Tom Brokaw's Disturbing Defense of the Media and Iraq

Editor&Publisher: Tom Brokaw's Disturbing Defense of the Media and Iraq
In the wake of the revelations in Scott McClellan's new book, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw offers Exhibit A in the continuing denial by the media of their complicity in the catastrophe that is the Iraq war.
By Greg Mitchell

....Rather than review all that has been said, and left unsaid, in the past few days, I will simply perform the service of providing the transcript of an interview that has gotten some attention via a video at the MSNBC site, but never quoted in full due to the lack of a transcript. It deserves full study. It features current NBC anchor Brian Williams interviewing former anchor Tom Brokaw (he was still in that seat when we went to war) two nights ago. Brokaw’s bankrupt arguments could stand as Exhibit A in the media’s continuing failure to admit complicity in the human, financial, and moral disaster that is the Iraq war.

Consider just a few elements. Brokaw says, “But this president was determined to go to war. It was more theology than it was anything else. It was pretty hard to deal with.” So “hard” that the media didn’t even try hard to “deal” with the 'theology." NBC and others chose to focus on the “evidence” of WMD rather than the evidence that the administration was simply bent on going to war, WMD or not.

Brokaw, to make light of McClellan’s charges, also declares that “all wars are based on propaganda.”...

As for mantra of "the context of the time": The context was that the attack on Iraq took place fully 18 months after 9/11. We had already blasted the forces who had actually hit us on 9/11, which should have taken care of the media's patriotic fervor. I lost a good friend on 9/11 here in New York City, but my patriotic fervor caused me to write numerous articles warning of an unnecessary war against those who had nothing to do with those terrorist attacks -- especially since United Nations inspectors, on the ground in Iraq, had found absolutely no evidence of WMD. That was the real "context" of the time.

Brokaw cites NBC putting war critic Brent Scowcroft on the air. Studies (cited in my book) have shown that such critics were vastly -- hideously -- outnumbered by war supporters who got face time.

He also blames the Democrats for not raising more of an antiwar cry. What kind of journalist explains a failure to probe the real reasons for a war on others who may not be doing their own due diligence? And as Media Matters pointed out this week, Brokaw's NBC devoted exactly 32 words to the key antiwar political speech in September 2002 by Sen. Ted Kennedy. The other networks did much the same.

Here is the Brokaw/Williams transcript....

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003810384

Maybe he still is. :shrug:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4290944.stm

"I also believe strongly that the Internet works best when there are gatekeepers. When there are people making determinations and judgments about what information is relevant and factual and useful. Otherwise, it's like going to the rainforest and just seeing a green maze." - Tom Brokaw

http://www.fair.org/media-beat/990304.html

"I also believe strongly that the Internet works best when there are gatekeepers. When there are people making determinations and judgments about what information is relevant and factual and useful. Otherwise, it's like going to the rainforest and just seeing a green maze." - Tom Brokaw

That's why we don't need so-called journalists like Tom Brokaw. The devil is the details, Tom. And the reason you would see "a green maze" in the incredible variety of color and texture in a rainforest, and all its richness of life, is because green is the color of money, and that's all you see or will ever see.

And, like the rainforest, the incredible richness and variety of the internet, and the incredible freedom of non-corporate, non-powerful human beings (99% of us) to pick and choose the information we want and need, and convey the information that we think others might want or need, is democracy's replication of nature's defense against specialization and monoculture. Nature abhors corporate monoculture. So do we, who believe in democracy. Corporate news is like the dinosaurs, whose bigness and over-specialization doomed them to extinction when they could not adapt to catastrophe. And the internet is like the rainforest, busily creating an almost infinite variety of little mice and monkeys, and birds and beetles, and fungi and bacteria, and flowers and medicine plants, and types of wood, and waterways and river critters, and God knows what else--we have no idea--that COULD survive. And this variety, in the rainforest, and the internet, is the deadly enemy of Tom Brokaw's puppetmasters--big, stupid, monopolistic, dinosauric corporations. They see "greenbacks" in the rainforest; those with open minds see life itself in the rainforest, in all its glorious, colorful, wild, free plenitude--and we see the same in the internet, as it re-creates democracy, that almost got closed off.

