- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
If Branfman considers Ted Koppel to be "one of America's most honorable and well-respected journalists," then how does this reflect on Branfman's own credibility? How MANY mass murderers does a journalist need to protect from media scrutiny and promote as a "impartial expert" before his own honor is in question? I would think one might be enough.
Branfman is exercising the same identification with power that he excoriates in his article: he allows his personal feelings for Ted Koppel to override his judgment of the man's public behavior, behavior that is in large part responsible for the public's ignorance of our government's worst murderous excesses. There is nothing honorable about befriending, defending, and protecting a mass murderer. There is nothing respectable about being a mouthpiece for right-wing propaganda.
Does Branfman forget how Ted Koppel got his big "Nightline" break in the first place? He was a shill for big business opponents of Carter. His job then was to keep a nightly vigil before the public of Carter's "incompetence" over the kidnappings in Iran. Where has been his vigilance over the Bush II administration's incompetence in capturing bin Laden? That Koppel occasionally allows competing viewpoints suggests that he does know the difference between news and propanganda, and he has deliberately chosen his own mantle: he's a whore who's turned to pimping for the powerful.
