Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

W.C. Fields once bragged that while someone else had knocked down the adversary in a saloon brawl, Fields himself had been the first to start kicking him as he lay on the floor.

Admirable though this may have been under the circumstances, even those of us inclined to emulate the Right Honorable Mr. Dukenfield generally disdain piling on. The most reprehensible foe, once felled, ought to be allowed to lie there in peace for a few minutes.

Hence the disinclination to add to the opprobrium visited on NBC News since Nov. 30, when the New York Times ran David Barstow’s excellent account of how retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey has been co-mingling his roles as military-industrial complex entrepreneur and NBC analyst.

From the usual precincts of the liberal blogosphere – most pungently from Glen Greenwald in Salon – came not merely the predictable excoriation of the network, the Pentagon and the general, but some good reporting. Greenwald obtained the e-mails between NBC and McCaffrey in which they plotted a response to Barstow, which was minimal on the candor, maximal on the tuchis-covering.

And the lead of Charles Kaiser’s “Above the Fold” column in the Columbia Journalism Review on Dec. 1 – “Is there any limit to the shamelessness of NBC News?” – adequately reveals his point of view.

Under ordinary circumstances, these and other assaults on NBC should suffice. But the circumstances are not ordinary. First of all, NBC and the other networks – all of them guilty, if less grossly, of the same transgression – have yet to acknowledge even the mildest regret for not telling their viewers that the supposed experts giving analysis on war and terrorism are also in the war-and-anti-terrorism business.

That’s been noted.  But the problem here goes both deeper and wider than the anger that has been expressed at the networks, the Defense Department and McCaffrey.

As Barstow noted, McCaffrey is not the only defense-oriented analyst who has an economic stake in defense contracting firms on the side. Or, considering where most of the money comes from, not the only defense contractor who does network analysis on the side.

But perhaps the reporters and commentators have been so intent on finding conflicts of interest that they have ignored the question of whether all these defense and terrorism consultants really bring anything of substance to the discussion.

Or to put it another way, is it all something of a (perfectly legal) “racket” even without conflict of interest?

On Dec. 1, NBC’s Today show, host Matt Lauer interviewed anti-terrorism “expert” Roger Cressey about the recent attacks in Mumbai. Cressey has impressive credentials, having held senior positions at the State and Defense Departments and the White House national security team. He seems to have no defense connections. He is the founder and president of Good Harbor Consulting, which “provid(es) clients with a holistic view of the security risk they face (and) offers strategic advisory services for identifying security vulnerabilities and mitigating risks.”

Whatever that means, it does not appear to disqualify Cressey as a disinterested observer. But here is what we learned from the interview: The Mumbai attackers demonstrated that they had “very impressive training” and were “highly disciplined.” Though there are “conflicting reports,” the attackers were “probably supplied by outside forces,” perhaps from Pakistan, though that “doesn’t necessarily mean the Pakistani government.”

Uhhh, yup. Hard to argue with anything there. Equally hard to think you wouldn’t have gotten the same analysis at the corner saloon.

The point here is not to knock Roger Cressey, who comes across as an intelligent and responsible fellow, and who may in the past have given NBC’s audience the kind of insight unavailable elsewhere. But it might be a good idea if some press analyst with a faster Internet connection than mine and access to all that Lexis-Nexis stuff checked into what all these defense and terrorism “experts” have been saying. How have their predictions turned out? Is there any reason to conclude that they know any more than the network correspondent covering the story, or any reasonably informed citizen? Or, for that matter, the loudest guy at the corner saloon? Are the networks paying for real expertise, or just trying to hype ratings by interviewing “experts” who may not know more than the rest of us?

And considering that the ratings haven’t been going up, are they just wasting money? Not that long ago, the “experts” on news programs would be … the correspondents the networks were already paying. Reporters. As in:  journalists, who could make themselves expert in the area they covered by talking to sources in, say, the State or Defense Departments, or in academia. These might include sources with a conflict of interest. But the reporter could take that into account. Granted, the station would then have one less talking head to which to switch. But the information transmitted to the audience would be better informed and more honest.

