Sunday Watch 10-5-08: In Which Tom Brokaw Goes Foxy

Originally published on CJR.org, the website of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Sometimes it's hard to know when Tom Brokaw is actually gauche or playing gauche; actually ironic or ironizing his own irony.

On Meet the Press, Brokaw played a clip of McCain's interview last week with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, featuring a woman off-camera who notes that "fairly conservative Republicans have expressed doubts about Palin."

"Really!" says McCain, voice dripping acid. "I hadn't detected that. And I haven't detected that in the polls, I haven't detected that amongst the base. We get 20,000 people that come to our, our rallies. So, again, I fundamentally disagree. Now, if there's a Georgetown cocktail party person who, quote, calls himself a 'conservative' and doesn't like her, good luck. Good luck."

To which Brokaw added: "Now, that's the John McCain that we've all come to know over the years... [Guest Peggy Noonan interrupted: "God bless him"] ... from time to time, and people have found it to be part of his charm."

The sarcastic McCain whom "we've all come to know over the years" (the "all" is a particularly nice touch) is, according to Brokaw, "charming." Or else Brokaw was being sardonic himself when he spoke of McCain's nastiness as "charm."

As usual, the roundtable featured zero outspoken liberals to one outspoken conservative, Noonan, who started a bit euphemistically about McCain and needed an assist to get to the obvious: "there's a sense of containment that you see with him more and more, where he is containing a certain amount of hmm, indignation, anger, ...whatever it is, but he has to contain it." In the absence of a liberal counterpart around the table, it fell to Gwen Ifill, herself a paragon of self-restraint during the Thursday night debate, to come back: "Not terribly well. I mean, sarcasm really is not containment."

Brokaw devoted much of his show to the polls and other tactical horserace paraphernalia. But he invited Noonan to express her sober view that the campaign falls short of what the country deserves:

"We are living in the age of the unknowable, of weapons of mass destruction, of crazy people who can get and harness these things and who can come and hurt us....When you keep your mind on that fact and that we may in our country face difficult days ahead, and even immediately ahead, when you keep your mind on that, you realize, whoa, this old partisan gamesmanship, this 'tear out his throat,' all of that stuff, it's over, it's yesterday. What we need now is grace. We need real patriotism, which patriotism isn't used as a weapon in a campaign....We got to be our best selves right now....We got to be adults. I sometimes think one of the problems in America is there are too many people that don't want to embrace the role of the simple grown-up and show the maturity and forbearance of a grown-up."

Presumably the candidate deficient in "maturity" and "forbearance" was the senator from Arizona.

But while paying tribute to an America made up of adults that is therefore due an adult debate, Brokaw passed up several chances to upgrade the discourse. Consider, for example, the moment when David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register said:

"In rural America the Republican brand is not doing as well as it once was. McCain still leads...all across the country in rural parts, but it's not by this margin that he needs--"

Brokaw had an ideal opportunity to shed some light. Given the recent jamboree of talk about "small towns" and "Main Street" as constituting an America that is more "real," more "authentic," more "heartland" than the rest of America, wouldn't you think this would be a teachable moment for telling people how much of the country is actually rural? The 2000 census classifies 19.7 percent of the country as living outside metropolitan areas. Of these, it classifies 11.6 percent of the population as strictly rural--smaller than the percentage of African-Americans or Hispanics in the population, although these are frequently called "minorities." Must the anchors go on genuflecting to a shrinking "heartland," pandering as if its residents are the "real" American soul? There are 3.6 times as many Brooklynites as Alaskans, for example--are they chopped moose?

Brokaw closed with this: "Isn't it also time for these candidates to...say to the American people, 'You've got a role in this, too. You've got to step up.' We're not going to make gain without some pain here in the next year, and, in fact, the American people have been part of the problem that we have right now. A lot of them took loans that they should--ought not to have taken. Credit card debt is very high. And they want to turn a blind eye to things like entitlements, Medicare and how we're going to pay for it."

Evidently, Brokaw, like Noonan, is attached to an abstract idea of evenhandedness. The assumption is that, until proven otherwise, everyone's equally nasty in a nasty world. Everyone's equally greedy, equally guilty.

On nastiness, Brokaw did refrain from false equivalence. Earlier in the show, he noted that the McCain campaign has announced that smears directed against Obama's "absence of character" and "absence of leadership qualities" constituted its systematic strategy. Meanwhile, according to Evan Tracey, who tracks national ad spending for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, McCain is devoting almost all his advertising to negative ads, while, to quote Greg Sargent of Talking Points Memo, "of [Obama's] $2.4 million weekly, Tracey says, well over half -- $1.4 million-- is funding the spot called 'Real Change,' which criticizes the status quo but doesn't mention McCain once." So credit Brokaw with refraining from phony equivalence on that score.

But as for Brokaw's parting statement, it reflected a largely Republican view of the world, camouflaged as a tribute to fairness and balance. "The American people have been part of the problem." How much? Ten percent? A quarter? Three quarters? Half? Such a statement, while balanced, is empty. Of course those who availed themselves of cheap back-loaded loans, assuming the bubble would never burst, are complicit. Missing from this account: the deregulation that permitted the banks to pass the bucks and conceal the bubble's dimensions. Missing from this account: the marketing apparatus that shoves credit cards into people's hands. Missing too, under the general rubric of "entitlements": the excellent solvency of the Social Security system, whose efficiency is a modern marvel-- thanks to Congress for refusing the Bush privatization that John McCain supported.

Brokaw's bland evasiveness here does not bode well for what we can expect from his turn as moderator at this Tuesday's debate. But then again, Brokaw lowered his own bar.

