Although Scott McClellan’s memoir is chock full of juicy bits about George Bush, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the myriad pre-war lies the White House force-fed America, perhaps the most important (and most overlooked) critique McClellan levels is aimed squarely at the “liberal media” and how they acted as “deferential, complicit enablers” of the administration’s “propaganda” leading up to the war. On the TODAY show this morning, Matt Lauer asked “the big three” — Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric — whether they thought McClellan was accurate in his criticism of the press. Their answers are revealing to say the least:
Gibson: “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently [if given an opportunity to do it again.]”
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To her credit, Couric admits that mistakes were made and that she could have done a better job vetting the administration’s claims; although she also admitted that the White House threatened to cut off her access after she filed critical reports. But Gibson and Williams (along with, one would assume, the majority of the elite press) simply lack the ability to recognize that they were duped, and that they thus duped their viewers. Indeed, as Glenn documents in a lengthy post today:
“This is why most establishment journalists will never be convinced that they failed to do their job, no matter how much evidence is presented: because of the understanding they have of what ‘their job’ actually is.”
For a comprehensive breakdown of just how laughable the Gibson/Williams defense is, be sure to read Glenn’s post in its entirety.
Filed Under: Media Criticism
Tags: Iraq War Lies, Scott McClellan
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What do they care, their tax bill went down.
she also admitted that the White House threatened to cut off her access after she filed critical reports
So submitting to social blackmail is what passes for journalism these days? In my day, she would have “published and be damned” and then commented on that as well.
Wimp.
How about giving the millions in the street more media coverage rather than ridiculing them as naive?
Just a bunch of liars making excuses. They would only repeat White House talking points and ignored and marginalized anyone who disagreed.
The Trillion Dollar, (One 7th of the GDP), Corporate Media in the USA is a private enterprise that exists solely to generate profits.
Their “job” has nothing to do with reporting ‘the truth’ to the American People.
The sooner people realize this the easier things will be.
~Nyc
What imbeciles. Gibson with his comment of ‘It’s not our job to debate,…’ Oh, it’s not? Just do what your told, no matter how much you are lied to? And Williams talking about how Bush had a blank check to spend & all that approval,… yeah, & what did he do with it? He literally could’ve united the world after 9/11, & he pissed it all away cheap so Cheney’s Halliburton stock could grow 5000% a year.
I do not understand why people are not rioting in this country.
The White House would have cut off access. No corporate-controlled media oligarchy can afford to go to battle with the White House in the 21st-century, not when said White House can favor competitors who are willing to play its games, and not when the White House controls the media via the FCC and its own influence with the advertisers the media need for survival.
So…the oversight function historically expected from the mainstream media is forfeit.
Have we learned anything new here? Not really.
Actually, heavy handed media manipulation such as banning and cutting off a reporter and even a network was fairly well documented early in this administration, so Couric’s account passes my bullshit test.
Charles Gibson is a pompous ass.His arrogance is palpable.
Fuck You Charlie!!! If you would ask any different questions if given the opportunity again then you should quit your job and go to work for McDonald’s or something, because that statement is proof the even you know you are a worthless hack!
God I hate these people! What happened to America…did Reagan and his gang really screw us up that much?
it makes me weep.
Cowards, the bunch of them. Some media we have. You could tell “the big three” that the sky is blue and they would shy away from the statement or say “we need more information before confirming…”
Oh and Scotty, he said all this AFTER he left the House. Where was his bravado before? Didn’t see it when he was collecting those checks.
IMPEACHIMPY.
Funny thing is, one of my favorite Sublime songs has the same title as Scotty’s book.
Wonder if he listened to it while writing the book?
~Nyc
After 5 years, its really just come down to a few words for all 5 of them:
FUCK YOU Matt Lauer
FUCK YOU Katie Couric
FUCK YOU Brian Jennings
FUCK YOU Charlie Gibson
FUCK YOU nameless brunette whore
We’ll never trust any of you again.
Well, at least Couric admitted she was threatened(spell check, go figure). That says a lot in and of it self.
These people in the media today really sicken me. If you’re doing a job and doing it right, you don’t let someone threaten you into failure. Do cops back down from giving you a ticket? Is a clerk going to back down if you pay them the wrong amount? So what the hell is wrong with these reporters they can’t even do the basics of their job without the “but they threatened me” bull. They’re not professionals, not even adults, if they are this vulnerable.
maybe it’s just me, but I’m sensing some serious hostility here tonight.
BOYCOTT THE MEDIA!!
But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction! —Stephen Colbert (bless your balls)
Why are people believing any of these liars? So, liar Scotty comes out with a book. BFD. The rest went right along with it.
