L. Brent Bozell
Brian Williams: from Musketeer to Mouseketeer
The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina recalls a horror show on two levels. There's the actual disaster, which killed hundreds of people, and then there's the media smear job on the Bush administration and first responders. No one should forget pompous grandstanders like "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams signing off three months after the floods from the Lower Ninth Ward: "This is a neighborhood that's been left to die."
How those network anchors loved hurricane hyperbole! Williams, for one, lectured the nation that the hurricane should "necessitate a national discussion on race, on oil, politics, class, infrastructure, the environment and more." He underlined that a top local radio station decided not to air President Bush's remarks from the city since "nothing he could say could ever help them deal with the dire situation unfolding live in the streets of New Orleans, where people were still dying during his visit."
It never mattered to these nattering nabobs that, as Popular Mechanics magazine documented, Katrina spurred by far the largest and fastest rescue effort in American history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm's landfall, rescuing an estimated 50,000 residents.
Not content to attack Bush on just his own program, Williams took to comedy shows to unload more spin. He lectured to Jon Stewart on how cities less black than New Orleans would have seen a lot more helicopter rescues. Williams proudly took that attack directly to Bush three months after the storm. "After the tragedy, I heard someone ask rhetorically, 'What if this had been Nantucket, Mass., or Inner Harbor Baltimore, or Chicago or Houston?' Are you convinced the response would have been the same? Was there any social or class or race aspect to the response?"
On the first anniversary of Katrina, Williams repeated the mudslinging, citing radical-left black professor Michael Eric Dyson in Bush's face: "A lot of Americans are always going to believe that that weekend, that week, you were watching something on television other than what they were seeing, and Professor Dyson from the University of Pennsylvania said on our broadcast last night it was because of your patrician upbringing, that it's a class issue." Bush shot back: "Dyson doesn't know. I don't know Dyson, and Dyson doesn't know me."
But Williams didn't care. His cartoon was perfect.
Williams later appeared on PBS and boasted, "You can't give distance. I don't mean that in a Jets vs. Sharks way. I'm not an adversary." That's laughable. He insisted Bush "appreciates the swordfight of a crackling good conversation."
Now watch Williams "swordfight" with Barack Obama. He's gone from musketeer to Mouseketeer. On the fifth anniversary of the hurricane, Williams deferred to the statesman before him by asking about the lack of a national conversation: "Katrina was about so many things. It was about class and race and government and the environment. Whatever happened to that national conversation we were supposed to have about it?"
Is that all the toughness Williams could muster? That's how he "crackles" now? See his crackling swordfight over the BP oil spill and Obama's lack of effort: "It's getting baked in a little bit in the media that BP was President Obama's Katrina. And it's also getting baked in that the administration was slow off the mark. Is that unfair?"
What about our disastrous economy? Surely Williams would challenge Obama here. "Do you have anything new on the economy?"
Instead of tough questions, Williams felt Obama's pain that too many Americans misunderstand his religious faith: "Mr. President, you're an American-born Christian, and yet increasing and now significant numbers of Americans in polls, upwards of a fifth of respondents, are claiming you are neither. A fifth of the people, just about, believe you're a Muslim. ... This has to be troubling to you. This is, of course, all-new territory for an American president."
That's not even a question! But it's all in a day's shoeshine for Brian Williams. He loved slinging "racist, classist" mud on Bush, but he was so distraught by Obama's-a-Muslim rumors that he replayed the poor-Barry exchange a second time the next night.
Why is this arrogant partisan the leading evening-news anchor in America? He drew 7.2 million viewers last week, as the ratings continue to decline. That's not unexpected when an anchorman can't be bothered to ask tougher questions to this president than his makeup artist would.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
The 'Elusive' Truth About Kagan
It's not cute when reporters play dumb. Last year, when Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, CBS anchor Katie Couric said labeling her "won't be easy." CBS reporter Wyatt Andrews found "no clear ideology" in her public record. This week, the Washington Post embarrassed themselves with a front-page story claiming, "Obama has not chosen outspoken liberals in either of his first two opportunities to influence the makeup of the court."
That ridiculous sentence collides with a June 8 report by liberal Los Angeles Times legal reporter David Savage. "The early returns are in, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is proving herself to be a reliable liberal vote on the Supreme Court. Cases this year on campaign speech, religion, juvenile crime, federal power and Miranda warnings resulted in an ideological split among the justices, and on every occasion, Sotomayor joined the liberal bloc."
That verdict came before Sotomayor voted with the gun-controllers in the Chicago gun-rights case, before Sotomayor voted for allowing public universities to deny recognition to Christian student groups who dare to oppose homosexuality and before Sotomayor voted as part of a 6-3 minority that it shouldn't be illegal to provide material support to groups defined by our government as foreign terrorists.
Now match that record with what the liberal media claimed about Sotomayor. "You know, for a Democrat, she has a pretty conservative record," NPR reporter Nina Totenberg announced on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show last year. "In fact, on a lot of criminal law issues, you could say that she's more conservative than some members of the Supreme Court, including Justice Scalia."
If Totenberg sold shoddy diet pills that fraudulently, she'd be a red-hot case for the Federal Trade Commission.
So why should anyone believe the media are telling the truth now when they suggest Elena Kagan cannot be called liberal? Kagan's views are "elusive," the media chant in unison. They all tried to evade Kagan's vivid writing as a college student in the Daily Princetonian in 1980, about how she cried and got drunk when Ronald Reagan won and "ultraconservative" Al D'Amato defeated her candidate, ultraliberal Democrat Liz Holtzman.
She wished that "our emotion-packed conclusion that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead and that there was no longer any place for the ideals we held or the beliefs we espoused" would be replaced by the hope that the Reagan era would be "marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left will once again come to the fore."
Unbelievably, our journalistic geniuses can read that and say Kagan's political views are "elusive."
In their deference to Obama, the networks barely mentioned Kagan for the six weeks between her nomination and her confirmation hearings. Conservative interest groups putting out complaints that she'd be a radical justice on abortion and gay marriage are not newsworthy, even though liberal interest groups ranting about "far right" Bush nominees were tenderly solicited by the same networks.
One TV reporter filed one story that broke the mold. On June 3, CBS legal reporter Jan Crawford said documents in Thurgood Marshall's papers in the Library of Congress showed that "Kagan stood shoulder to shoulder with the liberal left, including on the most controversial issue Supreme Court nominees ever confront: abortion."
The White House was furious that Crawford would dare tell the truth about such a thing. "Their reaction has been to push back so strongly on allegations, as they would put it, that she's a liberal," she revealed. "Like there's something wrong with that, like it's a smear to say their nominee is a liberal."
When the hearings began, ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions offered a devastating opening statement documenting Kagan's extreme liberalism. He ran through her college thesis that worried about socialism's demise, and her master's thesis praising the activism of the Earl Warren court. He noted how she worked for the Michael Dukakis for President campaign, and took a leave as a law school professor to help Joe Biden get liberal Justice Ruth Ginsburg confirmed.
If that's ancient history, Sessions added that in 2005, Harvard Law School Dean Kagan joined three other leftist law school deans to write a letter in opposition to Sen. Lindsey Graham's amendment on determining who was an "enemy combatant" in the War on Terror. She compared Graham's amendment to the "fundamentally lawless" actions of "dictatorships."
The networks skipped those facts in brief, perfunctory news reports.
Liberal partisans expect the "objective" media to spout obvious lies that there are no liberals to be found in Obama's Supreme Court selections, that they have been far too "elusive" to be categorized. That is why Americans are turning away in droves: They're not finding the media's biases to be "elusive."
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