"Gatekeepers," huh? Yeah, I know those corporate guys who gate up a forest before they clear-cut it. The wonder is how our democratic system spawned fascist dinosaurs like Tom Brokaw and NBC/GE war profiteers (--and the Mendocino Redwood Company, spawn of the Gap clothing store empire). Nature tries everything, I guess--even doomed species.

I guess it's only natural he would want gate keepers, he's afraid of the truth because the truth can be hard and it seems Brokaw doesn't do hard as from this paragraph of the O.P. Unfortunately when our so called fourth estate guardian watchdogs don't try hard; which seems to be most of the time now a days, many people end up dying.

"Consider just a few elements. Brokaw says, “But this president was determined to go to war. It was more theology than it was anything else. It was pretty hard to deal with.” So “hard” that the media didn’t even try hard to “deal” with the 'theology." NBC and others chose to focus on the “evidence” of WMD rather than the evidence that the administration was simply bent on going to war, WMD or not."

One other point it seems back in the day when the Clinton Administration thought there was a threat from Saddam Hussein, terrorism and or weapons of mass destruction, Brokaw preferred movies instead of religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog

Less than a month after the movie was released, President Bill Clinton was embroiled in a sex scandal arising from his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Over the course of 1998 and early 1999, as the scandal dominated American politics, the US engaged in three military operations:

· Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing campaign in Iraq that took place as the U.S. House of Representatives debated articles of impeachment against Clinton

· Operation Infinite Reach, a pair of missile strikes against suspected terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan three days after Clinton admitted in a nationally televised address that he had an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky

· Operation Allied Force, a 78-day-long NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that began weeks after Clinton was acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial.

In a further coincidence, the missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan were announced by the White House moments before the beginning of a press conference in which Lewinsky was to give details of her appearance before Congress.

Critics, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, charged that the former operation was an attempt to distract attention from the Lewinsky scandal, and Serb state television went so far as to broadcast Wag The Dog in the midst of NATO attacks on Serbia.

The video cassette version of the film contains an extended feature after the credits that has commentary about the movie in the context of the Lewinsky scandal by the producers of the movie and Tom Brokaw.

or something like that, conveniently suck-up dressed as patriotism.

Iraq because in a couple of days we are going to OWN that country." That was the night the invasion started as I recall. The hubris overflowth.

display zombie-like, theological irrationality that no mere human can investigate because... what? the pod people? what is this "theology?" what made it theology? since when is theology in service of warmongering a good thing for "JOURNALISTS" to bow down to?

Imho. I often thought he was a Bush supporter and quit watching him.Just another suck up.

Yet we have millions of lemmings who still fall for the 'liberal press" bullshit. If Tom loves "gatekeepers" so much, he should go to China and get refreshed on how "gatekeepers". er. CENSORSHIP works. What a pompous ass!

And 99% of people have not even noticed.

Game over.

and it happened quite some time ago, too :(

Seriously! Have you ever heard anything wise or insightful from this guy? He made his fame and fortune reading the news off a TelePrompter. Now that he is speaking on his own, he has nothing to say. And I mean nothing. I have never heard such empty pronouncements as the airy-fairy crap that tumbles out of Brokaw every time he is honored with another opportunity to reveal his ignorance and lack of depth.

At least he's not another right-wing shill. He's just a dope.

Run up to the war don't seem to be getting much play now. They peaked behind the curtain and saw the bullshit. The media whores who claim they were asking tough questions have got to know that they are full of shit. We saw what happened to people like Helen Thomas, who DID ask tough questions. They were ignored. The media whores had a choice to make and they made it: keep your mouths shut about anything of importance OR ELSE you won't be called upon to ask anything.