Media

When "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" by Scott McClellan came out this week, including his not very new charge that the media was asleep at the wheel during the lead-up the war in Iraq, NBC's Brian Williams spent more than three minutes "interviewing" his predecessor, Tom Brokaw. The length of the interview was in itself amazing...the average "sound bite" in TV is currently seven seconds...but it was the lack of any real questions that stood out. Williams did not ask about the red white and blue peacocks NBC used, about the immediate adoption by NBC and almost all of the media of the Bush Administrations code words "War On Terror" and "Operations Such and Such" and the use of military themed music for the constant "Special Reports". NBC and the other nets made it clear they backed the war, by omission and by inclusion: omission of the hard questions that a doubting media is suppose to ask every administration, even in war time, and inclusion by taking on the trappings of a war operation.
We know now that the Pentagon worked hard to make sure the retired Generals who "explained the war" to the network audiences stayed on the party line. Now one of the men who was in charge in the White House press room admits he himself saw the unwillingness of reporters to do their jobs.

Today's New York Times includes a story that quotes Katie Couric as agreeing with the criticism.

[Side note: several of my posts have been critical of NBC. That's partly a function of my viewing habits. I have no reason to doubt that similar criticism would be appropriate for each of the network and many local news operations with other net affiliations.]