A Million People Murdered For a Lie, and To Tom Brokaw It's Just Business As Usual

In a medium full of revolting displays of hypocrisy and self-importance, Tom Brokaw gave a performance last night that was so hypocritical and so self-important that I wanted to make like Elvis watching Robert Goulet and shoot out the screen with a .38. Fortunately, I was unarmed, and the TV was my mother's, or there would've been a thousand jagged fragments of screen and a black, smoking picture-tube in the center of her living-room.

Brian Williams was interviewing Brokaw about Scott McClellan's new book, specifically citing McClellan's charge that media talking-heads like Brokaw were "complicit enablers" in selling America -- in-between decongestants and erection pills -- a criminal "war" that has already killed 4,000 Americans and, according to the respected medical journal The Lancet, more than one million Iraqi citizens. It was a special moment, or what passes for one, on The NBC Nightly News, with Brokaw and Williams sitting knee-to-knee on an open stage, signifying for viewers that this was Serious Stuff, and we should Pay Attention.

Williams teed it up for Brokaw, condensing McClellan's charges and then capping it with the insipid: "But does it have to be viewed in the context of the time?" (As if everything doesn't have to be "viewed in the context of the time." And as if that excused the nauseating way that every network anchor picked up the pompoms and put on the cheerleader skirts to holler "SHOCK! AND! AWE! SHOCK! AND! AWE!" when Bush told them to.)

Well, big surprise: a grinning Brokaw averred that their sickening cheerleading did, actually, have to be excused by the "context of the time." He then gave an answer that -- even by the standards of corporate media -- was so stupefyingly idiotic that I forced myself to transcribe it in full to make sure I heard it right.

"When the President says we're going to war, that there's the danger of the mushroom cloud, we know Saddam Hussein had been experimenting with Iraqi nuclear programs in the past, honorable people believed that he had weapons of mass destruction, there's the drumbeat of war... this President was determined to go to war, and it was more theology than anything else, and that's pretty tough to deal with."

Wow.

This is such a smorgasboard of gibberish -- such a litany of stupidities -- that a rational mind reels even trying to make sense of it. Even worse, it reveals the mindset of the so-called "journalists" charged with the job of speaking truth to power -- their mental and spiritual laziness, their knee-jerk reflex towards submission, their lack of any ability to learn from history. Worse yet, Tom Brokaw knew in advance this question was coming, and the answer he gave was -- to coin a phrase that will not catch on -- like spreading horseradish on horseshit and calling it an hors d'ouevre.

"Honorable people believed (Saddam Hussein) had weapons of mass destruction?"

Horseshit. Name one. You didn't have to be a rich and privileged member of the American inner circle, like Tom Brokaw, to know that Bush and Cheney were playing a second-rate game of three-card monte with their incredibly sketchy "evidence" of WMDs. You didn't have to be a self-described "historian" like Tom Brokaw to laugh at Colin Powell's grade-Z dog-and-pony show at the UN, when he pointed to a couple of blurry photos that could've been Lindsay Lohan's backside and claimed they proved we were on the eve of World War III. Nonetheless, the Tom Brokaws of the world jumped all over these lies like crack-whores competing for a john, and even now they feel no need to apologize for -- or even reflect upon -- their unseemly haste to believe.

And, thanks in large part to them, we not only have a million unnecessary graves, and a million shattered families; we have an American landscape strewn with the grievously wounded. With human faces melted into horror-movie masks. With once-healthy young hands burnt into cloven stumps. With once-strong minds now shorted-out forever thanks to the unbearable sights they witnessed in Iraq.

"It was more theology than anything else, and that's pretty tough to deal with."

This is gibberish that actually gives gibberish a bad name. I dare Tom Brokaw to visit the wounded and grieving in Iraq and America and give them this nonsensical "theology" excuse.

Near the end of their conversation, seeking a make-nice takeaway, a clearly embarrassed Brian Willliams lobbed Brokaw a softball question, hoping to elicit one tiny bit of self-reflection, but Brokaw actually made it worse, though such a thing didn't seem possible. Dig this: "A lot of us would like to go back, with the benefit of hindsight, but a lot of what was going on back then was unknowable... The CIA insisted he had WMDs, the US military thought so... There was the 'fog of war,' and there was 'the fog of covering the war.'"

Oh yeah? It makes you want to scream: exactly how foggy was it, Tom? So foggy that you couldn't fight the Orwellian rules laid down by the Bush-Cheney junta and actually bring us images of the carnage and horror inflicted in our names? So damn foggy that your correspondents had to stay forever "embedded" deep in the butt of that "US military" you're so eager to believe? So foggy that you couldn't see the dead bodies, or hear the screams of the women and children?

Brokaw concluded his bizarre and revealing monologue with an especially strange observation: "We often bump up against what I call 'the opaque world.'"

