You have to read down a ways in this Radar post by Charles Kaiser, but there’s something very sad he gets to. It’s about blog postings by NBC anchor Brian Williams. Now, Williams apparently does not have the Katie Couric problem, which is not writing her own material.

(She got in trouble after one of her ghostwriters was found to have plagiarized columnist Jeffrey Zazlow.)

(There are so many things wrong with that previous sentence it makes one’s head spin.)

Anyway, Willams’s blog is indubitably personal, right down to the shifting fonts. He begins by meandering on about soft news coverage of the NYT. His evidence? Stories in the Styles section. (Confidential to B.W.: News stories are in the section that has the words “The New York Times” in big letters at the top of the page. The Styles section is about … styles ‘n’ stuff. )

Then comes a paean to a Peggy Noonan column that is an attack on Barack Obama’s patriotism. Here’s what Noonan wrote:

Main thought. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama’s problem. America is Mr. Obama’s problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men’s Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter’s Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There’s gold in that history.

[…]

Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That’s why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country – any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?

Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they’re questioning its content, its fullness.

Says Williams: “Peggy is doing the work of her career and must be considered an early favorite for next cycle’s Pulitzer for commentary.” Actually, she’s doing the work of the Republican ight-wing attack machine, trying to stir up the yahoos by branding Obama as the Other.

Kaiser has a killer point to make: Why hasn’t Williams, if he’s looking for news in the NYTimes, done a story on his news show about the Times’ huge investigation into how the Pentagon has been secretly training former military men to go out and repeat administration-approved talking points on the war in the guise of objective military analysts for the networks? Kaiser:

NBC, CBS, and ABC have all ignored the story, presumably because it makes all of them look terrible. But after Williams’ blog readers pounced, the anchor finally offered a defense for the use of these retired talking heads—an account that many of his NBC colleagues considered wholly inadequate. Williams explained that he was close friends with two of the “heavily decorated U.S. Army four-star generals”—Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey—that they had made plenty of criticisms of the war and, therefore, there was no problem. Then he added: “I can only account for the men I know best,” but he was sure that “[a]t no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers.” That is implausible.

In any case, the anchor’s explanation ignored the main point of the Times piece: that virtually all of these generals, including McCaffrey, worked for or consulted with military contractors, and the big advantage of participating in the Pentagon’s propaganda program was the number of inside tips they got about new war contracts that were becoming available in Iraq.