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Tavis: Always pleased to welcome Bill Moyers to this program. The highly regarded journalist and PBS host is back this week with an all-new season of one of public TV's most respected programs, "Bill Moyers' Journal." The season premier deals with the role of the media leading up to the war in Iraq. The show airs this Wednesday night at 9:00 PM here on PBS. Here now, a scene from "Bill Moyers' Journal - Buying the War."

[Clip]

Tavis: Following the season premiere on Wednesday, the series returns to its regular time slot, Friday nights on PBS. Bill Moyers joins us from New York. As always, Bill Moyers, an honor to have you on the program.

Bill Moyers: Same here, Tavis.

Tavis: Let me start with a question that - the answer to which I could speculate, but why speculate when Bill Moyers is sitting in front of you? Why this topic for the premiere?

Moyers: Four years ago next week, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln and in standing in front of that big sign, mission accomplished, spoke to the world. The press hailed him as a conquering hero, and one media star after another said, "What a tremendous victory; the war is essentially over." Well, it wasn't, and the way the press bought into that photo opportunity and pronounced the war over before all these tens of thousands of casualties, is symbolic of how the press bought the war four years ago and is complicitous in what has happened since then.

Tavis: You think the majority of Americans gets that, or needs to see a piece like this to understand how that happened?

Moyers: Well, I hope a lot of people watch this, Tavis, because if the watchdog doesn't bark, how do you know there's a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog. I'll put it another way: if you think that the fire department in your neighborhood is in collusion with the arsonist, you want to know about it.

And the fact of the matter is, in the build-up to the war the watchdog didn't bark and the fire department - in this case the press - was in cahoots with the arsonist.

Tavis: You raise some provocative questions about how the media slept on this, as it were. Let me come at this a different way. How is it that the American people sleep on the media not asking the right questions?

Moyers: If we had standards of accountability for the press, a lot of people on the air right now would be in the penalty box because they were so wrong about the war. And yet, I see them on talk shows, I see them on the Sunday morning shows, I hear them on radio. They're still sounding forth as if they had not been wrong in the first place. So, the press has to be held to standards of scrutiny and skepticism by a press that says, "Prove it."

Tavis: Let me fast-forward to the end, Bill, then I'll come back. After the American public watches this special on Wednesday night, what power do the American people have, practically, to check a media elite that is out of control? What power do I have to check "The New York Times?"

Moyers: Well, you have the power of comparison; the power of analogy. No one can be informed who reads only one newspaper or watches only one network. It's hard to be an informed citizen, but you can be if you cross-check the sources, if you read "The New York Times" and "The Wall Street Journal" or your local newspaper and "USA Today."

If you go to a conservative website on the net and then go to a liberal and then to a journalistic website. You really do need - we have to learn how to read the press critically and analytically and make comparisons between what they're saying, what he's saying, what she's saying, and then how does that meet the test of reality?

Tavis: All right, let me go back, then, right to the heart of the matter here. How did the press get had on this? How and why did they turn the other way?

Moyers: Well, first of all there is the right-wing partisan press that wasn't interested in getting it right. They see themselves as the amplifier or the megaphone for a conservative White House, and so whatever the president was saying, they amplified it, they broadcast it. They were cheerleaders for the war. Then you have the regular, mainstream press - the so-called MSM.

And in Washington, they're embedded in the Beltway mentality so that the official view of reality - how the government sees the world - is the beginning of how so many of the media elites in Washington see the world. And what the press was doing was very often taking an anonymous type or really a handout, the administration line, and just purveying it out to the public at large.

Tavis: I paused there deliberately for just a second at the end of your remark to see if you were going to go further, and I paused because I suspect there's some watching right now who are saying, "There goes Bill Moyers again." You start with the conservative press, you come to the middle, and you stop as if there is no liberal media bias.

Moyers: Well, in this case when you watch the documentary Wednesday night, you will see that we're as tough on the liberal "New Republic" as we are on the conservative "Weekly Standard." I believe very strongly in laying out a case before reaching any conclusion. And I'll tell you that they're not gonna be happy in liberal America in the liberal press when they see this documentary, because the truth hurts.

And it hurts the Republicans and conservatives in this case because they went along, and it hurts some liberals and the Democrats, because they were wrong. In fact, one of my most interesting scenes in the documentary is of ambitious Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry going along, essentially, with the intelligence that was given them by the administration.