The Opaque World.

What an accidentally perfect description of the American corporate media. Opaque it was, and opaque it remains. At a dark time, when a sick and treasonous cabal led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld was furiously dragging America into a pre-fascist state (and doing their best to strip away that "pre" once and for all), our media was staring dumbly at an "opaque world." When criminal thugs were turning our country into a mindless war-state without civil liberties or simple human mercy, those smug faces starring on the Nightly News could only cheer them on. We need to remember how completely these men and women disgraced their profession--because, as Tom Brokaw's words make all too clear, it will definitely happen again.

Comments

[ignrnthllblly]

Brokaw knows that the inconvenient truth of McClellan's charge is going to ricochet around the echo chamber for a while (the truth occasionally has that habit)--so he's issuing what has worked so well for the Bush regime: a one-size-fits-all preemptive pardon. He's inadvertently pulled back a corner of the curtain to give us the briefest glimpse of how television "journalism" is made.

In the outmoded print model of journalism there were these dinosaurs called reporters. Among them were the usual hacks and partisans, but their number also included hard-headed inconoclasts whose self-orientation to the power structure they covered was appositional, generally-speaking, and oppositional as frequently needed. They were under no compulsion to be pretty and they tended to create access rather than wait for someone to grant it to them.

Alas, the chief distinction of dinosaurs is that they are extinct. And when the meteor called television cratered journalism, voila.

What television gave us in place of the faceless reporter was the appealing narcissist whose raison d'etre is to be a face constantly needing the reassurance of its popularity. The inherent narcissism of television "journalism" is not served by viewing itself as appositional (and certainly not oppositional). It seeks to identify WITH its subject and therefore cannot endanger its position by antagonism--it must curry favor instead.

Brokaw's non-denial denial is what passes for journalistic responsibility these days. Television reformulated the Fourth Estate so that it was more easily resorbed.

[JBS]

Private Brokaw! What is the maximum effective range of an excuse?

Sir! The maximum effective range of an excuse is ZERO POINT ZERO METERS! Sir!

[Dap]

Dear Mr. Eskow,

Excellent essay/post, I agree, you called'em out correctly, and with good measure. Kudos ! Agape.

[mom2sons]

I guess their colleague David Bloom died for nothing too! Blood is on all of their hands! Shame on you Tom and Brian. Own up to your mistakes! Another young life taken too soon along with all of our soldiers!

[Clairvaux]

John Eskow Rocks!

Hopefully the MSM will be increasingly replaced by the internet. Without the progressive blogs we would surely be lost.

[Susan60]

John, thank you for slapping down these smug anchors like Brokaw, who because his last name is Brokaw thinks he can say any bull sh** thing and get away with it. I always think that if Brokaw thinks his words are poetic enough, we'll forget that he's not saying anything at all. They can all hide behind their opaque world, or wherever the hell they were residing when they should have been doing their job, but because of their failure, I actually supported this war. It took the internet to pull me away from the propaganda that I was being force fed on a daily basis. Trust me, I was no fan of Bush at the beginning of the war and I consider myself a very intelligent person, but they had me going. That's how I know they didn't do their job. If I had heard the actual facts, I would have been outraged that Bush was about to committ a horrible act in my name. P.S. You are a very funny man John.

[Lvm]

Bravo!! All I can say is thank God for people like you, Mr. Eskow. My intense anger for these pompous self-serving excuse for journalists is more than I can ever put into words, but you did it for me. If I were Tom Brokaw, I would take my fishing pole and bask in my retirement secure in the fact that no one ever called me out on the disgusting excuses I make for my incompetance. Maybe Tom was on vacation when hundreds of thousands protested in NYC in the run-up to this bloody war. These people need to go away and hide their heads in shame.

[ProfessorDuh]

And then there was the "fog" of going along with the staged toppling of Saddam's statue, and the faked "rescue" of Pvt. Jessica, wasn't there, Tom, all the while mumbling your scripted, Pentagon-licking nonsense with all that phony, rumbling faux-gravitas they pay you the big bucks for?

[harryjay]

Damn! That was great, those A-holes that we watch and listen to for information, are same one that attend those White House dinners and drink and dine and laught at the people who are selling off America, Not to mention Not reporting the terrible legislation that this congress is passing. "Something in the milk ain't clean"! There are just a few respectable reporters out there, They just don't exist on any network or cable news.

[suzyku]

The media does need to take responsibility. They're falling all over themselves trying to deflect any blame, saying what a good job they did, how they asked the right questions! B.S. I remember watching Tom Brokaw the night bush was elected, he was practically fawning over the poll numbers with excitement! That, by the way, was the last time I watched Tom Brokaw! Any credibility he had was gone. David Gregory was on Chris Mathews show saying the same thing Tom Brokaw did! They should all have the guts to tell the truth, they ran scared, were afraid of being called unpatriotic if the did ask the right questions, which they didn't! The American people also have to take responsibility as well for all of the same reasons. Shame on everyone, media, public, congress, this horrible administration-there's plenty of blame to go around and unfortunately it won't help the people whose lives have been destroyed or forever altered!

