On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before NBC announced its suspension of Brian Williams, New York magazine pundit Frank Rich, the former New York Times theater critic and op-ed columnist, weighed in on the flap over Williams’s helicopter-story embellishments. Rich remarked that NBC’s handling of the scandal had been “disastrous” and said Williams’s bungled apology last week had “turned what might have been a one-off, one-week story about a squirm-inducing bit of braggadocio into an epic mess.”
But Rich dismissed much conservative criticism of Williams: “They view him as Exhibit A of a lying left-wing mainstream media conspiracy…But neither in public nor private have I ever seen or heard Brian Williams express any partisan political opinion. And the NBC Nightly News…is too anodyne to have any discernible political agenda.”
Rich also blasted NBC News for its alleged “jingoistic parroting of Cheney doomsday scenarios” for several months leading up to the Iraq war and opined that “in a weird way, the debate over Williams has picked up where the debate over American Sniper left off. The Iraq War remains a festering wound on the body politic.”
Excerpts from Rich’s comments (bolding added):
I know and like Brian Williams…But I don’t know him well enough to know what happened here. He owes his viewers a detailed explanation, not just a correction, retraction, or an apology — particularly one as disastrous as the paragraph he slipped into the middle of the Nightly News last week. It was that bit of abject spin, with its all-too-artful use of the word conflate and its invocation of the “fog of memory,” that turned what might have been a one-off, one-week story about a squirm-inducing bit of braggadocio into an epic mess…
…Could NBC’s behavior possibly have been more disastrous? Certainly Williams has few friends at the network. If he had, someone would have told him not to deliver that correction, and someone might also have said that it was a bad idea for him to then be photographed at a Rangers game with Tom Hanks, whose signature screen performances include playing a war hero in Saving Private Ryan and a fictional witness to historical events in Forrest Gump. It was almost a subliminal invitation for social media to go berserk…
In a weird way, the debate over Williams has picked up where the debate over American Sniper left off. The Iraq War remains a festering wound on the body politic. Many of the nastiest Williams critics, online anyway, have been on the right: They view him as Exhibit A of a lying left-wing mainstream media conspiracy and link his scandal to Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing tall tale of facing sniper fire in Bosnia. But neither in public nor private have I ever seen or heard Brian Williams express any partisan political opinion. And the NBC Nightly News, increasingly top heavy with weather stories (and it’s not alone in this), is too anodyne to have any discernible political agenda.
At the same time, liberals, including Jon Stewart, are making the case that Williams is being pilloried for an infraction that is trivial compared to the Bush Administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMD that the news media fed to the public to gin up the war in late 2002 and early 2003. This is completely correct. But it doesn’t let Williams off the hook. NBC News was one of the biggest offenders in that jingoistic parroting of Cheney doomsday scenarios of imminent mushroom clouds; not only did its anchors wear flag pins, but the NBC peacock was rebranded with Old Glory. Neither Williams nor any other prominent NBC News journalist questioned the rationale for the war at that time…The NBC [president during] that era, Bob Wright, has now come to his defense by saying that Williams should be cheered by the right because he “never comes back with negative stories” about the military. Since when is cheerleading about any subject, let alone war, a journalistic standard?
