Former Katie Couric Producer Asks NBC News: 'What the Hell Is Wrong with You Guys?'

Katie Couric’s former producer who has worked in the mainstream media in New York and Washington for 26 years wrote a scathing blog post last week denouncing NBC News, writing he could not defend the organization anymore from accusations of liberal bias. 

Deacon Greg Kandra, who has won Emmy and Peabody Awards, said that he used to defend mainstream media organizations from these sorts of accusations. But after NBC News edited George Zimmerman’s 911 tapes to make him look like a racist and again misled its viewers by editing a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania by Mitt Romney to make him look out of touch, Kandra has had enough.  

“I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable,” Kandra wrote, noting that he had for years told people to calm down when they “stomped their feet and pounded their fists” while snorting “liberal media bias!”

Kandra said he could not believe Andrea Mitchell, who aired the edited Romney tape and joked about it with The Washington Post‘s Chris Cilizza, “failed to acknowledge what the ‘criticism’ entailed” and “neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered,” while offering “nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.”

Mitchell’s failure to apologize to her audience seems to have been the last straw for Kandra, who then wrote: 

Forget it. I’m done.  You deserve what they’re saying about you.  It’s earned.  You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you.   You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more.  You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.

Good job.

I just have one question:

What the hell is wrong with you guys?

That is a question many have been asking of NBC, an organization that even omitted the most damning evidence against convicted child abuser Jerry Sandusky in a much-touted and now infamous interview conducted last November.