Via Jeff Emanuel of Red State. Would you believe that this is the only one of the three nightly network newscasts that led with a story about the Attorney General being held in contempt by a congressional committee after the president invoked executive privilege so that he wouldn’t have to turn over documents? I didn’t see the CBS and ABC newscasts, but according to Mark Halperin the former led with the Fed’s new unemployment projections and the latter led with … the northeast’s heat wave. I’ll double check that once ABC posts the video and blog it later if it’s true. It merits a little public shaming.

Here’s the one network that did lead with the story framing it as yet another exasperating partisan food fight whose particulars aren’t quite as important as the fact that Democrats and Republicans are bickering again. It’s not so much a story about the DOJ running guns to drug cartels and then Obama trying to hide behind executive privilege to cover that up. It’s a story about … gridlock and civility, and other mainstays of Beltway navel-gazing. The spin from Williams’s apologists will be that he’s not saying that’s what Fast & Furious is, he’s saying that’s what it looks like to someone who’s so ignorant of the facts that they’re coming to this story for the first time. Which would be fine, if not for the fact that NBC’s worked very, very hard to make sure that its viewers are among that select group of ignoramuses. According to the Breitbart crew, the network started covering this story just one week ago, and even then they couldn’t be bothered to explain to the audience precisely why that nice Eric Holder is always being asked to resign by the damned GOP. If you want to make sure viewers don’t mistake a complex investigation for more of the usual “broken politics,” here’s a tip: Inform them of the complexities.

Oh, and as our Townhall cousin Katie Pavlich is forever reminding the media, Fast & Furious wasn’t “botched.” There’s no evidence to think that it wasn’t executed precisely as intended.

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