Brian Williams interviews Tom Brokaw to analyze Scott McClellan’s charges that the press was not aggressive enough on the Bush administration leading up to the Iraq war and called them “complicit enablers. “You mean us?” said the media.
Williams: Are you confident, taking the coverage in total that the right questions were asked, the right tone was employed and should it be viewed in the context to that time?
Brokaw: It needs to be viewed in the context of that time?
Isn’t the media supposed to be the watchdog of our leaders at all times so that lies don’t get us into wars and something called the truth is actually being reported?
Brokaw: When the President said we’re going to war, that there’s a danger of the mushroom cloud, we know that there’s been experiments with Iraqi nuclear programs in the past. Honorable people believed he had WMD’s…Look, I think all of us would like to go back and ask questions with the benefit of hindsight (Yea, we’re just Monday morning quarterbacks now) of what we know now, but a lot of what was going on was unknowable.
Well, he should have watched Bill Moyers special on the media as a refresher course. He then blames Congress too. Yea, they are culpable for their own actions, but NOT for YOUR coverage. Sorry, Americans aren’t buying this spin even from a well respected journalist like Tom. It’s really sad that he couldn’t take a critical eye to himself. The media needs it and I believe only the elder statesmen of the media can say the words to shake them up. Hasn’t he witnessed enough of The Chris Matthews effect already? I’ll let Glenn Greenwald dissect this at another time. I’m working on further deep analysis of their behavior to bring to you shortly. Apologist jerks—all of them through and through.
C&Ler Karen emailed me and said she lost all respect for Tom after watching this.
I have lost a lot of respect for Tom Brokaw after this interview. His perspective on McClellan’s revelations sound like a laundry list of Bushite excuses: Respectable people believed Hussein had WMD; We’d all love to go back in time knowing what we know now; etc. Worst, though, was his casual dismissal of the administration’s basing the war on propaganda with, “All wars are based on propaganda.”
Saddened,
Karen
I hear your pain, Karen.
Update: And Tom, yes there is propaganda for all wars by all administrations as you say, but aren’t you supposed to knock down that spin for the American people? Break through that wall of lies. If not, then WTF is your actual function? <correction to the title of the post>
Filed Under: Iraq, Media Bias, Media Criticism
Tags: Iraq, Media Criticism
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Tom Brokejaw has always been a corporate shill. He proved that when he sold out “The Greatest Generation” junk he spewed on America about 15 years ago.
Its no surprise he’s trying to paint himself out of a corner.
Pathetic.
All wars are not based on propaganda. Propaganda is used to lead the sheep to supporting the war.
Don’t excuse the propaganda or use it as an excuse for your own ignorance and complicity in a criminal war.
He’s just said that the media is either too stupid, or too cowardly, to think for itself. No surprise there.
wars do not have to be based on propaganda
the delusional leaders pushing for war are
responsible for their decisions alone. when
an unnecessary war is provoked by one of these
unscrupulous leaders, then they have commited
war crimes that can not be forgiven.
I think I just threw up a little in my mouth…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200....._rice_kiss
Ralph Wiggums: War President.
http://freewayblogger.blogspot.....oenix.html
Hey, I’m respectable, too, and I’ve been in the news business almost as long as Brokaw, since 1975. I had tons of questions about why we were rushing into a war, none of them asked by the highest levels of what passes for journalism anymore. If a peon like me can read about all of the evidence that Saddam no longer had WMD, why couldn’t they? The press anymore does not care for confrontation of the powerful, even though that’s a large part of the job, regardless of what ABC’s chief simpleton, Charles Gibson, says.
All of these media dupes should be exiled from America.
The only allegiance any of these frauds have ever shown is to the almighty dollar and their corporate masters who slop it out to their talking head dogs.
boy the roaches are all scurrying for cover under the blaring light…
oh Tom, you wouldn’t want to accept culpability and tarnish your own legacy? fear not old friend, you aren’t alone. history will not be kind to this president, congress, the supreme court, the media and the american populace in general for the travesty that has been the last eight years…
Buncha GE puppets
Honey, I cheated on you because all husbands cheat. Everything’s cool now, right?
