CBS's Margaret Brennan sat down with two Medal of Honor recipients on Face the Nation this Memorial Day weekend and tried her absolute hardest to get them to say something negative about America. It did not go well for her. Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Will Swenson and Command Sergeant Major (Ret.) Matthew Williams refused to take the bait and instead delivered an unscripted civics lesson that no network producer could have anticipated.
Imagine having so little self-awareness that you try to get the most decorated combat veterans in the country to dump on America — on the weekend we honor the dead. Peak CBS.
The segment, which aired Saturday from the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, started off fine. Brennan referenced the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American founding. "And before I let you go, we are coming up on this 250th anniversary," she said, clearly teeing up the kind of hand-wringing answer CBS lives for — something about division, or polarization, or how we've lost our way. You know the script.
But Swenson wasn't reading from her teleprompter. "Politics aren't everything. American lives continue on," he said. Then he delivered the line that should be printed on a billboard outside every newsroom in Manhattan: "No other place in history, time or on this planet have ever gotten to where we are today."
That's a Medal of Honor recipient telling a TV journalist that America is the greatest nation in the history of civilization. On CBS. On Memorial Day weekend. You almost had to feel sorry for the producers.
Almost.
Williams backed him up and then some. "It's so important to remember who we are as a country," he said, adding that "our country is a global superpower." Not a declining empire. Not a nation in crisis. A global superpower. Period.
As NewsBusters' Jorge Bonilla pointed out in his coverage of the segment, Brennan's line of questioning was designed to elicit exactly the opposite response. The media playbook for these interviews is well established — bring on a sympathetic guest, steer them toward lamenting the state of the nation, clip it for social media, run it as proof that Even The Troops Think America Is Broken.
Except these troops didn't cooperate. These are men who earned the Medal of Honor — the highest military decoration in the United States. They've seen things Margaret Brennan can't imagine from the safety of a CBS studio in Washington. And when given a national platform to complain, they chose gratitude.
That's what drives the media crazy. They can't comprehend that the people who've sacrificed the most for this country love it the most. It breaks their entire worldview. In their minds, anyone who's seen the ugly side of American power should come home disillusioned and ready to appear on a panel about institutional failure.
Swenson and Williams came home proud. And they said so on national television.
This Memorial Day, we honor the men and women who gave everything for a country that CBS apparently thinks needs an apology tour. Swenson and Williams reminded us it doesn't. God bless them both.