Happily, NewsBusters wasn't the only conservative outlet to pick up on the Christmas Day "Meet the Press" with Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel. The spectacle spurred columns by David Limbaugh and Jonah Goldberg. Limbaugh summarized:
"Russert was uncharacteristically tame toward these two, offering them repeated softballs concerning the past year's main stories. But the relaxed atmosphere gave us a clearer picture of the worldview these men share, which is doubtless representative of most of the Old Media players. From race and taxes to health care and Iraq, they spoke in a monolithic liberal voice, accented by its familiar air of moral superiority."
Goldberg thought it was a sign of Old Media extinction, with the dinosaurs agreeing with each other:
Brokaw agreed with Koppel, Koppel agreed with Brokaw. Russert nodded as one newsman repeated what the other one just said. For example, regarding the Hurricane Katrina episode - in which the media collectively broke all chains of objectivity in order to preen with outrage over the plight of the downtrodden - Brokaw asserted "there were no gray areas in Katrina." By this he meant the media was 100 percent right for portraying the federal government as 100 percent wrong. This elicited nods all around.
Brokaw even quoted Aaron Broussard, the Jefferson Parish president who openly wept on "Meet The Press" about the tardy federal response: "They didn't come. They promised they would come and they didn't come." Alas, Brokaw left out the fact that Broussard had to be invited back on the program to clarify various untruths (aka "lies") in his original version of events. Russert let this fact fall by the wayside in this no-gray zone. And on and on it went.
Jonah ends with the interesting observation that as Brokaw says the big underreported story is the fading days of General Motors, so is the Old Media fading away, having never captured the loyalty of an audience younger than Brokaw's "Greatest Generation."
