I watched the CBS and NBC Nightly newscasts tonight, hoping that they'd fairly report the Gregg departure. I mean like, after all, the man plainly stated that he was leaving, basically because he changed his mind because he didn't know himself very well, and that it wasn't Obama's fault. How could the networks distort this? Well, they found ways.
On CBS Evening News they led with the Gregg story and had absolutely nothing about Obama in Peoria, with his important comments about job creation.
Couric was eager to play this Gregg thing into a big, grossly exaggerated story about vetting problems. Look at this exchange between Couric and Bob Schieffer:
Couric (with an air and tone of absolute astonishment that Obama could let something like this happen again!!): "Does this once again raise questions about the Obama administration's vetting process!!??"
Schieffer: "Well, I don't think it could help but do that. Now, they'll get by this. They'll find a commerce secretary, but to have these incidents happen over and over again – this does not help this administration's credibility, There's no other way you can say it."
The tone with which he said this is very important. Schieffer had the same sort of tone he had on "Face The Nation" when Gen. Wesley Clark said (about McCain) that having one's plane shot down does not qualify one to be President. Schieffer replied "REALLY!!!??", as if it was the strangest thing anyone could say. Well, tonight he had a tone of voice and mannerisms that this Gregg thing was a very serious, inexcusable example of incompetence of a very weird nature.
Like CBS, NBC also played up the angle of a continuing problem of incompetence in the vetting process. (Both networks ignoring the perspective that there are ALWAYS a number of problems when any administration first comes to office, in putting a cabinet together. It is inevitable when you have to hire huge numbers of human beings, to be grilled by Congress, in just a couple months.)
NBC also led with the Gregg story, with Brian Williams introducing it with such phrases as "another Obama administration cabinet departure. What happened THIS time" and "a massive personnel problem".
Then Chuck Todd did a story that started rather decently just briefly going into Gregg, but then showing Obama in Peoria and his comments about job creation and Caterpillar, etc. – more than CBS did.
But then Todd came back to the Gregg story with completely unattributed speculation, phrased as if factual, completely beyond anything Gregg said in his speech:
Chuck Todd:
"There might have actually been a raw political reason and that was the fact that the White House was going to take control of the census away from the Commerce Department and into their own hands. And that had become sort of a mini firestorm both on the right and the left. And at the end of the day with the White House and Rahm Emanuel wanting control of the census, that was yet another reason Judd Gregg decided he didn't want the job."
Oh yeah Chuck? Where did you pick this up? Can you read minds?, or did you get it straight out of today's republican talking points that were going around before the Gregg announcement? They are trying to make the census thing into an example of how Obama isn't really trying to be non-partisan.
I gave up on getting serious news from the network news a long time ago. I only watch to see how they are distorting this time. If they can distort this severely something as straightforward as the Gregg story, there is not much hope for them in the near future.