Did anyone catch Wednesday night's Nightline? I can't believe what I saw. Until Ted Koppel left the show late last year after 25 years at its helm, it stood out as a news-based feature show that managed to present what I'm sure most people here would agree was an unbiased, unsensational, sober treatment of the many issues it covered. But if tonight's show was any indication, it could be yet one more news show that has taken a sharp turn to the right--and into the media gutter.
The show started out with a brief opening segment on the Alito hearings, which from start to end portrayed the Democrats as mean-spirited, partisan and determined in what it claimed was their largely failed attempt to make Alito look bad no matter how low they sunk, with scant attention paid to the far more substansive issues raised during the hearings--let alone that Democrats DID in fact succeed in revealing a multitude of very serious problems with Alito's nomination.
The focus was on the brief, obviously stage-managed part mid-way through Wednesday's hearings in which propa suthun gent Lindsey Graham appeared to make Alito's po' lil' wife cry, forcing her to flee the hearing room in tears. This was after he asked Alito whether he was a bigot in reference to Democrats' earlier questioning of Alito about his mysteriously and conveniently forgetten membership in the now infamous Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a racist and sexist organization at Princeton that sought to restrict the number of female, minority and disabled students admitted to Princeton during his time there as a student in the early 70's.
This was essentially the ENTIRE Alito segment, with barely any mention made of the many other issues raised by Democrats during the hearings and of infinitely greater bearing on his qualifications for the Supreme Court, such as his views on abortion and Roe v. Wade, the limits of executive power, the legality of the warrantless NSA wiretaps, etc. Instead, they focused on this silly little episode that I'm convinced was staged by the GOP. They also made some comments about how the Democrats appeared to be failing in their attempts to paint Alito as unfit for the court--without, of course, offering ANY substansive proof of this other than this pathetic little segment.
Here's an excerpt from the matching article for this segment on the Nightline web site, Alito Grilling Gets Too Intense for Some:
After probing for possible weak spots in the record of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito on Day Two of his confirmation hearings, Democrats used Day Three to poke at what they thought those weak spots were.
But at the end of the day, the Democrats' plan of attack proved to be too much -- at least for one member of the audience.
The nominee's wife, Martha Ann Alito, broke into tears after Republicans expressed their disapproval of how Alito was being treated.
Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had been sympathizing with Alito, telling him he was sorry he was being subjected to grueling questions from Democrats. In an effort to settle the matter of whether the nominee was prejudiced against women and minorities, Graham asked him directly, but sympathetically, "Are you a bigot?"
Alito responded, "I'm not any kind of bigot."
It was at this point that Alito's wife, who was sitting right behind her husband, began to cry and left the hearing. After a recess in the hearing, she returned for its remainder.
One White House official later said that Mrs. Alito viewed the attacks on her husband as disgraceful. "She was very upset that a good and decent man would get attacked," the official told ABC News. "It's outrageous."
My my, cry me a river and give this man a free pass to the Supreme Court! They made his wife cry, so obviously he's qualified for the court! Those horrible horrible Democrats!
Yeah, I'd call this outrageous--outrageous that a sanctimonious asshole like Graham would try to pull such a pathetic and transparent stunt and that the assholes running ABC would allow this clearly biased crap to go on the air. Shame on them and may their ratings take a dive. I guess that now with Koppel and Jennings gone, some Roger Ailes clone is running things in the news division.
Strangely, the accompanying online article had some actual substance on the hearings that discussed the more substantial issues brought up during Wednesday's hearings, that was not included in the TV segment. Of course, the vast majority of Nightline viewers probably never read the online article so this doesn't mitigate the show's irresponsibility one bit.
The next segment was about the so-called 'Abortionist of Arkansas', an Arkansas doctor who's performed at least 10,000 abortions (and possibly double that--he claimed to not keep track, which seemed kind of odd to me, but I'm not a doctor so perhaps that's not unusual). Martin Bashir, famed celebrity interviewer (everyone's heard of or seen his now infamous Michael Jackson interview during his trial of several years back), did the segment.
From virtually start to finish he adopted a clearly hostile attitude towards both the doctor and the practice of abortion itself, asking very leading questions and treating him with clear disdain. He described the doctor as "unabashed, some would say shameless" in his willingness to perform as many as six abortions a day. When the doctor told him about a patient of his who had had nine abortions, Bashir had the temerity to ask "Is that really appropriate?", to which the doctor said that yes, if that's what the woman wanted, it was appropriate. Period.
When he asked the doctor how he felt about performing abortions, he responded that he "consider[ed] the mother's life to be much more important than that little blob of tissue, and that's all it is at that time". Bashir immediately countered, with indignation and contempt in his expression and tone, that this "blob of tissue" had a beating heart at 21 days and a brain at 40 days, pausing for effect and clearly looking for a sign of shame or contrition from the doctor. He didn't get any.
Instead, the doctor explained how he believed that he was helping women who might otherwise go on to have unwanted births or try to perform an abortion on themselves, often with horrible consequences. He described his experience with one woman who tried to abort her pregnancy with a caustic douch, causing terrible burns and effectively destroying her vagina. Bashir didn't appear to have any reaction to this. Instead, he continued to describe what the doctor did in ways that were clearly meant to come across as disapproving if not openly contemptuous.
Some examples:
And he remains entirely unambiguous when it comes to the fundamental issues at stake when considering to terminate a pregnancy.
...
The doctor conceded to me that all of this is true -- and that he's comfortable with killing this notion of life.
...
"The Abortionist of Arkansas" ... and neither the doctor nor his patients are ashamed of that title.
It was unrelenting, and unbelievable for a show of Nightline's caliber. ABC should be ashamed of itself for hiring a hack like Martin Bashir for ANY position let alone as co-cost of one of its most respected news shows. To call him a journalist is to call Bush an honest and courageous leader. He's clearly a "Hard Copy" brand of trash TV "journalist" better suited to reporting on the latest exploits of Paris Hilton and the Bush twins than to covering real news.
Ted Koppel would never have allowed trash like him on his show and must be recoiling in horror at what they've done to it. I think that Terry Moran's actually done a pretty good job and that Cynthia McFadden is ok, but if tonight's show was indicative of the direction that Nightline is taking, I'm going back to watching Letterman--for good.
Ironically, Koppel's parting words on his last show were to ask Nightline viewers to give the new hosts a chance, or else ABC will just cancel Nightline and replace it with a late night comedy show. Maybe that is precisely ABC's intention. If so, they seem to be succeeding, as this show doesn't deserve to stay on the air if it continues down this path.