The nonsense of NBC Nightly News—one of the most influential mainstream media institutions—has been going on for years. For instance, several years ago, they had to dump their anchor Brian Williams because he was a liar; he exaggerated, or what he said “misremembered,” his experiences during the Gulf War.
Lying Williams and a Clinton on the Payroll
Williams’ exaggerations and lying were a black eye for the network that expects the views to trust the veracity and skills of its anchors, producers and reporters. But that wasn’t the first embarrassing resignation. Some months before last year’s election Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former president and secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton, bowed out of her high-paid job as a special correspondent (Media reports said she was pulling 200k a year, not bad for someone with almost no journalism experience).
I saw her last story for NBC News. It was a story on a charity group that any person with a modicum of intelligence could have done. The network shot a bit of film on the charity. Chelsea Clinton did a few interviews and here was the story, not a very strong effort. At the end of the filmed report, Chelsea came on to the set to converse with Lying Brian Williams, who told her that it was “nice to see her.” This was an honor rarely given to other NBC reporters.
The issue, of course, was why all this favoritism was accorded to a daughter of a presidential daughter? Chelsea Clinton was being paid a hefty salary, much more than other NBC reporters who had labored for years to earn jobs at the network. But Chelsea Clinton, a college graduate who seems a smart woman, nevertheless had no journalistic credentials; certainly, none that would compare with others with much more experience, but who made a lot less than Chelsea. The Clintons claimed they were “broke” when they left the White House in 2001, a comment that had many Americans in hysterics. The “poor” Clintons have made hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars for giving speeches, including former first daughter Chelsea, who can also command a big payday for I’m not sure what). One of their themes of their speeches is sometimes the greediness of society.
Who Wants Chelsea’s Job at NBC?
So why did NBC News give her a prime spot, a spot that she voluntarily left? (My guess is that she left because she wanted to become involved in what would become her mother’s ill-fated, disastrous, presidential campaign. She couldn’t have imagined what she was actually joining. Few people could).
Again, it seems obvious to me. NBC News was trying to gain brownie points with the powerful Clinton family, who seemed on the verge of winning back the presidency. NBC News was doing the same as many others—sucking up to power, or what they perceived to be power. They were hiring a presidential relative and giving him or her a big salary in the hope of a political payoff (They would be “in” with the Hillary Clinton administration. A historical note: Decades ago the Libyan government paid president brother Billy Carter a ton of money as a lobbyist for obvious reasons).
By contrast with giving the Clintons anything they want, NBC News has been incredibly antagonistic to Donald Trump. Now Trump obviously has done and said more than a few stupid things (As I write this, he has just pulled another historical boner in his speculations on the causes of the Civil War. One must take into account that El Donaldo has never been a great one for learning and it is rumored that his library is restricted to “the best coloring books money can buy.” By the way, Chelsea Clinton, in a tweet, tried to straighten him out by saying our Civil War was exclusively about slavery, which it was not. Slavery was one of the factors but by no means the only one. There were other factors as the guns went off in 1861. Otherwise, why did President Lincoln, at the outset of the war, guarantee slavery wherever it existed and why did he wait about a year and a half before he committed to ending it and then only in some states?).
Still, Trump has offered the outlines of a tax plan that may well help the American economy grow at a faster pace than over the past few years.
Cut Taxes? NBC News Doesn’t Want to Hear About It!
Trump has proposed a major tax cut package that could jump start the economy. It might raise the nation’s GDP growth from one to two percent a year to three or four percent a year. Serious discussion of these tax cutting efforts will never be found at NBC News. Here NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander, not an economics expert but someone who looks great and wears beautiful suits, opined, not reported, that the plan would simply help the rich and hurt everyone else. And that was in what was supposed to be a news story and not an op-ed piece. Most NBC News reports on Trump are usually disguised as the latter but pretend to be the former.
During the campaign, most reports on Hillary were ads for her disguised as news reports. NBC News was hitching its cart to what it believed would be the Hillary Clinton administration. This explains why so many NBC News people seemed as though they were going to start balling on election night.
I plan on this discussing this controversial Trump tax package at GregoryBresiger.com soon in an even-handed way. However, an even handed, intelligent approach to economics is the last thing one can expect from NBC News. It will never find anything good to say about Trump for the wrong reason—-because it has been so blatantly biased against Trump and made up its mind that tax cuts are almost always bad. It was no different with republicans McCain and Romney. NBC News has become an adjunct of the Democratic party, which is why it often ends up employing people who have or will work for the Democrats.
Unbiased News? Not at NBC
Indeed, Brian Williams, in 2008, was practically a press agent of the Obama campaign, yet he and his colleagues pretended to give you straight reporting. It is nothing of the kind. It was, at the time, sickeningly biased. It hasn’t changed under Lester Holt and his please don’t turn us off at the commercial break antics.
Bismarck is reputed to have said that there are two things no one should ever be see being put together—laws and sausages. I nominate a third—-NBC Nightly News.
