Brian Williams was off this week, but he left a taped piece with his bias for Friday's NBC Nightly News. To mark the 60th anniversary of the Enola Gay dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Williams went to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum annex near Dulles Airport -- where the plane is on display -- to talk to the plane's navigator, Dutch Van Kirk. Williams asked: “Do you have remorse for what happened? How do you deal with that in your mind?” Van Kirk indignantly replied: “No, I do not have remorse...”

A transcript of the second half of the August 5 NBC Nightly News story, picking up after Van Kirk offered some recollections of what he saw:

Earlier this week, AP writer Tom Raum did a ‘Newsview’ piece, ripping President Bush’s nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Today, he’s back as a Newsview commentator repeating his own ‘Breaking News’ story from yesterday word for word.

The identical pieces, entitled, “Deadly Attacks Put New Pressure on Bush,” start off quoting their own AP/Ipsos poll showing the president’s Iraq approval rating down to 38 percent, “among younger women, especially those who live in the suburbs, and among men with a high school education or less.” Big surprise there.

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, who has had his articles appear in The New York Times, criticized Vice President Dick Cheney this week on The Nation's blog site, for comments he made on CNN's Larry King Live back in June." Nichols wrote, "Vice President Dick Cheney, who predicted on the eve of the U.S.

Liberals' glee over Robert Novak's outburst on CNN has caused at least one major newspaper to lose sight of some facts.

Scott Collins, in today's (Fri. Aug. 5, 2005) Los Angeles Times, wrote in an article (sign-up req'd)(emphasis mine),

"The CNN incident was a leading topic for bloggers. On the liberal blog talkingpointsmemo.com, one reader wondered whether conservative activists would demand that the Federal Communications Commission fine Novak for indecency. Many conservatives complained after rock star Bono uttered a profanity during an NBC awards show and the FCC took no action."

Oops. Collins failed to mention that the FCC does not regulate indecency on cable. (Even Josh Marshall of the tpm blog remarked that this was so. Apparently Collins missed this and ran to his typewriter.) Bono's profanity occurred over NBC, which, as a boadcast outlet, is regulated by the FCC, of course.

Just 16 days ago, CBS reporter Trish Regan did a story for the Evening News premised on the idea that the “reality” of the U.S. economy is far gloomier than the positive comments from experts such as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. As MRC’s Brent Baker noted in the July 21 CyberAlert, Regan preferred to trust the offhand comments from people she met on the streets of New York City to all of the statistical evidence that the economy is growing at solid pace and creating jobs.

CBS showed Regan prompting a woman on a Manhattan sidewalk: “Alan Greenspan says the economy is doing fine, we’re seeing a lot of growth. What do you think of that statement?”

The woman replied, “I disagree with that.”

On last night's Hardball on MSNBC, Chris Matthews did his best to keep morale down here on the home front when he brought on anti-war parents of a fallen soldier and asserted American lives were being "wasted" on Iraq like "pouring water into a sand hole." The following is just some of the exchange. Read on for more.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Mr. Schroeder, why do you think we`re in this war? What do you think is the real reason for this war in Iraq?

PAUL SCHROEDER: Well I really don`t know why. I could guess, which might be unfair. But I would guess it has to do with oil. It has to do with deposing a dictator that we used to love and came to hate.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

"After Bombings, Few Signs Of Similar Attacks in U.S." -- August 1 headline, New York Times.

"Assessments Find Threat of Suicide Attacks in U.S.” -- August 5 headline, New York Times.

In an article entitled "Americans aren't all agog for blogs," Boston Herald reporter Brett Arends tries to minimize the importance of blogs by citing a new study claiming that "fewer than 2 percent of Americans who go online read blogs once a week or more."

Arends starts off tongue-in-cheek:

"To hear some folks tell it, the insomniac army of bloggers is already inheriting the Earth. Clad in pajamas and armed only with Pringles, cocoa and a keyboard, they sway millions and make the mighty tremble as they tap away into the night.

"The only problem: it isn't quite true."

He compares blog readership to the viewership of ABC or those who read their local paper.

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, who has also covered elections for The Progressive and has had his articles appear in The New York Times, criticized Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday on The Nation's blog sight, for comments he made on CNN's Larry King Live back in June."

Nichols wrote, "Vice President Dick Cheney, who predicted on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that Americans would be "greeted as liberators," has in recent weeks been peddling a new line of spin. If Cheney was not in charge of U.S. foreign policy, he could be dismissed as a ranting lunatic."

What's the 'spin' Cheney is guilty of according to Nichols? For saying he thinks there's been major progress in Iraq and that, "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.'"

Nichols then contrasts Dick Cheney's 'spin' to John Kerry's words before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, "Any attempt to address Cheney's rhetorical excesses brings to mind the words of a young veteran from another misguided and unnecessary war. 'How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?' For Cheney, that's simple: Just keep telling the young men and women who are marching to their deaths that they will be greeted as liberators and that the enemy is so weak that it is in its 'last throes.' In other words, just keep spinning a slurry of fantasy and lies into U.S. policy."

I'm one of those people who believes a picture is worth a thousand words, and the one above certainly is powerful enough to make the point that there are Iraqis who are grateful for the liberation that has come to their country. (See picture here) And there are accounts of Iraqis who supported the War in Iraq early on. For instance, when I interviewed Steven Vincent on his book, In the Red Zone, on my show he shared of Iraqis who told him while he was embedded three times there, that they wanted the Americans to take Baghdad, but that they also knew Saddam Hussein had WMDs and "would kill them" (the Iraqis) in the battle, but nevertheless they wanted America to do it anyway.

But these kinds of accounts are seldom reported by the MSM. That's why we have to do it.