Welcome to a community supported and guest-produced edition of the best of the left podcast with clips today from NPR, Ring of Fire, Real Time with Bill Marr, Counter-Spin and the Young Turks.

Let's start with Moyers documentary buying the war. Here's a clip in which Walter Isaacson, who headed the CNN during the lead up to the war, talks about how many journalists felt restrained from reporting critically on the Bush administration's plans in Iraq or Afghanistan.

There was a patriotic fervor and the administration used it so that if you challenge anything, you were made to feel that there was something wrong with that and there was even almost a patriotism police, which you know they'd be up there on the internet, sort of picking anything, a christian arm on poor or somebody else would say, as if it were disloyal.

We interviewed a former reporter at CNN who had been there through that period and this reporter said to us, quote, everybody on staff just sort of knew not to push too hard to do stories critical of Bush administration.

Especially at right after 9-11, especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on, there was a real sense that you don't get that critical of a government that's leading us in more time.

There was a clip from the new Bill Moyers documentary buying the war. Bill Moyers, welcome back to fresh air. What are some of the other things you learned in this documentary about how CNN tried to prevent coverage from being too critical of the Bush administration in the lead up to the war?

Well, doing the Afghan bombings, which were our retaliation, the US government's retaliation to the 9-11 attacks from the base of Osama bin Laden, CNN reported, it showed some of the, you know, what we call collateral damage, the human cause, the human deaths and the human calamities that resulted from our force.

And when they ran on CNN, World Isaacson and the producers and reporters there heard from what Isaacson called the patriot police, the corporate executives, as he says in my broadcast, some advertisers.

And in particular, the watchdogs on the right who believe that showing anything negative about our response to the Taliban into Osama bin Laden was on American.

And he felt that pressure every day he told me in my interview with him.

And he warned his staff. He says not to focus too much on casualties in Afghanistan and to balance reports on those casualties with reminders of the damages done to America on September 11th.

Yes, he wrote a memorandum, which was finally leaked to the New York Times. And he told his producers, his reporters, his staff that if they did continue to show.

The human casualties of American force, they needed also to remind people that they had been the casualties caused by the terrorists at 9-11.

And it was his way to try to keep putting into context because of the pressure he was feeling and getting to put into context the cause of the bombing that produced the deaths and the destruction from American firepower.

Now, as you point out in your documentary at the same time that CNN is trying to be very careful about not being too critical about what's happening in Afghanistan and always reminding people that this is a response to September 11th.

Fox News is trying to position CNN as being the liberal news network.

And by liberal, they meant to, you know, the anti-American anti-war network.

How effective do you think Fox News was in giving CNN that reputation as being liberal and biased?

I think Fox was very effective. They exploited the emotional sentiments and passions and the fears that had risen in response to the terrorist attacks on 9-11.

And it, you know, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, many Americans rallied, of course, naturally and patriotically to the administration. The Roosevelt administration has happened in 9-11.

People were uncertain about the sources of this terrorism. They were scared that there would be more of them. And there was a feeling, you know, punched the guys back in the nose, go out to them.

And I decided to do that. I knew one night late when I was watching the Letterman show, the David Letterman show, and Dan Rather was on very emotional about the impact of 9-11 on him.

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