Network news = useless.

You know things have gone horribly wrong when Katie Couric has the most journalistic integrity.

Network news anchors praise the job they did in the run-up to the war - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

"...the three network news anchors appeared jointly on The Today Show this morning and were forced by McClellan's book to address whether the media failed in its duties in the run-up to the war -- the first time, to my knowledge, that this topic has ever been broached by network news journalists (h/t Kitt). The fact that television news has blacked-out the whole issue until now is, by itself, rather amazing.

While Katie Couric impressively argued that the media did fail to do its job -- pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war and that anyone who questioned the war was deemed unpatriotic and all of that "affected the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media" -- the painfully empty-headed Charlie Gibson and the mindlessly establishment-defending Brian Williams both insisted that the media did a perfectly fine job and that they would do nothing different. "There was a lot of skepticism raised about" the Colin Powell speech, said Gibson, in one of the falsest statements ever uttered on TV...

Perish the thought that journalists should be adversarial to our political officials, challenge what they say or point out when they're lying. Instead, their job is merely to pose polite questions, let political officials say what they want in response, and then go home -- just as Charlie Gibson said. This is why most establishment journalists will never be convinced that they failed to do their job, no matter how much evidence is presented: because of the understanding they have of what "their job" actually is. If anything, by Gibson's understanding of what they're supposed to be doing, they did their job brilliantly, by letting Bush officials go on their shows and -- as Cheney aide Cathy Martin said about what happens when they went on Tim Russert -- "allow[ing Bush officials] to control the message.""