This issue that doesn’t seem to be getting addressed re: Iraq’s having WMD is that it didn’t matter if Saddam had them or not. His country was locked down under sanctions and no fly zones. We continually bombed their infrastructure to the point where Iraq could hardly project anything resembling a threat.
This is common sense. You didn’t need to be in the CIA or a brain-dead member of Congress to see through the lies being pumped out of the Bush admin.
10, 20 years from now it will be the media who will be judged the hardest for what took place. Scott is right: they enabled this illegal war.
What a lame excuse: The Senate voted for the war. Well, sure they did because the media persecution questioning their patriotism would have threatened their jobs. Not that I excuse them, they certainly let their constituents down. But it’s the JOB of the media to ferret out the truth. And if you are too lazy or timid or blind to do that, you have no fucking business being in the business!
“If not, then WTF is your actual function?”
Plutocrap plutocorp frontman, and he’s known it for a long, long time…pompous fake-ass gravitass MSMutherfucker.
Sorry, John…hate these self serving lying fucks.
Disgusting. I’ll never watch any of these worthless prime time corporate cocksuckers again. The insultingly endless amount of excuses by this so called voice of integrity was a disgrace. Gargling voice Tommy’s lame reasoning paralleled the deluge of bullshit that the right wing tried to peddle to us all yesterday. It’s official: The MSM was complicit in mass murder.
Fuck you, Brokaw
.
The context of that time…
“Thou shall not ask questions!”
.
McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay & Warren Strobel were among the few who got it right in the lead up to the war (McClatchy was still Knight Ridder).
Wrong on Iraq? Not Everyone
Four in the mainstream media who got it right
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2847
They tore Charlie Gibson Brian Williams up yesterday after they basically said the same thing as Brokaw …
They were either lazy or they feared being called “unpatriotic”. Good news people should never be either of those things.
Shorter:
“I was ignorant.”
“Everyone was ignorant.”
“Ignorance can’t be fixed.”
“The White House has total power over me.”
“We are not responsible for what we do.”
“I can in no way be blamed for my actions.”
If I remember correctly, didn’t Brokaw laugh at or directly question the patriotism of peace activists early on, maybe at the start of the war?
Just now losing respect for Tom Blowhard? Wow, where has Karen been. Blowhard
has never had my respect..just one of the elite, corporate media assholes.
Just take your fucking medicine, you sorry sack-of-shit apologist.
Fuck you Tommy you sack of crap.
I would prefer Laurel and Hardy doing this discussion. Stan and Ollie were clearly smarter, more informed about life in general, and they did not pretend their work wasn’t meant for a laugh.
The idea of the parasites that are newsies defending their complicity in this is not funny. The way they ignore reality and try to protect their lack of honor, is.
Here we are again, I’m a broken record singing one tune.
This is what we have:
Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations… and their buddies.
These corporate media henchmen are not journalists. They are to journalism what Marcus Welby was to the medical profession. They play act as a journalist on TV. If they were real, they would have said this:
The ‘war’ in Iraq is a swindle by the Military-Industrial-Media complex.
Seems to me the proof, if any more was needed, that Iraq did not have WMD is that if it had had WMD, Israel, whose intelligence about such things is very good, would have taken them (the WMD) out.
In any event, Brokaw demonstrates he’s a useless human being just about every time he opens his mouth. Someone who knows and cares for him a lot should try to convince him to STFU.
And here’s the clincher: Every single non-trivial factual assertion in Colin Powell’s address to the security council was false — and was reported to be false in the European press within two or three days. For example, British and French reporters went to the “terrorist training facility” he referred to, where Saddam was supposedly training al Qaeda in the use of poison gas, and found that a) it was in Kurdistan, protected from Saddam by the British no-fly zone and b) it consisted of a few decrepit, abandoned shacks with no electricity or water.
This was reported in all the British newspapers and on the BBC. It was not reported in the United States.
Mullah Krekar, the leader of Ansar al Islam, the “al Qaeda” group that Powell claimed was allied with Saddam, was at that time enjoying political asylum in Norway because Saddam was trying to kill him. That was not difficult to find out either, I would say.
