Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

That's the tune that they are singing over at the Media Research Center about Brian Williams, who will replace Tom Brokaw at NBC Nightly News. It turns out that Brian Williams is a hated liberal as well, and therefore unfit to deliver the news. The examples they select, however, aren't entirely revelatory.

Take this example.

The United States spends billions on foreign aid, and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers gave their lives to bring freedom to the citizens of other countries, but Williams glibly suggested the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was enough to make the U.S. a global bad guy.

Anchoring the May 7, 2004 Nightly News, Williams intoned: "The damage is clear: After no weapons of mass destruction showed up in Iraq, the U.S. justified the war by saying that at least the human rights violations would stop - the torture, the abuse and the murders. Tonight, although the scale of this is much different, it is increasingly difficult for the U.S. to make that moral case around the world."

OK, let's break this down. The Media Research Center claims Mr. Williams claimed that Abu Ghraib was enough to make the United States look like a global bad guy. What Mr. Williams actually said was that if we are claiming to have invaded Iraq for humanitarian reasons, than the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib make that a tougher sell. Seems like that's a pretty good analysis, even if it isn't something that conservatives want to see repeated. Is it really the Media Research Center's opinion that the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib are going to improve America's image around the world?

And then theirs this popular technique.

When he was covering the White House for NBC, Williams gushed over then-President Bill Clinton. "He's perhaps the most intellectually and physically active person to have held the job in decades," Williams told the Late Late Show's Tom Snyder on November 17, 1995. "I've also said that if Americans were paying Presidents by the thought, we're getting a bargain in this guy because, my God, he's just always moving, his brain's moving, he hardly sleeps."

Did you catch that old switcharoo? They are penalizing him not for what he said as a newscaster during his newscast, but for what he said on a talk show, where he is naturally expected to give his own opinion. In effect they are penalizing him for admiring President Clinton's workaholism as a private citizen.

I don't know whether Mr. Williams is going to be a good host or not. I'm unlikely to find out as I don't really watch evening news (preferring to read my news). But not sure that these criticisms are anything to get my dander up over.