Bill Moyers eyes run-up to Iraq in his return to PBS

“Deep Throats were talking, but few in the press were listening,” Bill Moyers says in “Buying the War,” a cold-eyed look at how lock-step with the Bush administration the mainstream news media became in the months leading up to the Iraq war.

Airing tonight on PBS, the documentary marks Moyers’ return as a regular PBS presence. He left his previous series, “Now With Bill Moyers,” at the end of 2004, frustrated by what he saw as the politicalization of public broadcasting under then-Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson.

Tomlinson is gone and Moyers is back (albeit with a suspicious lack of fanfare). “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (which last aired in 1994) will settle into Friday nights on KCET after tonight’s premiere. In “Buying the War,” Moyers the citizen journalist (in the good sense of that term) goes back over the hawkish national climate in 2002 and ‘03, and the echo chamber the Bush administration created out of the mainstream media, including hallowed institutions such as “Meet the Press” and the New York Times, in selling the idea of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapon programs and ties to Al Qaeda.

The heavy-hitters that Moyers says he tried but failed to get to comment for “Buying the War” include former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Times columnists Thomas L. Friedman and William Safire, and Fox News Channel architect Roger Ailes.

The lighter hitters you will see a lot of are Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, reporters in the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder Inc., along with their bureau chief, John Walcott.

This is Moyers’ larger point: that these men were exceptions to the rule, writing stories that questioned the veracity of official intelligence, and because Knight Ridder (now owned by the McClatchy Co.) didn’t have a paper in New York or Washington, their dissenting voices couldn’t compete with the theme of the moment.

The front pages were blaring, and cable news, of course, was banging the drum -- and the pots, and the pans. The clips alone that “Buying the War” amasses are chilling, what amounts to a hall of mirrors, administration officials leaking and spinning and then going on talk shows to point at their media-fed leak or spin.

Phil Donahue, fired as host of an MSNBC show in early 2003, says he was told he could have a war advocate on his program as a solo guest, but dissenters had to be balanced out from the right.

“Our producers were instructed to feature two conservatives for every liberal,” he says.

There is no one representing the conservative argument here, nor the deeper ideological reasons for believing in the Iraq invasion. But that’s partly Moyers’ position: In the run-up to war, point-counterpoint emerged as a devastating sham.

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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‘Bill Moyers’ Journal: Buying the War’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 10:30 tonight

Rating: No rating