Comments

[AmHope]

Tom Brokaw. A disappointment.
No Tim Russert. That's for sure.

[DuPageDem]

Brokaw, like Charles Osgood at CBS, is so in the bag for corporate interests it has cut off the blood flow to their brains. The MSM wonders why no one wants to hear them any more. They're so far removed from average Americans, they may was well live on another planet. Too many decades living as overpaid media elites.

[topkatnc]

IM DONE WITH NBC AND TOMMY B !!!

[TrooAmerican]

Brokaw signed a secret deal a few weeks back to leave NBC after this campaign and be the Anchor on Fox.

The fact that theres no follow up questions means that the Thing we all have to worry about is what kind of BS questions Brokaw will allow to be asked. He'll most likely have softball questions that use GOP talking points for McCain and against Obama, "assuming GOP false accusations as fact", and send total BS at Barack insinuating all the false claims by McCain are true and Obama in fact is the liar, when thats been proven over and over by FactChecking organizations to be the opposite.

[nikz]

Brokaw had Olberman and Matthews removed as election night anchors because he said they were "biased" and leaned to the left.

He has admitted to being a friend to the McCain campaign! Fair? No way. You can see it in his body language and talking points that he is not exactly fond of Sen Obama. Brokaw leans to the right. Watch him steer the debate/town hall toward McCain.

He is no TIM RUSSERT!

[texastrixie]

It will be interesting to see how the split is between anti-Obama and anti-McCain questioners on Tuesday night. Nashville is not exactly a Democratic stronghold. -- It goes with my premise on all these town hall meetings that McCain wanted to drag Obama too. His people would make sure that no anti-McCain people were allowed in, and Obama-haters prevailed. Thus McCain would get questions along the line of, "How did you ever survive in that prison camp all those years?," while Obama got asked why his wife hates America.

I fear that Brokaw and his team will not do their jobs. However, since confronting Obama will get better ratings than confronting McCain, I fear that the questions will be designed to cut Obama to shreds while giving McCain an avenue for either reform, maverick, prison camp, or earmarks.

No one will ask McCain why he won't let us see his full medical records if he is so healthy. No one will ask him if taxing employer-based health care benefits won't encourage healthy people to drop their insurance, and to encourage companies to drop health insurance altogether. And no one will ask him how he intends to create more jobs in this country besides drill, drill, drill.

[metivo]

It's not drill, drill, drill. As Gov. Palin so helpfully reminded us, it's "drill, baby, drill."

[InofTouch]

got love the interwebs

[McNuts]

Tim must be doing the proverbial roll at Brokaw's usurpation of his legacy. At first I wondered why Brokaw would want the weekly burden at his age other than for the five-seven million salary which he certainly doesn't need. The tragedy is Brokaw was on the brink of Cronkite, Murrow stature, and is in the process of flushing it all for a lineage of hate and incompetence.

[McNuts]

Something has happened to Brokaw as he gets closer to his maker, rather similar to McCain. There is a bitterness and recklessness that creeps in with dementia. Brokaw, Gregory, Chuck Todd, all giddy lawn jockeys for the forces that brung us to this point. But hey it's a lot more comfortable being a lawn jockey in the Hamptons than on mainstreet.

[hopefulinpa]

If Brokow does not do an unbias job of this debate (he picks the questions that get asked) then we should all boycot whatever station he is on until they fire his republican licking behind. He was a poor pick to take over Meet the Press. He does not do his job, but then he has been around a long time like McCain and we all see how the old timers are left to slide.

[Manx]

Unlike Brokaw, I find McCain the opposite of charming. His smiles are forced and awkward, revealing his clinched teeth. His phony smiles can't hide the anger within. Most of the time, he looks as if he would like to clobber someone, especially someone in the press.

And Brokaw is just another clueless Republican, stuck in the culture of the 1950s. He's a McCain groupie, in awe of McCain's wartime experience. Brokaw doesn't like Obama at all and it will show in his questioning at the debate. After all, in the culture of the '50s that Brokaw cherishes, Obama would have been considered "uppity."

[DuPageDem]

Which culture do you mean? The Civil Right movement? The Beats? If you're going to grossly generalize a time period, try the 1920s, when KKK membership and lynchings peaked.

[rw97]

If Brokaw refrained from false equivalence it would have been a first on this campaign. I have zero faith in his impartiality at the debate on Tuesday. Brokaw's sell by date has expired.

[radiclib]

.
.
Peggy Noonan just happens to get offended now at tacky politics and cultural divides.
We did not hear such talk from her when such tactics helped Republicans.

Now, in her plummy tones, she warns of what it might bring.
Such hogwash. What a phony. The Reagan era is over. She helped pimp it.
Get rid of the right wing and its propagandists, too.
.
.

[emcd]

Shouldn't all journalists have to publish a disclosure statement? I hear all sort of stories about news people and their supposed affiliations or those of their spouses or other relatives. Shouldn't they in the interest of disclosure have to report this somewhere????

I have heard over the past few weeks the following -- how do we find out if these are true?

Brokaw hosts republican fundraisers at his house.
Chuck Todd's wife works for the McCain or other republican campaign

what else is out there that is proven, not just rumor?

[anaicram]

Last week MTP got several emails regarding Tom's aweful moderating of the program. I wrote to them because it was one of the worst MTP I've ever seen. Tom continues to do the same thing each week. He is not only destroying this show, but viewers are seeing through his angle. Call it what you may, Tom is definitely not Tim and never will be. I can only imagine what we should look forward to on the debate he's planning to moderate. At some point, I thought I was looking at Fix News - I had to check to ensure it was actually NBC I tuned in to. What a joke.