I've recently described, here and here, how an unexpected streak of reasonableness broke out at the Today show. On successive days, Matt Lauer criticized the Democrats for trying to make political hay out of Iraq without offering any alternatives of their own.
Strangely, sanity has seemingly struck again. And this in the most unlikely person of NBC reporter Jim Maceda, who only last week, as I reported here was carping that the French were not appeasing their Muslim rioters assiduously enough.
This morning, Maceda was in Iraq interviewing US troops. He summarized their message in this blunt and refreshing way: "these soldiers think the politicians who want to pull out quickly are dead wrong."
Maceda reported that "increasingly their role is to step back" and let Iraqi soldiers and police shoulder most of the fighting burden. Speaking of the Iraqi forces, an African-American soldier opined: "they're coming on good, they're coming on great, they're coming on faster than we could expect."
Continued Maceda, in a shot at the Murthas of the world: "These soldiers are against any kind of timetable except this one: that US soldiers go home when the mission is accomplished."
Perhaps most amazingly of all, Maceda concluded with this nugget of MSM self-criticism: "many soldiers blame reporters for what they see as a one-sided picture, saying that we tend to emphasize the violence and the death and under-report all the positive steps Iraq is taking."
I waited for a counterpoint back in the studio from Chris Matthews or some such, but it never came.
Could a warm wind of reason be blowing through NBC? Hard to imagine, but we'll certainly be watching with keen interest to see if the trend continues.