I refuse to listen to a single word these three bobble-heads have to say.
Was McClellan accurate in his criticism of the press? Their only truthful response can be:
“We made lots of money doing what we did, and that’s the only thing we care about. We got ours.”
The only thing that surprises me about any of this is the fact that such a shitty product can continue to be gobbled up by the masses.
The Daily Show is going to have a hootenanny with this one
mudshark hussein @ 16:
Mudsharks have special hostility sensors along their nose.
Highlight of the video, at the very end.
Charlie Gipson says to the Today show host (woman): “It’s your show, kiddo” (translation= “I am a male chauvinist ahole”)
And of course Katie couldn’t possibly go on nation-wide TV and say:
“The administration has threatened this station with retaliation and restricted access if we tell the story truthfully. These elected officials don’t want the public to know what they are doing, in our names. Let the administration know what you think of their threats. Call this number…”
God what a bunch of craven cowards. If the Bush administration threatened access to CBS if they didn’t like the questions they were being asked, why in hell didn’t they report this as the lead story on the 6 o’clock news..
And they’re not just cowardly , they’re liars. Who in their right mind would not ask questions about why we wanted to go to war with Iraq when we’re supposed to be fighting Al Qaeda? Support for the war by the public was not overwhelming initially.
Remember that these people were culpable for hiring military analysts who they knew were pentagon propogandists. They have more guilt than most for the Iraqi mess that has killed and maimed so many people. They were wrong and it’s galling that they won’t face up to the tragedy that they helped cause.
fuck all these hacks…not one has credibility
take a look at the gaggle that hang with mcshouldbedeadcuzhesolderthandirt…and feed the fucker donuts
what questions??? why didnt they report that the wh and the pentagon were strong arming them
they were afraid to be called unpatriotic??? what kind of 3 column are they?
all these fucks care about is looking good on the tube, cashing their multimillion dollar paychecks and taking nice vacations on the riviera
this is why i no longer watch network news
That’s because charley gibson…the pathetic debate host…and brian williams are nothing but administration shills.
I love it when they say “doh…we didn’t know”…”we were duped…”…all these other dumb ass, lame excuses. They our the PRESS…our only source of info in this country, and they let us down. They are STILL letting us down.
Pathetic. Once the light is on them, they cower and cry “uncle”, “….it’s his fault” bull shit. Haven’t we been telling the dumb asses for years now? NO EXCUSE. Our big press is deplorable. There is no excuse for their poor performance. They owe this country a HUGE apology, and they need to step down. They have NO credibility it my book…..NONE!!
e.g.: Dan Rather
While Mctell’em is the traitor du jour, it is worth remembering that it took a village of traitorous assholes in and out of the administration to a foster this nincompoop on the American people. Here is a sample of tinpot’s genius from David Letterman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....gspot.com/
The ‘liberal media’ let howlers like this go by without more than a little chuckle, after all, who needs a smart president? Not them. They didn’t need any brains to do their jobs and being preznit couldn’t be all that much harder. Gov’mint, what was there to understand? No doubt, it made a lot of them feel good that they could actually think of themselves as a little smarter than tinpot. That way they could indulge him his little malaprops, his mental meanderings, his obvious falsehoods. Patronizing power, of course, comes with a responsibility to protect power. And that responsibility they carried out well.
Um gonna lob you a softball…and you hit it back to me, m’Kay?
As he showed in the last Democratic debate, Charles Gibson is a pompous, arrogant, condesending, elitist ass. He’ll NEVER admit a mistake.
One Year Wonder @ 13:
Well I’m willing to give the nameless brunette whore another chance..
Hulk @ 28:
I feel your rage.
Let’s hope that Telecommunication Act of 1996 can be reversed, and the corporate media monopolies BUSTED.
Watching David Gregory on Hardball was laughable. He is as much to blame as Bush they all are for not doing their work and digging for answers
listen most of you bought the package ,all the way up to this election, you let them herd you away from kucinich and edwards , and sicked you on to clinton and obama ,didnt you notice the news whores keeping the cameras off the politicians they didnt want you to vote for? didnt you see the news pimps keep focusing only on clinton and obama? did you think they did that because they loved you? you were snookered, led like a good little sheep flock!
Hulk @ 28:
What good is an ‘apology’ from a bunch of liars? It’s an empty gesture.
pleaae note the anchors appeared together to kick off the anti cancer campaign..which was oversadowed by Scottie’s book launch.
let’s give the co-conspirators an opportunity to explain their actions with a day in court.
As Woodward and Bernstein demonstrated, there’s more to journalism than press conferences.
