Defending missile defense. (Correction, Please!).

ITEM: When the Pentagon announced it would deploy missile defenses, ABC'S John McWethy complained on December 17th that, "the administration plans to spend $17 billion to rush into the field a system that may not work against a threat that critics say is remote."

ITEM: The same night, NBC Nightly News' Tom Brokaw planted more doubts. For instance: "The dream of a missile shield goes back to the Reagan Administration Star Wars program. The hang-ups have always been cost and the fact that the technology is not always reliable."

CORRECTION: Will missile defense be perfect against all threats when first deployed? Certainly not. Indeed, the idea is to put land-based interceptors in Alaska and California by 2004 to protect against a limited missile attack from regimes such as North Korea -- which is rapidly improving its long-range nuclear capability.

Deployment is required by the 1999 National Missile Defense Act, which passed the Senate 97 to 3. It was also a campaign promise made by George W. Bush.

Arguing that only perfect systems should be deployed is a ruse. As arms-control expert Ken Adelman has written: "The critics don't want a perfect missile defense system -- one fully researched and tested. They want no missile defense system."

It is not unusual to field a system with flaws. The Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and the JSTARS surveillance aircraft, for instance, were still in the experimental stage when used in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf War, respectively.

Meanwhile, the networks do their best to downplay or ignore progress. The Media Research Center has documented how Brokaw heir Brian Williams, a CNBC anchor, "has never failed to publicize an antimissile test 'failure,' yet never bothered to report on any of the five instances when missiles traveling at nearly 15,000 miles per hour were intercepted and destroyed."