Excellent piece about the fall of 60 Minutes by Peggy Noonan today.
We are living in the age of emergency—the economy, the Mideast, North Korea, Iran. The president has an utter and historic inability to forge a relationship with Congress. Unemployment seems intractable.
And the best Steve Kroft and “60 Minutes” could do was how wonderful are you?
The Obama-Clinton relationship is interesting, but here are some questions about it that might have elicited more than outtakes for a Hillary 2016 commercial:
Mr. President, does your foreign policy really come out of the White House, even out of its political office, and not the State Department? Has the department’s ability to formulate policy and be a player in terms of the development of grand strategy been diminished? Her first year in office Mrs. Clinton looked like someone who’d been put on a plane and told to do interviews on “Good Morning Manila” about how she met Bill. What do you say?
Mrs. Clinton, some think you held your tongue, made the best of a bad situation, worked the areas you could, moved forward on issues of particular concern like women’s rights; that you dummied up on Benghazi, demolished your congressional critics in one masterly day of testimony, and now have been rewarded for your loyalty and discretion with a joint presidential interview that amounts to an anointment for 2016. Can you comment?”
Most Americans may not remember it, but there was a time when Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart and Jason Mattera weren’t around yet — none of us muckrakers were — and there was one network show that could be counted on to ambush bigwigs and ask tough questions and get stories. That show was 60 Minutes. I know, right? It’s very hard to believe now.
60 Minutes doesn’t speak truth, or seek it, from certain powerful people anymore. It fawns over them, like People magazine.
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