August 3, 2010--EXTRA, EXTRA: TV Host Challenges Guest!

The New York Times' TV critic, Alessandra Stanley, looked in on Christiane Amanpour this Sunday. (Article linked below.) Ms. Amanpour, who left CNN after decades as its chief foreign correspondent, is now host of ABC's Sunday eponymous morning show, "This Week With Christiane Amanpour."

Contrasting Amanpour with David Gregory, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," who Stanley characterized as part of the "oasis of calm" that is characteristic of Sunday talk shows, she found Amanpour "animated" and "at times impassioned." Both to her good things. Stanley even cites an example of Amanpour actually "challenging" a guest, in this instance Nancy Pelosi, who Amanpour "pressed" to reveal what "her gut" tells her about the situation in Afghanistan. She even showed Speaker Pelosi the cover of this week's Time Magazine which has a picture of a young Afghan woman who had her nose cut off by the Taliban.

Pelosi looked away but retreated into a series of bland "politic answers."

Amanpour did not follow up, though she might have considering that Pelosi has voted for every appropriations bill to fund the disastrous war in Afghanistan, now dragging on longer than all wars in our history, including the eight-year-long American Revolution.

For "leaning forward" as she raised this question and "waving her reading glasses for emphasis," Amanpour gets kudos. At last, Stanley gushed, no more calm oasis.

Thousands of the best of our young people are in harms way and being killed and maimed in a disastrous war and waiving glasses is considered tough-minded journalism. This is not what the farmers of our Constitution meant when they protected freedom of a robust press as one of our basic freedoms and essential to a functioning democracy.

This pathetic pretense at serious journalism reminded me of a very different kind of interview that I saw on the BBC a number of years ago when George Bush was president and Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense. I forget the name of the journalist and I can't remember his challenging question--maybe it had something to do with restoring electricity to the cities of Iraq (something after nearly eight years we have been unable to accomplish though it has been one of our highest priorities--Baghdad now has power for just four hours a day).

Rumsfeld danced around the question, speaking from Pentagon talking points. Not satisfied with the answer, the reporter, word for word, repeated the question. Rumsfeld tap danced around it, offering the same answer. So for the third time, the interviewer asked the identical question. Rumsfeld still did not answer it. Then, still without attitude or waving eyeglasses like a prop, the interrogator posed the same question for a fourth and final time.

Rumsfeld's repeatedly canned response was an answer in itself. "Forget about the electricity," he in effect said. "So it's 120 degrees. We brought them elections, didn't we?. What's more important? Air conditioning or the semblance of democracy?"