Aaron Brown Finds His Spine

Actually, I'm being unfair both to Mr Brown and to the small number of honest, investigative journalists left in America (an endangered species, to be sure) with that headline, but it was so startling and so refreshing to see a popular television anchor with a large, thoughtful audience actually use the power of his pulpit for the public good that I almost dropped my drink.

Let's recap the situation that suddenly made someone on CNN actually do some honest-to-gosh reporting for a change:

The quick summary: there's a commission investigating the 9/11 attack on America. Many blog readers (being news junkies) know this, but most Americans actually don't know this -- and how sad is that?

The commission, you will be even more surprised to learn, has had a very hard time getting the White House to cooperate. Never mind that the purpose of this commission is to study what went right -- and wrong -- to help protect America from future attacks, never mind that the commission is bipartisan and, by all accounts, nonpolitical -- a blue-ribbon panel of solid citizens who want to get to the bottom of the worst tragedy of our new, young century. The White House is worried that some facts might embarrass them (you mean like the fact that George W. Bush did nothing for almost 19 minutes after being told that the country was under attack? You mean like the fact that Iraq had no connection to 9/11, and yet we invaded them instead of rounding up the real culprits?), so they've been uncooperative to the point where now the President has decided that they can only have one hour of his time to question him about the matter.

That's one hour compared to the over 2,200 hours the President has spent on vacation. Just for comparison's sake.

Amazingly, however, that's not the story the national media have chosen to cover. The big story as of two days ago was that the commission had asked for a small extension to their deadline for a report -- 60 days extra time, which means the report would be out in July -- which they think will allow them to finish their work and put out a comprehensive report. After initial reluctance, even President Bush decided that was a reasonable request. But House Speaker Dennis Hastert (in what has been widely speculated as a "bad cop" turn to cover Karl Rove) denied the request without explanation. The only partial explanation offered was that it would mean the report was coming out too close to the election.

Survivors and relatives of the 9/11 victims, who it is safe to say were not planning to vote for Bush anyway because of his handling of that event, went ballistic. Democrats went ballistic. Non-partisan intelligent people (who heard about this -- it wasn't widely reported until after the fact) went ballistic. And, finally, someone good and decent (but with some power and access to the media), a guy trying his best to stay professional and above it all ... one guy decided he'd had enough.

That guy was CNN late night anchor Aaron Brown.

He didn't have to do much -- just make a small, heartfelt speech at the beginning of his newscast, which you can read here. I witnessed it firsthand and knew immediately that Hastert was toast.

Sure enough, within 24 hours the Speaker relented. It wasn't all Aaron Brown's doing, mind you ... some of us are capable of acting on our own, thank you ... but to deny the power of Brown's pulpit and his high national regard as a first-class television anchor in the mold of a Dave Galloway, a Jim Lehrer, a Walter Cronkite, is a serious mistake.

Two observations: one, it is absolutely pathetic that the state of our government is such that TV news anchors now must force the government to do the right thing; and two, when both Aaron Brown and Lou Dobbs are spending serious amounts of airtime questioning the administration line on just about everything, you know there's been a serious corruption in the Matrix, as Billmon noted today.