Brian Williams posted a blog at the NBC News site yesterday innocuously titled: Making the Quarter rounds. It that is almost as staggering in its naïveté as it is frightening in the message it contains…
Williams tells us he has just returned from the French quarter where things seem to almost be returning to a semblance of relative normality, though “it will be a long time before it resembles anything close to New Orleans.” . But “It is slowly drying out… and cleaning up. There are a few random businesses open.”
Not until the second paragraph does Williams mention “an interesting dynamic,” an understatement if ever there was one, although he recognizes that it is “not altogether positive.” He then goes on to describe a city that has “reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement.” He then describes an incident he chalks up to a soldier’s “whim:”
Williams goes on, again suggesting, via a parenthesis, that these are isolated acts not in any way linked to official orders from up top, to describe:
Is that all this is, Brian, a “perverse” and “backward postscript?” Might it not perhaps be better described as the Bush administration’s efforts, via military muscle, to clamp down on the images of suffering and death being delivered to the eyes of the American people over the past week? But that obviously isn’t the message or interpretation that Brian Williams appears ready to convey on the Nightly News based on the concluding paragraph of his blog:
You mean like a police state interfering with the constitutional right of the media to report what is going on in New Orleans? Apparently not.
Little wonder that GOP message spin master Frank Luntz, in a confidential memo to Republican leaders, that surfaced last February, described Williams as the “go-to network anchor” because of his brains and “lack of detectable ideological bias.”