It's hard to say which image is more disturbing in the Bill Moyers' Journal special airing this week: the World Trade Center collapsing or Dan Rather on David Letterman a few days later, crying and telling the president, "Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where."

Or perhaps the image of Vice President Dick Cheney on the Sunday morning talk shows discussing secret intelligence details about Hussein's (imaginary) nuclear program as reported in a New York Times story — a story made possible only because of a Bush administration leak.

Or the clips of endless pundit shows featuring war hawks like Richard Perle, William Kristol and James Woolsey pitching and re-pitching the rationale for the invasion of Iraq until it became, not opinion, but fact.

"Buying the War" premieres tonight (Wed., April 25) and repeats overnight early Thursday. The weekly Journal show resumes in its regular time slot on Friday night at 10 on WEDU Channel 3.

On the air again after a 12-year layoff, Moyers' series is turning its guns inward. Even PBS comes under fire for buying the Bush administration's carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign.

"How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?" Moyers said in a release announcing the documentary.

With hindsight, the way the media bought into the Iraq War becomes more clear. Start with an administration full of Neocons who wanted to take out Saddam and affect change in the Middle East even before 9-11. Throw in a national tragedy. Distill it through a White House propaganda machine (a marketing group including Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Mary Matalin and Condoleezza Rice) that veteran Washington reporter Walter Pincus calls "just the cleverest I have ever seen."

Iraqi dissidents, funneled through the questionable Ahmed Chalabi, provided grist for unquestioning reporters and pundits. Chalabi and his group gave the same information to reporters that it gave to the White House, neither of which checked it out. Calling for confirmation, reporters were told by White House officials that it was safe to run with the stories because they had heard the same info.

More insidious for the White House marketers was the device of leaking top secret intelligence on Iraq to reporters (no matter that it was shaky intel, at best) and then going on the talk show circuit to cite that publication as further proof of the need for an invasion. Leak the story, then quote the story.

Throughout Moyers' piece, established journalists look like idiots. Leslie Stahl interviews a comically cigarette-smoking Iraqi defector on 60 Minutes about his assertion that biological weapons were developed on trucks to keep them mobile and hidden. (After the invasion, CBS retracted the entire piece and admitted the evidence for mobile labs was false.) New York Times' columnist William Safire writes and speaks repeatedly about the "undisputed fact" of a meeting in Prague between 9-11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and Iraqi agents. It never took place.

The height of absurdity is reached in a Vanity Fair article by David Rose. He described a 1,200-man elite Iraqi terror squad whose "last training exercise was to blow up a full-size mock-up of a U.S. destroyer in a lake in central Iraq."

Complete hooey.

There are a few heroes — notably Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau and Charles Hanley of the AP — who question the fantastic tales and try to report how military and intelligence officials disagreed with the White House. But their voices were drowned out by larger newspapers inside the Beltway.

In the end, Moyers points out how all the big media stars have survived being so negligent at a time when so many other journalists are being laid off. Kristol and fellow hawk Peter Beinart are now regular contributors to Time. Others cited in the report likewise will have jobs.

"Being a pro-war pundit," media critic Norm Solomon says toward the end of the documentary, "means never having to say you're sorry."

For a daily dose of political pearls, visit PoHo's blog, thepoliticalwhore.com.

This article appears in Apr 25 – May 1, 2007.