How 60 Minutes Wasted Its Interview with Obama

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/how-60-minutes-wasted-its-interview-with-obama/249827/

In an interview posted by 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Obama spends an hour answering questions posed by Steve Kroft, a 23-year veteran of the CBS television program who has won numerous broadcast journalism awards and enjoys unusual access to the president: earlier this year, he conducted the only interview with Obama on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and back in 2008 he scored the first post-election interview with Barack and Michelle Obama.

Were I an adviser to President Obama, I'd urge him to give his next exclusive to Kroft too, for there is a superficial toughness to his interviews. "There are people in your own party who think that you were outmaneuvered. That you were stared down by John Boehner and Grover Norquist and capitulated," Kroft says at one point. Later he notes that "You say that you rallied the country, but these poll numbers show otherwise. They show that 75 percent thinks the country's on the wrong track." As a political operative, these are exactly the sorts of questions I'd want the struggling politician for whom I worked to get, because it appears that he has volunteered to sit down with a tough interviewer, but actually he is being given an opportunity to offer free-ranging explanations for something that no one can deny: lots of people in America are unhappy with him.

As a journalist at a non-broadcast outlet, I am frustrated by interviews like this one. Few journalists (and zero non-journalist citizens) are afforded an opportunity to spend an hour asking anything of the president, and fewer still who enjoy a mass audience as big as 60 Minutes, which bills its broadcasts as "hard-hitting." It is therefore disheartening each time the opportunity is squandered with broad, superficial, softball questions:
***more at link

[Cigar11]

1. I got it;

They should have asked real Hard-Hitting questions like … where’s your Birth Certificate, or where’s your Harvard Grades

[NNN0LHI]

2. Ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner

[Mira]

3. A true ambush was needed, such as

"What newspapers do you read?"

[Cigar11]

4. Here’s a good question to ask the President of the United States …

Are you an American?

I'm sure the Conservatives are just dieing to know the answer to that complicated question.

[bhikkhu]

11. and then continually interrupting to change the subject, and preventing any full sentence answers

that's probably the kind of interview that would have gotten good marks.

[RC]

5. I see the Pro-Obama folks are out this morning.

Ask him where are the Living Wage Jobs and why he bails out Wall Street and not Main Street?
Ask him why he continued so many of gw bu$h disastrous policies?
Ask him why Git'mo is still open and why we need a base in Cuba in the first place.
Ask him what are we really doing in the Middle East in the first place and why are we still there?
Ask him if we are actually welcome in all those countries we occupy.
Ask him if it is OK for us to bomb and murder people in their own country, WE say are bad people, why other countries cannot do the same to us here in this country?
Ask him why it is more important to have a military budget the is as large or larger than the rest of the world combined at the expense of the needs of this country.
Ask him why we did not let expire bu$h's tax cuts on his rich friends.
Ask him why he thinks it is such a good idea for payroll tax cut and holidays that may benefit some in the short run but are disastrous in the long run.
Ask him where are the Living Wage Jobs? Jobs that funded the programs from payroll taxes. Just jobs does not cut it.
Payroll taxes are taking a double hit, lack of Living Wage Jobs and payroll tax cuts. How does this help Social Security and Medicare, both not and in the future?

[NNN0LHI]

6. My living wage job and many others were already gone when Obama was still a kid

And that happened back in the early 1980's. And I know who is responsible for why those jobs are gone too. I know this because I watched it happen in real time.

But you want me to blame Obama for that?

Good luck with that one.

Don

[ProSense]

7. Does

"I see the Pro-Obama folks are out this morning."

...this mean you're one of the Anti-Obama "folks"?

Ask him what the young people think

http://www.democraticunderground.com/100211431

[RC]

10. A Democratic President should be a Liberal President.

Not a Right of Center one.

Why this?
Obama to sign Citizen Imprisonment Law
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017600

[TwilightGardener]

9. Crazy, pro-Obama folks posting on a Democratic website. They should just get lost, eh?

[snooper2]

8. After doing some googles on the author of this piece, I've determined he is an idiot

Plus his parents can't spell