the journalistic organs and that’s not their
top priority. When Michael Eisner says he doesn’t want ABC news covering
Disney activities you realize there’s a chilling effect on corporate
journalists that proscribes their boundaries. With a few honorable
exceptions, you cannot count on the big media companies to put
journalism above other values in their hierarchy of values. There was a
study done a year ago in which one-third of the journalists who
responded said they were asked to kill stories that were offensive to
the clientele of their corporate bosses. So you have a very neutered
mainstream media, and you have a powerful ideological megaphone in Fox
News and talk radio for the right wing. So there’s an imbalance today
and the right wing has the dominant megaphone in America.
****
RE Bush )I never took him as a compassionate conservative. I’m a Texan.
I saw what he had done to Texas and I knew he would do to the nation
what he had done to Texas. And by God he’s done it. He’s turned the
environment over to the polluters, he’s turned the courts over to big
business, and he’s turned the schools over to the religious right. I was
not fooled by his prevarications and his camouflage and his deceits.
****
But all that was out there in plain view. How do you account for this?
There are always a lot of people who prefer the comfortable lie to the
uncomfortable truth. In this case, a majority of voters knew exactly
what you’re saying, yet voted for him none the less. They did so for one
of two reasons. First, Bush had America scared to death. And fear was
the dominant issue in that campaign, not moral values. Second, many of
Bush’s supporters buy into the belief system that he and his allies have
propounded. And in that belief system — which is supported by Fox News
and talk radio — no evidence to the contrary can be permitted.
Ideologues embrace a worldview that cannot be changed because they admit
no evidence to the contrary. ---- It’s a weird phenomenon. I’d also say
conservatives have never been more politically dominant and more
intellectually and morally bankrupt. Because of that they can keep their
troops believing the Big Lie. The Big Lie is that the threat of Al Qaeda
is greater to us than the threat of low wages, environmental pollution,
the growing inequality in America, or the terrible failure of the Bush
policies on schools. People just didn’t want the uncomfortable truth to
disturb the comfortable lie.