(Now watch me get sued by The Artist Formerly Known As…).This post by Meteor Blades over at The Daily Kos today pretty much captured how I feel and what I wanted to say about the fact that our dear cousins who work for “news” operations with initials for names have pretty much ignored what I would call the story of the year (and in the running for story of the decade as far as I’m concerned).
And that would be the total co-opting of our military analysts by Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to the point where these people went on T.V. to provide commercials for the war and thus feather their own financial nests; the problem is that their words utterly flew in the face of reality to the point where our military was killed in ever-increasing numbers, to say nothing of other coalition force members as well as innocent Iraqis (all of this was thoroughly and expertly documented by Times reporter David Barstow a week ago Sunday).
And as much as I want to praise Meteor Blades here, I have to make a minor correction; as Media Matters tells us here, though “legitimate” news organizations are providing the proverbial sound of crickets in response, Jon Stewart and Comedy Central paid attention.
As I was digesting all of this, I happened to come across a post to the blog of Brian Williams and NBC News (didn’t know they had one) from HuffPo. In the post, Williams employs the typical “kill the messenger” strategy concerning the Times instead of legitimately reporting on the numerous questions raised by Barstow’s account.
Williams starts by noting that the circulation of the Times has decreased (something else noted here and here), but to be fair, that is true of practically all newspapers in this country (as much as I wanted to pillory the Inky over it, it really wasn’t news, I thought...also, the recession has more than a little to do with that, I'm sure). Of course, Williams’ “NBC Nightly News” broadcast is apparently doing well in the ratings in what seems to be a nip-and-tuck battle with its ABC equivalent (with their ratings, CBS and Little Katie Couric might as well be up against a test pattern).
After noting the Times’ circulation loss, Williams tells us the Times carried “an op-ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards bemoaning the lack of serious, in-depth coverage of the political race” (and she was right, of course, though that’s true of ALL media, particularly broadcast) and then proceeds to list the stories in the Times that caught his attention in the most snarky way possible.
And as if that isn’t enough, Williams links to a Wall Street Journal screed by Peggy Noonan which he considers typical of Noonan’s “Pulitzer”-worthy commentary (I’ll try to save you the time and annoyance by telling you that she thinks undergoing an airport security check is “demoralizing to our society,” and she also notes that no one in the terminal en route to their planes was watching Wolf Blitzer’s report on the PA primary – a small victory for common sense, I’ll admit – though noting the Dem contest between HRC and Barack Obama gives her the opportunity to depict him as “a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue” and mention flag lapel pins for, oh, I’d say about the two millionth freaking time, while John McCain “carries (America’s history) in his bones,” and George W. Milhous Bush “has left on-the-ground conservatives…feeling undefended, unrepresented, and alone”).
Yep, I would say that Williams’ news judgment, or lack thereof as far as I’m concerned, is truly on display here.
So just to recap, Brian Williams of NBC News has pretty much run away from the true scandal of the bought-and-paid-for military analysts polluting our media, but he somehow believes he still has the right to take the New York Times, the paper that broke the story wide open, to task over it’s coverage selections that aren’t to his liking.
And by the way, here is Williams failing to ask New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg about his surveillance of peaceful anti-Bush protestors during the 2004 Republican National Hatefest; here he is erroneously implying that trying to impose a timeline for withdrawal in an Iraq war funding bill, something the Dems have sought repeatedly, would leave our troops “high and dry”; and here he is stating that scientists disagree on whether or not global warming is man-made, even though the author of the study he cited said that it is.
I will give Williams some minor praise for blowing off that ridiculous White House correspondents’ dinner the other night so he could be at home to spend some quality time with the baubles and trinkets awarded to him by his handlers over lo these many years (and it’s funny, by the way, that Williams himself has a blog, given what he generally thinks of people who do this, as noted here).
Update: I just came across Glenn Greenwald's typically thorough refutation of Williams here (h/t Will Bunch), using bigger words and longer paragraphs; Glenn's stuff is always worth a read.
Update 5/5/08: This may not be the most boring blog post I've ever read, but it's right up there.
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