NBC’s coverage of the Brussels attack was stunningly irresponsible
The "Today" show talked to Trump & Clinton about the Brussels attack, and lived down to our expectations
TOPICS: NBC NEWS, NBC, THE TODAY SHOW, DONALD TRUMP, HILLARY CLINTON, ELECTIONS 2016, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
(Credit: NBC)
Horrific attacks like the one that took place in Brussels on Tuesday morning tend to bring out the worst in our elite media. The coverage usually combines the blind panic and speculation that accompany any major breaking news story with an unrelenting stoking of our most vengeful, authoritarian impulses. Tuesday’s news channels were filled with the usual scenes: an array of mostly white men speaking ominously of “soft targets” and of endless war. Most of these outlets like to pretend that calling one of these inevitably gung-ho hawks a “national security analyst” or a “law enforcement expert” somehow makes that person a non-ideological expert. Really, all it does is highlight just how narrow our conversation about terrorism and war tends to be. (Talk of peace stays far away from any table.)
None of this was unexpected. This is how it was after Paris. This is how it always is.
A particularly nauseating example of the media’s approach to such matters could be seen in a pair of interviews that NBC’s “Today” did with presidential frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In particular, both interviews contained such irresponsible and morally bankrupt conversations about torture that you wanted to throw something at the television.
Trump was, of course, despicable, offering not even a single word of condolence to the victims of the attack. But what was worse was the questions Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie put to him. Challenging they were not. All of the “Today” show’s queries were framed so as to get Trump to illuminate just how far he would go in his efforts to combat such attacks, rather than grilling him whether that approach was either right or proper.
In a particularly disgusting back-and-forth, both anchors quizzed Trump on whether or not he would torture Salah Abdeslam, the alleged ringleader of the Paris attacks who was captured by Belgian authorities a few days ago.
“What would you say would be appropriate in terms of what they can do to him at this moment to get any information that they can about possible further attacks?” Lauer asked. “When you say do whatever they have to do, can you be specific?” Guthrie followed up. She then bluntly asked him if he thought that torture worked. Trump, unsurprisingly, said that he did.
Nowhere in this conversation was there any suggestion that torture is an obscenity, that the very fact that two of the most high-profile journalists in the United States were speaking so casually with the likely Republican presidential nominee about torture on national television was symbolic of America’s moral degradation. The closest Guthrie got to any of this was when she said that “some people think that kind of harsh interrogation technique works…and others say that it doesn’t work.” What a brave stance.
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