Brian Williams leads this week's list of Winners and Sinners

Sinner: Brian Williams
Network anchors are usually careful not to advertise their personal convictions, to avoid damaging their Q ratings or their carefully nurtured images of objectivity. But Brian Williams punched a couple of large holes in his own credibility with two vacuous blog postings this week.

Last Monday, the NBC anchor began by making fun of all the soft stories in Sunday's New York Times. Then he contrasted those stories (young gay couples who love to barbecue!) with a "sparkling piece of journalism" by the magnificent Peggy Noonan, which Brian thought should put her in the running for a Pulitzer.

Here are some of the brilliant Noonan insights Brian pointed us to:

• Has Obama "ever gotten misty-eyed over ... the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history."

• "John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977–92."

• "Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country—any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?"

• In the words of Glenn Greenwald, "How trite, inane, and McCarthyite is this dreary right-wing pablum—even for Peggy Noonan?"

• But as devoted readers of Williams' blog quickly pointed out, the bigger problem with his posting was the fact that Williams was making fun of the Times after spending the previous eight days ignoring the paper's blockbuster expose of the networks' on-air use of retired military officers. Nothing on Nightly News—and nothing in his blog—explaining the silence. The Times had revealed that practically every one of these "experts" had multiple conflicts of interest—and most of their talking points came directly from the Pentagon's propaganda machine.

NBC, CBS, and ABC have all ignored the story, presumably because it makes all of them look terrible. But after Williams' blog readers pounced, the anchor finally offered a defense for the use of these retired talking heads—an account that many of his NBC colleagues considered wholly inadequate. Williams explained that he was close friends with two of the "heavily decorated U.S. Army four-star generals"—Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey—that they had made plenty of criticisms of the war and, therefore, there was no problem. Then he added: "I can only account for the men I know best," but he was sure that "[a]t no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers." That is implausible.

In any case, the anchor's explanation ignored the main point of the Times piece: that virtually all of these generals, including McCaffrey, worked for or consulted with military contractors, and the big advantage of participating in the Pentagon's propaganda program was the number of inside tips they got about new war contracts that were becoming available in Iraq.