Party crashers incident means the White House should blacklist NBC News

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The affair of Mr. and Mrs. Tareq Salahi, the reality-show-fameballs who succeeded in crashing President Obama’s state dinner for visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, keeps getting more and more tawdry. It’s bad enough that a trailblazing ex-Army officer, Michele S. Jones, appears set to take the fall for the two scheming their way into the White House. But what’s even more revolting is the way that NBC News has managed to make this turd blossom into amber waves of exclusives. And the more you look at it, the more it seems like the White House should consider itself at war with NBC, not Fox News.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi took to NBC’s risible Today Show this morning to tell their side of the story. If ever there was a side of a story that didn’t need to be told to the public, it was Tareq and Michaele Salahi’s. It’s a side of the story that should be told to law enforcement officials, and then to a judge and a jury. But there’s Matt Lauer, pretending to be a newsman, squeezing them in for an interview parading as news with softball interview questions, allowing them to describe themselves as the victims in the story, not a single curl of Lauer’s lip into a sneer for the calculated effort undertaken by these two do-nothings to make the highest office in the land into a tacky prop for their career of meaningless fame and celebrity. The segment was nothing more than some crossover marketing for their probable appearance on the Bravo network’s Real Housewives of DC.

And why were they on Today? Gawker reports that the two had no choice but to speak with Lauer. They are under contract with Bravo, a cable channel which like NBC News is owned by NBC Universal. Bravo will set the ‘lives’ of the two famebots against the backdrop of their scurrilous reality TV series that tries to convince us that a herd of funemployed plastic surgery and hair weave victims are what real married women are like.

But Lauer hasn’t been alone at NBC News in pretending like the Salahis party crashing was some organic news development. Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News, with help from NBC’s White House news team, have reported breathlessly on whether the Salahis’ infiltration of the White House is evidence of lax security procedures.

And this is where it all starts coming together: Gawker also reports that the Salahis’ White House gate crasher routine was actually set up by the morons at Bravo who produce the Real Housewives series, a key plot point in their so-called reality TV series. So to re-cap: Bravo, a network owned by NBC Universal, decides to make the White House, and one of our nation’s most important diplomatic relationships, into a prop for their reality TV show. Once the incident becomes a big story, NBC News feasts on coverage of the ’story’ during a holiday weekend news slowdown, and then gets a big exclusive from the perpetrators of the hoax. This, ladies and gentleman, is what the corporate execs at NBC Universal probably refer to as ’synergy.’

And it stinks. That’s why the White House should re-consider its working relationship with NBC News. They’ve taken fluff entertainment, dragged it into the sphere of real news, and transformed it into a rare commodity that financially benefits them. The network has clearly put profits over the public interest of news gathering and reporting.

Now consider this sordid affair against the backdrop of the Fox News-White House spat that broke out during the Fall.

The White House claimed that Fox was putting a reality show up above national issues by not airing the President’s address on health care reform on its broadcast network, and that it was producing propaganda instead of news. But let’s at least grant to Fox that they are reporting on subjects that are of interest to their audience, however slanted that reporting appears to be. And the objection here was the way that Fox News was reporting on the issues of the day in a manner that was deliberately stacked against the Obama administration. I.e., they were focusing on the issues of the day, not some made-up story that had no merits in terms of its actual news value.

In contrast, with Gatecrasher-gate, NBC Universal’s proxy invented a news story that had nothing to do with important subjects at the center of public life in America, and turned it into exclusive scoops for its actual news organization. It’s a type of malpractice that strikes me as much more serious than any of the showmanship engaged in by Bill O’Reilly or Chris Wallace in the past nine months. And it’s worth keeping in mind the next time Robert Gibbs fields Brian Williams or Matt Lauer’s requests for a sit-down with President Obama.

Update: 7:44 pm – Chris Matthews just showed a clip from ‘In the Line of Fire,’ the 1993 Clint Eastwood thriller about a would-be presidential assassin, while interviewing Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Homeland Security Committee Chairman who will be holding hearings on the Salahis infiltration. If Rep. Thompson doesn’t look into NBC Universal’s role in this whole affair, he should be fired from a cannon.