How Not to Interview a Toddler
Dorothee Benz
 The headline news from President Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes interview, taped on October 20, was that he walked out and ended the interview early, a fact CBS played up ahead of the October 25 airing of the show.
It was on brand for both Trump and the network. For Trump, it supported the image of the tough businessman who doesn’t play by Washington’s rules. It enabled CBS, meanwhile, to look like hard-hitting journalists.
The gulf between brand and reality, though, was significant in both cases.
 Lesley Stahl (60 Minutes, 10/25/20) introducing her interviews with Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
Lesley Stahl started the interview by asking, “Are you ready for some tough questions?”—instead of actually asking any tough questions. It was hard not to feel some sympathy for her, given that even her softest softball questions went unanswered and/or were interrupted while Trump complained, “You’re so negative,” and lobbed one outsized lie after another at her. She did try at times to correct his falsehoods, but mostly she just gave up on one subject after another and moved on.
But as anyone who has raised children or puppies knows, if you give in to the bad behavior, it is bound to be repeated. Stahl’s first substantive question (I use that term loosely) was “Why do you want to be president again?” To which Trump responded:
Because we've done a great job, and it's not finished yet. And when I finish, this country will be in a position like it hasn't been maybe ever. The economy is already roaring back. And—other people aren't going to bring it back, certainly the person that we're dealing with is not going to bring it back. They're going to raise taxes.
This response begs for follow up. How exactly have you done a “great job”? How can an economy with staggering food and housing insecurity, tens of millions unemployed, and crushing impacts on BIPOC communities be described as “roaring back”? And perhaps most importantly, what is your vision for a country “in a position like it hasn’t been maybe ever”? Yet Stahl didn’t engage with any of it, and thus set the terms for the rest of the interview— that Trump’s claims, no matter how outrageous, would go unchallenged.
Later, when Stahl tried to counter Trump’s assertion that “we created the greatest economy in the history of our country,” saying, “You know that’s not true,” it was futile. And by the time she was arguing with him about whether he said, “Suburban women, will you please like me?” her counter to his fictional great economy had dwindled to “the economy has kind of stalled a little bit.”
 Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (10/23/20)
As of mid-October, 10.3% of US adults had not had enough food in the last week, compared to 3.7% of adults who reported not having enough food sometime during all of 2019. In households with children, that number rises to 14%. These numbers bear witness to a massive increase in grotesque economic violence; and when considered alongside the fact that US billionaires increased their already obscene wealth by $845 billion during the first six months of the pandemic, there simply are no words to properly describe the depths of this depravity.
But here was Stahl, trying to keep the toddler in chief from throwing a tantrum by sweeping all this under the rug: kind of…stalled…a little bit.
Instead of actual tough questions that cited facts and demanded accountability for economic hardship; or human rights abuses by police and immigration authorities alike; or environmental regulations that are speeding global warming, extinction and mass deaths, Stahl asked inane questions like, “Can you characterize your supporters?” and “Do you think that your tweets and your name-calling are turning people off?” and made comments like, “I wonder if you think that masks don’t work.”
There are many other problems with this interview, but the absolute worst part was this comment from Stahl:
Four years ago, you were behind in the polls, as you are now, and you pulled it out. But this time, you have kind of a double migraine. You have unemployment claims going up. You have Covid cases going up. I mean, it's like the gods have suddenly decided to conspire against you—
Trump cut her off, and I can’t even tell where this was headed as a question, but What The Actual Fuck? Here is one of the supposedly top journalists in the country, preemptively absolving (the gods conspired!) the most powerful man in the world of responsibility for twin crises that we all know he made immeasurably worse with his actions and inactions.
The real Covid dilemma: How many guests for Thanksgiving
Stahl’s interview with Vice President Mike Pence was no better.
 Mike Pence on 60 Minutes (10/25/20): " I think the difference between President Trump and me and some of the public voices in this debate over the last year has been we trust the American people."
The vice president is the head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and, as such, should answer for the federal government’s breathtaking failure to address the pandemic. From the failure to provide testing or PPE, to the refusal to issue a national mask mandate, or to even mildly encourage the use of masks; the invocation of the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to stay open, ravaging immigrant communities, and the failure to apply it to secure ventilators; the lack of aid to struggling states and cities; billions in corporate bailouts, and peanuts for the tens of millions who have lost jobs. And so much else.
But did Stahl ask about any of those things? No. Instead, as with Trump, she turned life-and-death policy failures into matters of individual judgment and opinion. She asked if Pence cared to comment on Trump’s calling Dr. Fauci an idiot. Nine million Americans have been infected and a quarter million have died, not because of Trump’s insults, but because of a systematic and deliberate refusal to enact necessary public health measures. Where was that question?
Next, Stahl ignored Pence’s false dichotomy between the economy and public health, and asked this instead:
So let's say there's a mother out there. Let's say in a hot spot in Wisconsin. And she's wondering whether she should send her children to school. Now, what's your advice?... So are you saying she should send the kids back? Should the kids wear masks?
