SALON

Glenn Greenwald

Thursday, May 3, 2012 11:52 AM UTC

NBC News’ top hagiographer

The role of Brian Williams is to glorify political and military leaders, but he really outdid himself last night

By

Topics:

NBC News' top hagiographer

Whatever one’s position is on the killing of Osama bin Laden — and I’ve always argued that there is a range of reasonable views — there are many journalistically important questions and significant disparities that still need serious examination (with all due respect (i.e., none) to John Kerry’s dictate that we all “shut up and move on”). For one, as both Mother Jones’ Mark Follman and my former Salon colleague Justin Elliott have extensively documented, there are — due to multiple conflicting White House claims — numerous unanswered questions about what really happened on the raid.

There’s also the question of why Obama aides like John Brennan spouted outright falsehoods to the world on key questions (such as whether bin Laden was armed or used his wife as a “human shield” and whether there was a “shootout” in the house). There are conflicting claims about whether a full video recording of the raid exists. There’s the contradictory administration behavior of resisting lawsuits seeking any disclosure about the raid on secrecy grounds while simultaneously boasting publicly about the details of the raid for political gain. And there’s the question of whether previous American statements — and the principles of Nuremberg — would have made it better (or even legally necessary) to apprehend bin Laden for trial; whether doing so was reasonably possible; and whether that was permitted by the mission plan.

None of those questions was even acknowledged, let alone meaningfully addressed, by last night’s one-hour melodramatic extravaganza hosted by NBC News anchor Brian Williams. This bin Laden show — “Inside the Situation Room” — was hagiography in its purest, most propagandistic, and most subservient form. This is typically the role Williams plays — he cleanses and glorifies American government actions, especially military actions, with his reverent, soothing, self-important baritone — but he really outdid himself here.

From the start, Williams proudly displayed his child-like excitement over his special access: “television cameras are inside the Situation Room for the very first time,” he gushed. As he stood outside of the sacred room, holding the now-iconic photograph of Obama officials watching the raid, he intoned: “We are one floor below the West Wing of the White House and we are about to take television news cameras inside the White House Situation Room for the first time in its history.” (Do people like Williams, or Peter Bergen and David Ignatius, ever wonder why they are chosen to receive such official honors and how that reflects on whether they engage in actual adversarial journalism, or do they just avoid looking these royal court gift horses in the mouth?) For his first inquiry, Williams, holding his spectacles in his hand, noted that he was standing behind the very same chair where the President sat that night, and — as he showed Obama the photo — unleashed his first question, one of the most challenging ones he posed that night: “there you are — that’s an intense look on your face, and everyone is intently watching that screen.”

In essence, the entire show was devoted to uncritical veneration of our national political and military leaders. It was as vapid as it was propagandistic; as Josh Gerstein wrote: “Much of the program was devoted to the thoughts and feelings of the senior officials involved and to such details as Biden clutching his Rosary ring as the raid unfolded and the sourcing of the food consumed by officials on that fateful day.” We got to hear about how the President’s daughters reacted upon hearing of bin Laden’s death, and how very difficult it was for him to attend the White House Correspondents’ dinner that evening. The coolness of American military gadgetry was constantly on display (the SitRoom has multiple digital clocks for different time zones, one of which always shows the time where the President is located, as well as some really big and flat TV screens!).

There was no dissent, no critical scrutiny of claims, no raising of difficult questions, no facts revealed. It was all reverent praise and uncritical amplification of official government claims. In sum, it was consummate American establishment journalism. Even if you’re someone who entirely approves of the raid and sees it as a rare American success over the last decade, uncritically bostering feel-good triumphalism about American political and military leaders is not the role of journalism (in theory, that is), and nobody should want it to perform that function.

The debut of Julian Assange’s television show on Kremlin-created RT a couple weeks ago produced some debate over state-controlled propaganda. This is why I found all the hand-wringing in the American media over his show to be so disingenuous. If an American media figure wants to rail about state-subservient media propaganda, they don’t need to look to all the way to Moscow to find it. It exists in robust abundance right at home. Brian Williams doesn’t occupy the position he occupies — as America’s Most Serious and Visible News Anchor — despite his vapid glorification of American political and military leaders; he occupies it precisely because he’s so good at doing that. That’s the prime requirement of this job.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 289 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Glenn Greenwald (email: GGreenwald@salon.com) is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's

two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.




Continue Reading

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
249 points250 points | 10 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
224 points225 points | 47 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
187 points188 points | 1 comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
58 points59 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
40 points41 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Latest Tweets

Recommendations