And on and on. All they had to do was check out the BBC web site.
media talking about media… circle jerk, anyone?
didn’t brokaw write a book about the iraq war? anybody that would make money off of this war based on lies is the lowest piece of shit ever. fuck that fraud brokaw.
It has been said better many many times but the reason they do not think they are at fault is because they reported exactly what the President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Security adviser, Director of the CIA, Secretary of State, and all the Deputy Secretary’s, and the White House Press Secretary said word for word. They just didn’t have enough time during the 24hour news cycle to interview only but one or two descending voices. Those descending voices were treated like they were the ones that were saying the earth is flat, and we are the center of the universe. It was just Un-American to say anything against the Administration, besides if you did you might lose access to all the great parties and barbeque’s.
….LOTS of people gave this administration a pass….beacuse ultimately people trusted that they would not be lied to about something so serious, and in such a manipulative way (freedom fries, lapel pins, “with us or agin us” crap, etc)….what people have lost is faith in government that is very hard to restore. Quite frankly, this goes well beyond Tom Brokaw trying to ease his conscience with his old pal.
Nebby @ 11:
[snark] Sure, but let’s face it, the Iraqis are of the brown skinned type. They speak that gibberish primitive language and still live in ***** caves. So we bombed them to experiment with new weapons, so what? Big wooop! …..and the 4000 soldiers that died in the process, well, they volunteered. What exactly did they expect when they joined, to peel potatoes for four years?[/snark]
So if you tell a lie and everyone believes it, you’re not accountable?
Is there any chance you could post some clips of David Gregorys’ statements over the past couple days? I noticed that he has been carrying the water for Bush to the degree of using white house talking points during his opening commentary of his show yesterday. The uncoordinated dancing fool has turned out to be useful for MC Rove.
Cervantes@25: Yeah, and the BIGGEST lie was when Powell showed us all the
alleged photos of the trucks carrying alleged aluminum tubing to alleged manufacturing plants. We now know that these “pictures” were just an artists
version/rendition of what Powell said they were. Lies, lies and more lies.
Binned or B&?
Expecting one of these white linen tablecloth sterling silver cutlery polo playing douchbags to admit they were … wrong?
Dont think so …
brian williams interviewing tom brokaw, now THAT is the state of 2008 journalism.
piss fucking poor.
“a well respected journalist like Tom” (Brokow)
???@@@###!!!???
Are you kidding? Since When is this guy “respectful” and not a common HACK in fancy suit?
I have loathed him for years.
The hack. The lying REPORNICAN HACK.
This is part of the media’s new narrative for what happened in the Bush Years. It’s like Tom (6 Months) Friedman saying that everyone–the whole USofA–went bonkers after 9/11, that’s his excuse and his narrative to post for history. But they forget that there was a large block of us who were alarmed from the get go and later horrified by the media’s lack of curiosity, lack of the truth.
Anybody else reading (or have read) Static?
Leave these poor news people alone!!
It was their job to report whatever they were told by the administration. If they had begun to question what they were transcribing, they would have lost access. Loss of access would have meant loss of a job.
Look what happened to Knight-Ridder. They questioned the propaganda.
Are you saying you would have given up a 6 digit income because they wanted you to lies.
I didnt think so.
Oops. It appears someone threw some water on the wicked witch of the west, and she’s melting.
EliteLemming @ 39:
Even tho it didn’t go anywhere, I found it quite shocking at times…kinda rubbed me the wrong way.
;-}
You should ALL know that this same lying media drummed up the racism in Los Angeles
and actually CAUSED the riots of 1992.
They needed a ratings bump.
Ask anyone (like me) who lived there at the time and witnessed this.
We were all asking, “What next? What new hell will these guys invent for ratings?”
I always liked that Howard Stern bit when Stuttering John asked Tom Brokaw to say something like Rubber Baby Bumper Blanket, or something like that.
Is Brokaw really this stupid or does he just want to appear this way?
Bull shizzle! I’m from Canada and I saw his shit a mile away, and so did the rest of the world. Lazy ass American media your are totally fucking complicit.
was trying to cereal p2b… sheesh…
themediamyth @ 8:
They are all in spin and denial mode these righteous scum, almost all of them. Brokaw has now proven he is one