NBC's liberal hack syndrome

04/28/2014

By Michelle Malkin 

I've always thought entrenched left-wing journalists in Washington needed their heads examined. Much to my satisfaction, it appears the corporate media bosses of at least one Beltway anchor now agree.

According to The Washington Post, NBC News hired a “psychological consultant” firm to examine why “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory has been bombing in the ratings. The shrinks (NBC prefers the euphemism “brand consultants”) came from the New York-based brand fixer-upper Elastic Strategy.

They interviewed Gregory's wife. They interrogated his friends. They crunched their numbers. And after all that, the “experts” are still scratching their noggins: What's the matter with David Gregory?

I could have saved the honchos at NBC News a lot of time and trouble. David Gregory is a phony. And he's a jerk.

Gregory's predecessor, Tim Russert, was highly respected on both sides of the political aisle. The former chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Daniel Moynihan turned “Meet the Press” into mandatory viewing for any American serious about politics and policy. Yes, he was liberal. But he never pretended to be anything he wasn't.

Russert was also a decent man, as so many warm eulogies across the ideological divide attested. Gregory is the anti-Russert. His boorish behavior around D.C. is legendary — from his juvenile tantrums with President George W. Bush's press staff to his diva snit fits with innocent bystanders while filming news segments.

One of the most telling and notorious anecdotes involves Russert himself, who reportedly reprimanded Gregory in 2008 for going ballistic on a poor waitress while the two TV stars dined at a D.C. restaurant.

Since Gregory doesn't have the intellectual heft to carry in-depth interview segments the way Russert did, “Meet the Press” producers have reduced substantive exchanges to a few minutes and larded the rest of the show with fluff and stunts.

Last fall, Gregory, the gun-control activist masquerading as a Sunday talk-show journalist, made headlines with his brazen hectoring of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre — while illegally brandishing a 30-round ammunition magazine on national television. He has used the show to fawn over vulgar, misogynistic “comedian” Bill Maher and to repeatedly browbeat Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York over gay marriage.

The problem isn't bias. It's the pretense of non-bias. Gregory and his peers suffer from cognitive dissonant hack syndrome, a common affliction among incurable left-wing journalists who sanctimoniously pay lip service every day to neutrality and objectivity while brazenly using their platforms to promote partisan political narratives.

Gregory, like many of his ilk, is a thin-skinned elite who lives in the Beltway bubble and can barely contain his contempt for his audience. With rare exceptions, the supposed watchdogs of Washington journalism are lapdogs for the establishment with “Don't You Know Who I Am?” egos as big as the politicians they sidle up to every weekend.

To the chagrin of NBC, Americans have discovered an effective cure: the “off” button on their remotes.

Michelle Malkin is the author of “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies” (Regnery 2009).

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