Science & Tech Quote by Tom Brokaw

Brokaw’s line reads like a veteran anchorman trying to throw a wet blanket on a digital brushfire before it burns down the whole village. The loaded phrase “political jihad” is doing two jobs at once: it frames the online backlash against Dan Rather and CBS not as ordinary criticism but as a coordinated, quasi-religious crusade, and it implicitly questions the motives of the people driving it. He’s not defending every editorial choice; he’s defending the legitimacy of a major news institution being judged by something other than a pitchfork mob.

Context matters. This lands in the early-to-mid 2000s, when the Internet was rapidly becoming an alternate court system for media scandals, and when Rather/CBS were engulfed in the “Rathergate” controversy over documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service. Traditional journalism suddenly had to answer to a distributed network of bloggers, partisans, and amateurs who could scrutinize typography, sourcing, and timelines in real time. Brokaw hears something unsettling in that shift: not accountability, but a new kind of ideological enforcement that treats humiliation as a civic duty.

The subtext is professional anxiety disguised as moral outrage. By calling it “highly inappropriate,” he’s asserting an older standard of decorum and adjudication - internal review, institutional processes, reputational fairness. But the line also exposes how legacy media wanted the Internet to be a tip line, not a rival newsroom. His complaint isn’t just about tone; it’s about who gets to define credibility when the gate is gone.