Pence said they “should adhere to whatever criteria the school administrators and local health officials determine to be appropriate,” which, amidst other nonsense and lies, was actually not a terrible answer. But it tells us nothing about what the administration has and hasn’t done, will or won’t do, or should or shouldn’t do. The framing of the question itself precluded a meaningful conversation about policy, erasing the responsibility of the federal government and devolving responsibility instead to a matter of personal judgment.
After this, Stahl and Pence agreed that Thanksgiving was one of their favorite holidays, and you’d be forgiven if your takeaway from this interview was that the most pressing public health question facing the nation is how many people to invite for Thanksgiving this year.
What’s scarier than a Halloween haunted house? A liberal White House
 CBS's Norah O'Donnell (60 Minutes, 10/25/20) introducing her interviews with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
As bad as the Trump and Pence interviews were, the ones with former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (10/25/20) were worse. When they weren’t just stupid (“Could Donald Trump still win this?”), Norah O’Donnell’s questions were based on textbook neoliberal orthodoxy. Indeed, they were virtually indistinguishable from the warnings corporate media have had for Democratic politicians in (and between) every election cycle.
O’Donnell:
The president made the case at the Republican Convention that your administration would be a Trojan horse for liberals. That AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren would actually be controlling policy, that this would become the most liberal administration in US history.
Besides being obviously and laughably untrue, note that the framing of this comment rests on the assumption that being “the most liberal administration in US history” would be a bad thing. And when it came to economic policy and taxes, the bias got even clearer:
You are proposing several trillion dollars in new spending over the next decade for economic relief, education, healthcare. How are you going to pay for that?... You think it's a good idea to raise taxes [on people earning more than $400,000] when the economy's in dire straits?
Where was the question about whether it’s a good idea to let children go hungry and families get evicted? Where was the question about how to provide healthcare for the 15 million people who have lost insurance coverage during the pandemic, or what Biden’s plan is in the (very likely) case the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act in 2021?
The only way to tell that this interview was from 2020 rather than 2016, 2008 or 1992 was the addition of a pandemic neoliberalism section, raising alarm at the prospect that public health measures might “lock down the economy,” and citing, uncritically and without context, Scott Atlas’s herd immunity policy recommendations. (I wrote about the first wave of kill-grandma proposals to save the economy stock market last spring.)
 CBS's Norah O'Donnell (60 Minutes, 10/25/20) to Kamala Harris: "Is that a socialist or progressive perspective" that you would bring to the White House?
O’Donnell’s interview with Harris was more of the same, grilling her on whether she would be loyal to Biden’s more conservative policy agenda:
You supported the Green New Deal, you supported Medicare for All. You've supported legalizing marijuana. Joe Biden doesn't support those things. So are you going to bring… those progressive policies… into a Biden administration?
There were multiple follow-ups doubling down on this, including some classic red-baiting asking if Harris’s perspective was “socialist.” To her credit, Harris laughed at that.
The follow-ups on whether Harris would pull a Biden administration to the left also included a specific request for reassurance that Harris would not, as vice president, ever advocate for universal healthcare:
Just to button that up, because you have fought for Medicare for All…. If you become vice president, would you say to a President Biden, "You know what? Let's—we should really be pushing for Medicare for All….”
Just to reiterate: The United States is in the midst of a catastrophic pandemic, hundreds of people are dying literally every day, 15 million people have lost healthcare coverage, the Supreme Court is set to end the program that provides coverage to another 21 million, and the thing O’Donnell felt it was important to “button up” was that the next vice president of the country would not be advocating for any kind of national healthcare.
Got it.
Oops, we forgot to ask about racism
Among the various ways that Stahl tried to placate Trump was her shameful avoidance of any discussion of the administration’s racist and ethnic cleansing policies. The only person asked if any of Donald Trump’s actions were racist was Harris…the only Black person interviewed. Natch.
Stahl found a slew of euphemisms to replace any mention of white supremacy (“racial strife,” “the country being divided against itself”) and failed to mention its impacts, particularly devastating in 2020, altogether.
 O'Donnell (60 Minutes, 10/25/20) told Joe Biden that because he says he would "address systemic racism," "there's a sense...that you would not be a law-and-order president."
O’Donnell did no better. But she did inadvertently admit that US policing is inherently racist. She told Biden:
There's a sense that there's a divide out there, that in order to address systemic racism, that it's anti-police, that you would not be a law-and-order president.
This, too, was a fishing expedition, looking for confirmation that Biden would choose “law and order,” i.e., the continuation of oppressive, racist policing, over addressing systemic racism. That much was clear from the follow up, in which O’Donnell invoked Trump’s barely coded racist boast, “I saved the suburbs.”
Whatever happens on and after November 3, one thing seems pretty clear: We can count on 60 Minutes to cover it in a way that props up the status quo.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to 60 Minutes at [email protected] (or via Twitter: @60Minutes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
|
