A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

COMM 317: Link to Bill Moyers show

A copy of the assignment sheet for your term papers -- due Tuesday, April 1 -- is posted below. (Don't let the date unduly influence your creativity!) We'll talk about it between now and then. Here are some links to help you

Here's a link to the Bill Moyers show "Buying the War" we watched Tuesday:


The show originally aired on Bill Moyers' Journal April 25, 2007. In class today, we watched all of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 and the first 15 minutes or so of Chapter 4. We'll discuss it in class Thursday, and screen the last part of it Tuesday, March 25 (we have to do it that way, because we can only get the lab in UA4 on Tuesdays). For continuity, start at 12:42 in Chapter 4 if you're screening it yourself over spring break.

"How did the mainstream press get it so wrong?" asks the tease to Moyers' show. "How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported?"

A better question might be: How did a second-rank bureau like Knight-Ridder get it right?

Interviewed prominently are Washington bureau chief John Walcott and reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder, who went against the grain and presented a fairly balanced account of the evidence for and against the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq.

About the only review I found was in Variety, the show-biz magazine, which praised Moyers' brand of "provocative, high-IQ TV" but also noted his standing as a "long-time liberal advocate." Variety said the show was a "methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap" of pre-war coverage. Similarly, a story in USA Today notes the "media-White House dance is familiar to Moyers, who once spun the Vietnam War as a special assistant to President Johnson," but offers no opinion on the show.

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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.