Brian Williams: Fair and Balanced?

When NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last Friday to plug his upcoming NBC Dateline special, Taking the Hill: Inside Congress, Williams made the absurd claim that he was a fair and balanced journalist without an agenda.

Video.

JIMMY FALLON: We don't get really too political on our show, but now and then we'll do a joke about Obama, or we'll do a joke about Sarah Palin. Keep it balanced. But, man, people go nuts on Twitter. They go, 'Hey, stop making fun of Palin. Why aren't you making fun of Obama?' And I go, 'We do make fun of Obama.'

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Just today, somebody tweeted me, 'Hey, Brian, does your back get tired carrying all that water for Obama?' (Speaking with a mocking tone, sounding dim-witted)

FALLON: Wow.

WILLIAMS: Dude. Really.

FALLON: First of all, I apologize for sending that tweet. I apologize. I was drunk. I didn't know what I was doing.

WILLIAMS: And it's always like, you know, 'Partyboy@Arkansas.' (Dim-witted voice again)

FALLON: That's crazy, yeah. But I mean, do you find it hard. Being, you know, Brian Williams you can't really have a side. You have to be... you can't pick a side.

WILLIAMS: Well, I try to play it down the middle like you do every night. I do it in news, you do it in comedy. We try not to take a side.

That exchange made me gag.

I think Jimmy Fallon does a great job of keeping his show balanced. It's not overly political. He doesn't push an agenda. It's a great respite from all that stuff. The focus is on fun, not mean-spirited political sniping.

Brian Williams, on the other hand, does not provide balanced coverage of the news. He most definitely has an agenda.

The fact that Williams mocked someone criticizing him the way he did is revealing. Williams didn't cite a tweet complaining about him carrying water for the Republicans. He didn't say it's always from 'Partyboy@Massachusetts.'

Brent Bozell wrote a column about Williams' special and his assault on the Tea Party.

Of course, I didn't watch Taking the Hill, but Bozell's take is interesting.

Somehow, Williams never spent a second on his Obama special asking the President how he was going to handle the demands of “hardline liberals” – or any kind of liberal, for that matter. The only hardliners are conservatives who want to stop the spending madness. What this country desperately needs are more “hardline conservatives” to dismay network anchormen.

Williams undermined his own musical intro by questioning Boehner’s grip on power. “Mr. Speaker, is it fair to say you have a bit of a rebellion on your hands?” Sadly, Boehner tried to play along. “I've got a little rebellion on my hands every day. It comes with the territory.”

Williams pulled out the New York Times, not exactly where Republicans go to look good. “You don't look happy on the front page of the New York Times. It says ‘Boehner's Grip on His Caucus is Put to Test on Standoff.’ Feel like you're being tested?” Boehner agreed. The question is whether Boehner wants to pass that test by pleasing liberals like Brian Williams, or by pleasing conservatives.

Williams suggested the newest Tea Party Republicans in Congress weren’t real Republicans: “Your job is to run your party, but there is another party in there too. You have this Tea Party caucus that didn't come to Washington with the same values.”

This time, Boehner had a good answer. “It's not the Tea Party caucus. It would be more what I would describe as some hardline conservatives who want more. I don't blame them. I want more, too.”

And now we arrive at the point where Williams and NBC made colossal fools of themselves.

Williams wanted the political narrative to be painted by ultraliberal Sen. Charles Schumer. “Word has gotten around” that House Republicans held a meeting and showed a motivational movie clip from the Ben Affleck crime movie “The Town,” which Williams said “eventually involves hockey masks and baseball bats and tons of bullets.” Horrors!

After Schumer declared the Republicans were violent nuts, the NBC cameras turned to Republican whip Kevin McCarthy. Williams pushed him about this press-stopping scandal. McCarthy professed amazement that Schumer would be highlighting a movie clip from a meeting he didn’t attend.

He shouldn’t be amazed, and Brian Williams would never try to embarrass Democrats by accepting leaks about movie clips from internal party meetings. That partisan double standard defines the Old Media.

I wonder if Williams sincerely believes that he's fair and plays it down the middle.

Does he really fail to notice the way he exposes his bias?

Could he be that delusional?