No, Tavis, here's the point: whether you're a Republican or a conservative or a Democrat or a liberal, you have to be concerned that this war has now run longer than it took us to beat the Japanese and the Germans in World War II. April was the cruelest month, and one day in April was the bloodiest day of the month. It isn't a question of whether it's a Democrat or a Republican; our political and media elites, four years ago, took their leave of reality and the consequences are devastating.

Tavis, you can't win a war that was begun with lies, because you can't go on asking people to die for the wrong reason. One of the reasons I was so skeptical early on about the build-up to the invasion is because I was in the Kennedy and Johnson administration. Tavis, I was there when we escalated the war in Vietnam, and we did so by rushing to judgment with flawed intelligence and without knowing everything we should have known about Vietnam.

I saw the same thing happening in Iraq, and today the White House and many Democrats as well, and many Republicans, are in denial about what's really happening in Baghdad. We've gotta crack that and get in touch with reality.

Tavis: In advance of people seeing this on Wednesday night, what assurance do you give the people that the piece - pardon the pun - is fair and balanced? And I ask that against the backdrop of what you've just shared now. You were very forthright and very honest, which I appreciate, about your being skeptical of the war to begin with, skeptical of how the media covered or didn't cover the war. How, then, does one who has your point of view put together a fair and balanced piece about this provocative question?

Moyers: You gather the evidence. "Fox News" has so poisoned the meaning of fair and balanced that I can't even understand those terms anymore, but anybody who watches this documentary will see that we lay out the evidence. And I ask everybody who watches - I ask everybody who's watching tonight to watch the documentary and ask yourself as you go along if the evidence isn't being laid out, and then reach your own conclusion.

That's really why I did the documentary. I wanted to go back, review - and I've interviewed Dan Rather for this documentary, Tim Russert for this documentary, Walter Isaacson, who was the president of CNN at the time of the invasion of Iraq, Bob Simon of "60 Minutes," and I want the audience to listen to those interviews, look at the evidence, and then reach your own conclusion about what you think, not what Bill Moyers thinks. That's not that important.

Tavis: You used a word earlier in this conversation, Bill, that I want to go back and get now and tweak it just a little bit. You used the word embedded a couple of moments ago. I wonder to what extent you believe or discover that these so-called embedded journalists had anything to do with the spin that we were given about the war?

Moyers: Oh, yes. There's no question about it. Judith Miller, for example, of "The New York Times," was embedded with the defectors who kept bringing these we now know very misleading analyses of what Saddam Hussein was doing about weapons of mass destruction. She was embedded with the neocons in Washington and she reflected - and with the defectors - and she reflected their take on the war.

We know that many others were - William Kristol of "Weekly Standard" was embedded in the neoconservative movement that promoted the war, and he was using the "Weekly Standard" to advance the administration's view and the ideological case of the war.

There were exceptions, by the way, and you will see in the documentary some great reporting and some great reporters at the Knight Ridder bureau, like Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who were right from the very beginning about the war because they didn't buy into the Beltway mentality, and they don't play the game the way the mainstream media plays the game.

So, there's no question about it, that many in the mainstream media became magnifiers of the administration's case, passing along the flawed intelligence as if it were authentic.

Tavis: Finally, is it just me or is this administration the most secretive of all time? You've worked in the White House. I wonder to what extent, again, their modus operandi - which is secrecy at all costs - has anything to do with the story that you're going to unveil for us on Wednesday night?

Moyers: Well, Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information act back in 1964. He signed it reluctantly, because having been in Congress for so many years he was a man with a passion for secrecy, too. But there's no question but that this administration - and I'm not the only one saying this - there are a lot of people who say this - historians and other journalists say this is the most secretive administration that anyone can remember.

And you know what? That's come home to haunt it, because if you are so secret and you keep things to yourself, when it starts coming out, as this is now coming out about what's happened in Iraq and other things - the Justice hearings - the House tumbles pretty quickly. And when people realize they've been lied to, they don't trust you anymore and your credibility goes sinking like the Titanic.

Tavis: So again, Wednesday night on most PBS stations across the country, "Buying the War," the premiere episode of "Bill Moyers' Journal" and its return to PBS. That's Wednesday night on most stations. A 90-minute special, and then of course on Friday nights it will resume its regular time slot. Bill Moyers, as always, an honor to have you on the program. Thanks for your insight and for your time, sir.

Moyers: Thank you, Tavis. And my guest on Friday night, by the way, will be Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" because I think he's one of the most significant analysts of the news and information of our time.

Tavis: I look forward to seeing both shows this week. Thank you, Bill.

Moyers: Thank you, Tavis.