[GiannaX]

Excellent, profound post!

[apoyo]

I lost respect for Brokaw when he reported that Florida went to Al Gore three hours before all the polls closed in Florida in 2000. I have often wondered if the networks weren't in such a fury to one up each other with their "exclusives" whether people would have made an effort to go cast their ballot. If they had planned to vote for Gore but heard he had won the state, I keep wondering how many decided not to bother casting their ballot since their candidate had already won the state. All these people who have lost their lives, all these families whose lives have been basically destroyed, all those children who have been maimed, orphaned or worse, do they all wonder what if? What if the media had a little bit more integrity and moral conscious to report the truth, to report facts, to clear the fog, to do their duty, to do their job.

Thank you, Scott. Better late than never. There is always time to tell the truth.

[kae]

I'm sorry I missed this one - I find it fascinating watching these episodes of staged banter - "MSM Innocence Theater", there's been lots of it lately. Many posts here blaming American's for not speaking out - that may be true but I think that argument is a little weak. We are dealing with the "blow-back" of deregulation here. If you're smart enough to see through the propaganda then you are smart enough to know not all American's are. Please remember the media's 24-7 tower collapse footage and now every American has watched every bit of stock footage of a Muslim with a gun add that to hourly terrorist threat updates and oh yeah, some people were sent anthrax - that was scary..no?. This administration used the media to create the ignorance and fear it needed. Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw know what has been done, they just hope we will stop caring.

To all MSM:
Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.
Journalists should:
" Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
" Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
" Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
" Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
" Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
(above taken from Society of Professional Journalists homepage)

[Desiderata]

"Our journalists must stick to the script provided."
"Ignore all criticisms of the public."
"Admit mistakes only if such admissions do not expose the script nor undermine corporate profits."
"We will not tolerate whistleblowers nor journalists of integrity. We fire them."
"Abide by the orders of your corporate masters or join the rest of the principled unemployed."

(above taken from the Tom Brokaw, Charles Gibson, Wolf Blitzer, and lesser associates handbook on journalism; published by Disney, GE, and Murdoch.

WARNING: Do not open this book. It is full of warm shit.

[kappa08]

Great piece...It's nice to see that I wasn't the only one on the verge of blowing up my flat screen when Gregory flared his trademark strils over the same insecure "look in the mirror".

[digitboy]

This is why I pulled the plug on the MSM months ago. Cancelled the satellite TV, Newsweek and the daily paper, stopped listening to news radio. Because there's no one left in the MSM that I trust enough to waste even 5 seconds of my life listening to.

Now if I could only get a few dozen million people to join me, we the people could take back this country.

All these chronic-liar media pinheads are just as bad as our War Criminal President himself. We the people have the power to end the mindless blather and bring the MSM advertizers to their knees as well.

And don't get me started on all the "body-cavity searches" I've endured at the airports because of all the imaginary terrorists running around. Don't leave your bag unatteded... because why? Because the President's lied? Fear level orange, my ass. Duct tape and shrink wrap, my ass.

We've endured lies from the President, the media, from our representatives' "impeachment is off the table". If the President is a criminal, it is our representatives' constitutional responsibility to impeach him. And they would not. And the people did not demand impeachment from their representatives.

So let's hope the finger-pointing doesn't go on too long. Because every one of us is as guilty as the German people who made believe they didn't know the contents of those train cars.

We live in a shameful, pathetic, arrogant society. How can we begin to make it right?

[dr4Will]

how true--Brokaw is just one of the media whores seeking money long after any effectiveness he had has passed him by years ago!!! He and Williams can be combined and it would be difficult to find any talent,truth or true reporting!!!

[funnyguy]

At the time this was all happening, it was obvious the American media---and guys like Brokaw are perfectly representative---were not doing their jobs. Through the Internet, I began reading the European press. Guess what? None of them were fooled; they and the UN knew the evidence to support an invasion did not exist. In fact, in Europe, there were the largest antiwar demonstrations in world history, 2 million people in Madrid alone, protesting war in Iraq. But none of this got reported in the American press, and near as I can tell none of them even read any European press.

Also, the real question in March 2003 was NOT to go to war or to do nothing. The UN had 100+ weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq and if more were needed could have increased that to 1,000. If we had supported that, and not an invasion which has cost at least hundreds of thousands of deaths and several trillion dollars, we would have discovered there were no WMDs and no need for war.

This logic apparently escaped Brokaw at the time---and continues to escape him.