Why NBC News Should've Known Better

A lot has been written about Barry McCaffrey in the past couple days following a blockbuster New York Times report on the screaming conflicts of interest between the retired general's role as an NBC News commentator and his deep and broad financial ties to military contractors.

But one thing that's been overlooked is the parallel between the current flap and an earlier scandal that arose during McCaffrey's time as White House drug czar.

In January 2000, Salon broke the news that the Office of National Drug Control Policy, under McCaffrey's leadership, was quietly paying television networks to weave explicit anti-drug messages into some of their most popular shows. (It was a little more complicated than that -- rather than giving the networks cash, ONDCP was giving them back airtime it had already purchased at a discount, allowing them to resell it at a higher rate. But that was the gist.) After a period of defending/minimizing its actions, ONDCP dropped the controversial program a year later.

Flash forward to the present. Neither NBC nor McCaffrey makes any serious effort to dispute the substance of the Times's reporting: that, time and again through the years, McCaffrey has articulated positions on the air that serve the interests of the many military contractors that write him checks for sitting on their boards or consulting for them.

Instead, both have chosen to treat the report as an ad hominem attack. NBC News president Steve Capus "said in an interview that McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis," while McCaffrey thumped his chest and declared himself "a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity."

Perhaps he does have integrity of a sort. But it's now been made clear twice over that McCaffrey also possesses a high-handed certainty in the pureness of his own motives and an arrogant willingness to decide for himself what the rest of the world does and doesn't need to know. His actions as drug czar show that he's comfortable shaping a single message to suit multiple agendas without disclosing that fact to the message's recipients. Why, then, shouldn't we suspect that's exactly what he's been doing on NBC?

McCaffrey may have been an honorable general, but he makes an awful journalist. NBC News should end its relationship with him or face the loss of its credibility.