Why all the righteous indignation at this stage of the game? We have been, are being, will be, spoonfed by the MSM for years. No revelation. When was the last time in the past three weeks you have seen a report coming out of Iraq? You haven’t. The press is one big bucket of lard all in cohoots about the presidential race. Nothing else matters. It dominates 24/7. Any real, hard news surrounding rising gas and food prices? Not much. And when Couric tells us that her press access might have been cut off, that tells the whole story in a nutshell.
If these spineless creatures, passing themselves off as journalists and reporters, got together and demanded accountability, even if it meant walking out of the press room en masse, we may would start to feel as if we counted. We don’t. And as long as they come to love their overblown salaries and the possibility of rubbing shoulders with those they supposedly cover, then nothing changes.
Do you think they are going to admit that they were taken for the idiots that they are? They have learned from Bush - keep to the script and let the people think whatever they want. These jerks will never admit that the Bushies had them.
Every college in these United States offering a degree in Journalism should immediately have its accreditation called into question. Perhaps a more appropriate title to place upon the diplomas of these graduates might be “Bachelor of Arts in Punditry and Sycophancy.” It would be more accurate.
What a mess we’ve made of ourselves.
This is why I stopped watching TV news and started going online and to the blogs for information…this and grandma’s cat stuck in a tree as the lead story on the local news.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
the internet is awesome, and our society could be so much awesome-r if used correctly. lightning-fast transmission of data to millions of readers, real time, unfiltered, uncensored…
and what are we doing with it? lolcats. myspace. facebook. rickrolls. and what have you.
its like - its like living in Italy in an era of unprecedented quantity and quality of olive and tomato crop yields… and the citizens using the crops to engage each other in a wacky food fight rather than feeding the downtrodden.
its like that. news anchors regurgitating political talking points, then guerilla marketing each other hip new mp3-sharing websites, or what have you.
history - our children, and grandchildren - are not going to look back kindly on this generation. no offense to the bloggers writing the articles on C&L, or the posters responding. but lets face it. we’re a minority. we live, and thrive, within a cesspool of uneducated, self-serving douchebags… with such great potential sitting idly next to all of us.
*sigh*… - Katie Couric shouldn’t even be at the status she’s at. she’s just pretty. thats all she provides, a pretty face delivering sugar-coated heavily-censored bad news. not unlike Dana Perino. Charles Gibson is a young baby boomer outside his intellectual jurisdiction when it comes to web 2.0 shit. Brian Williams looks like the kinda guy who’d put a roofie in a sororstitute’s drink. of course they caved to pressure… thats why they got promoted in the first place.
Thank God for Helen Thomas, one of the few remaining “real journalists”
I don’t buy that “mistakes were made” bullshit coming out of some of the more prominent members of the Corporate -owned, members in good standing of the Beltway Village media. We on the Left were saying FROM DAY 1 that invading Iraq was a mistake; that the WMD rationale was horseshit, but what did we get from the Mainstream Media? We got Tweety gushing over Bush’s manly flightsuit to a degree that was embarassing. We got “journalists” from CNN practically having orgasms while reporting about ‘SHOCK AND AWE!” “SHOCK AND AWE!” “NAVY SEALS ROCK!!”. Those who questioned the war were called traitors and defeatists. Now that Simple Scotty is trying to rehabilitate his reputation while throwing a large number of his colleagues under the bus, we’re supposed to buy this line that “Well, ya know, that George Bush he sure did tell us a whopper didn’t he?” Sorry. but I’m not buying it, not from any of the warmongers and propagandists.
That practically made me throw up.
Brian Williams basically said he had to be in New Orleans, with bodies floating by, to be able to see the truth. What a fucking idiot.
All of them are idiots. Self-serving, pampered, ratings- and career-obsessed idiots.
And lets not forget, RICH idiots. Every one of the so-called journalists on that clip makes at least a couple of million bucks a year (little Katie Couric makes about $10 mill). They’re set for life. They live in spectacular houses, have personal assistants and staff to attend to them, they never have to worry about health insurance, recession, or the price of gas. Their kids all go to private schools. They have fat pensions for when they get too wrinkly to sit on camera any more. They’re stars - what the fuck do they care about journalistic integrity? About holding the elected representatives of the people accountable?
They’re not Murrow or Cronkite or Helen Thomas (the last one left with any spine at all), they’re just the filler between the Preparation H commercials.
Every one of these media darlings rides to work every day in a chauffeured town car. When was the last time Matt Lauer or Katie Couric even shopped at a supermarket? Years, I bet.
They’re bubble dwellers, just like Bush. Nothing they say means anything.
It’s a surreal self evaluation that’s going on amongst the press right now. They’ve gotten it so wrong for so long, that they are all circling the wagons