Oh, yeah. Honest. Whereby we segué back to NBC. Because the problem here is not only broader conflict of interest; it is also deeper.

For our purposes, let’s forget about the Pentagon and the general. First, because, what’s new? A government agency is more interested in its image than in honesty. A businessman is out to make money. For neither discovery need we stop the presses.

Besides, as journalists (and that’s the focus here), they’re none of our business. NBC News is. And when asked by reporter Barstow about McCaffrey’s conflicts of interest, the president of NBC News, Steve Capus, “said in an interview that Gen. McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC.”
Let’s pause there for a minute, and let’s stipulate for the purposes of this discussion that the first part of Capus’s statement is correct. Gen. McCaffrey is a thrice-wounded combat veteran with two distinguished service crosses and two silver stars. As credentials for honor and achievement, these are not chopped liver.

But when Capus adds that McCaffrey “would never let business obligations color his analysis” (not his words, but Barstow’s accurate paraphrase), he raises one of two questions, or both:

1 – How dumb can this guy be?

 2 – How dumb does he think we are?

Because nobody could stop his or her business obligations (itself a euphemism for economic self-interest, or greed as it is sometimes known) from coloring his or her analysis. There is nothing complex or subtle or debatable about this. We are all flawed. We all want to get ahead. We’d all rather make more money than less.

Picture yourself on network television, asked to provide an assessment that will be heard by millions and perhaps influence policy-makers. Answering one way might nudge them toward a policy that would enrich you by many thousands of dollars. Perhaps millions. He or she who contends that this would not “color” his or her analysis is at the very least guilty of what a great poet, in quite another context, called “the self-deception that believes the lie.”

It isn’t that Barry McCaffrey is a bad guy. But he is a guy, vulnerable to all the weaknesses of all us other guys (of either gender). To contend otherwise is downright un-American. The Founders created our system of government with all its countervailing powers because they understood that no one is immune to the temptations of wealth and power. That’s why governments have laws, and news organizations have rules.

Still, at some point, we do depend on the honesty of particular people and organizations. Sadly, NBC News has none. In defending  McCaffrey, the network called him an “independent voice” because he had challenged former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s stewardship of the Iraq war.

But McCaffrey’s criticisms served his economic self-interest. He called for more troops, who would require more equipment and more services, many of them provided by companies McCaffrey worked for. In one case, a company of which he is chairman.
Then the network said (again, according to Barstow) “that the general’s relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC’s Web site, where General McCaffrey’s biography now features a link to his consulting firm’s Web site. That site, they said, lists Gen. McCaffrey’s clients.”

But as Barstow pointed out, that is false: “While the general’s Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR.” Veritas, according to Barstow, has paid McCaffrey at least $500,000.

In other words, NBC has been lying. Nor did this just start. Barstow earlier this year revealed several conflicts of interest on the part of the expert analysts on the networks. As far back as April of 2003, an article in The Nation revealed McCaffrey’s connections with businesses that could profit from his recommendations. The network’s non-reply, from vice president of NBC News talent development (whatever that may be) Elena Nachmanoff,  was “We are employing them for their military expertise, not their political views.” Defense contracts, she said, are “not our interest.”

Neither, apparently, is honest journalism.

In their (proper) outrage over the network’s failure to disclose these conflicts, NBC’s critics, even the angriest such as Greenwald, do not go far enough. The remedy here is not for the networks to disclose the conflicts. It is simply not to employ the conflicted.

Again, nothing here is complex, subtle or debatable. An observer who stands to profit from his or her observations does not belong on a news program. It’s bad enough that the networks regularly employ partisan ideologues as political analysts. At least their conflicts are obvious and are merely (if that’s the word) intellectual, not economic.

The final question is whether self-respecting journalists should continue any association with NBC News, such as appearing on Meet the Press. I realize that’s easy for me to say, some years and several hundred miles removed from the temptation for all that TV glory. And I should add that several of the program’s regulars are people I’ve known, liked and admired for years, as is departing host Tom Brokaw.

Still, there is a limit as to how many times one can lie down with this particular dog and expect to arise flealess.