NBC: Nothing But C___
Category: TV & Radio...
Posted Saturday, January 10, 2004 at 09:27 PM [GMT-6]

You can fill in the blank of the subject line yourself, as long as you don't use anything complimentary.

I've made no secret of my disgust for the partisan leanings of some of the folks on The Today Show, Katie Couric in particular. But I continued to give the weekend edition the benefit of the doubt, since it tended to focus on softer stories that were harder to politicize.

This morning I realized that there's nothing that can't be politicized; there's no topic that NBC's morning hosts can't distort to an anti-Bush, liberal agenda.

Campbell Brown was at the helm (I should have heeded that warning flag to begin with) and she was interviewing Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," about Bush's pronouncements this week regarding a moon station and a manned mission to Mars. For someone who's supposed to be a gung-ho science advocate, Nye was surprisingly unwilling to acknowledge the excitement of the vision, and instead chose to nitpick details (even though none have been announced). For one thing, Nye feels there's nothing new to be learned by another moon mission. Then he dropped this little throwaway line regarding the potential cost of a moon mission: "The current Mars Rover mission cost only $100 million, about the same as one day of war in Iraq."

Brown and Nye went on to discuss why these proposed projects were "not very good ideas" (Campbell's exact words). But I didn't hear any additional remarks, because I switched channels, and I won't be back.

P.S. I must mention that the Campbell/Nye exchange came immediately after a pronouncement by the Cloned Guest Meteorologist of the Week that "global warming is no longer a theory; it's a fact." According to him, global warming is to blame for record high temps, record low temps, record drought and record rainfall totals. Wow. Lord of the Meteorological Theories...One Paradigm to Rule Them All.