I tried to watch Meet the Press a week or two ago but couldn’t get through more than 20 minutes of David Gregory as the new host. Although Tim Russert was deeply flawed in his own way, I could at least stomach him for an hour. Gregory I cannot abide. Glenn Greenwald sums up some of my thoughts on the matter here:

Several months before he was named as moderator of Meet the Press, David Gregory went on MSNBC to categorically reject Scott McClellan’s accusations that the American media failed to scrutinize the Bush administration’s pre-war claims. Gregory vigorously praised the job which he and his “journalistic” colleagues did in the run-up to the Iraq War — the period which Salon‘s Gary Kamiya called “one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media.”

Proclaimed Gregory, with a straight face: “Questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the President. Not only those of us in the White House Press Corps did that, but others in the media landscape did that. I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn’t do our job. I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.“

Perish the thought that a reporter should point out when government officials are making “bogus” claims and are lying a country into a war. That is “not their role,” says the New Tim Russert (and, unsurprisingly, the Old Tim Russert wholeheartedly agreed).

Whatever one’s views are on Israel’s attack on Gaza — pro, con or otherwise — there’s no denying that it’s an extremely controversial matter — at least it is in the world that exists outside of mainstream American political discourse. Even within Israel, there are scathing criticisms of what the Israeli Government is doing — on both strategic and moral grounds. Yet none of those objections made their way into David Gregory’s interview of Livni. He didn’t present her with a single argument against the Israeli attack. He didn’t challenge a single word she uttered. He was even more sycophantic with her than the average American journalist is with the average American political leader.