Edward R. Murrow is one of my journalism heroes. I’ve read four books on him – two major biographies, a history (Murrow’s Boys) on his time organizing CBS News team in London during WWII, and the memoir Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control by producer Fred Friendly who was his partner. This latter has the most-detailed telling of their famous See It Now broadcast (the precursor of 60 Minutes) that documented the grave actions of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, devoting a full chapter to it. The show is considered one of the seminal steps in helping end McCarthyism by showing his reckless brutality for what it was. It is also part of the CBS legacy for high-end journalism. (In fact, when I was at Northwestern, I did a one-on-one independent study with a new professor, Sig Mickelson, who had been president of CBS News when Murrow was there. We never talked about the McCarthy broadcast, but did talk about Murrow, though only briefly. By the way, if you ever saw George Clooney’s movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, Sig was played by Jeff Daniels – who looks absolutely nothing like him. Rather, he looked a lot like the actor John Randolph, who you’d recognize. But I digress.) I didn’t watch Lesley Stahl’s interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. I have my standards, and even at their lowest level, I'm afraid that ignorant, anti-Semitic, conspiracy-minded, Insurrectionist fascists aren't able to reach them. That, and I just didn’t have the stomach for it. As a result, I can’t comment on the specifics and won't. What I did see, though, was the promotion they did, and I know the show’s long history of promoting their segments. And when they have something controversial or that has conflict, they make sure to let the audience know. But when they’re doing more of a puff piece, they make that clear with friendly footage. This had warm footage of Lesley Stahl walking around the street with Greene with happy smiles. And the text wasn’t about how 60 Minutes was sitting down with one of the more divisive members of the House, but instead about her getting the “nickname” of MTG. (A particular warning light because she didn’t “get” the “nickname,” but gave it to herself out of jealously after seeing all the attention Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was receiving as AOC. While I hoped dearly that the broadcast would be an heir to the See It Now "Tiffany network" legacy of Murrow-like shredding of Joe McCarthy, I didn’t have those expectations. The show's promotion for this looked a whole lot closer to a puff piece than an insightful look at someone who was a divisive danger to the country. Further, I have since seen several articles on the Stahl-Greene segment and read comments from people who did watch. And like many things in the news, we often rely on what little we do know and what is reported by others we trust. And if it wasn’t my worst fear of a puff piece, it seems to have been a cousin dancing in the neighborhood. A good friend, who knew my concerns, wrote – “So I saw the 60 Minutes interview, and I thought that it was not good at all. She did hit Greene with quotes and debated her, but she let Greene get the last word which implies a logic and elevates her bullshit to a respectful level as you feared it would.” He later went into more detail when we spoke, and explained how Lesley Stahl would occasionally show footage of Greene, but not use it as the foundation for a more involved discussion, or not use video of Greene to contradict something disingenuous she tried to pass off as the truth. And that Stahl seemed to try to make the piece -- both out on the street walking among the people and when inside for the more direct interview -- charming, which ultimately humanized the anti-Semitic, fascist Greene. Stahl would also ask a hard question, but not follow-up with what was the obvious comeback you were waiting to hear. (For instance, when Greene responded to a challenging question about some reprehensible comment she posted on Twitter by saying she didn't write all of her tweets and that some of her staff did, Stahl left it there. Nothing more. As if that explanation was reasonable and the accepted final word. Left unasked and hanging in the air were such blatant, follow-up questions as -- Do you read the tweets posted under your name? And do you none-the-less agree with that tweet that was posted under your name? If not, why didn't you delete the tweet? Or why not publicly respond that a staffer posted that and explain what your real position was? And did you reprimand the staffer? Have they continued posting some of the other problematic things under your name that you don't agree with? And how do we know they were posted by a staffer and not by you, since after all they are under your own name? We just have your word for it with no evidence to suggest anyone else wrote it.) When Stahl asked Greene about her repugnant charge that Democrats were the "party of pedophiles," she not only doubled-down on the charge but even included President Biden in her weird, reprehensible definition that somehow involved the concepts of sexualizing children and transgender. Stahl's response was an almost-whispered, "Wow." While I'm sure to many, Greene's own incoherent words were damning, but it left uncertain viewers with her explanation as the final arbiter. Since this wasn't a live broadcast, and 60 Minutes could have put together the segment in as informative a manner as they wanted, perhaps editing in a brief interview with an expert in the field talking about how damaging such horrific mis-representations are might have been more pointed. And then there was a far-more damning tweet written by respected scholar Norman Ornstein, who wrote – “I have known Lesley Stahl for more than forty years, worked alongside her for many election weeks. She has been a great journalist, but this is a disgraceful, cringeworthy performance. Shameful to the max.” All the more shameful because Lesley Stahl is, as Ornstein noted, an excellent journalist with a long, admirable career. And shameful, too, because she seems to have ignored a story she's told on herself. It’s from the time she did what she thought was a blunt, critical 60 Minutes piece on President Ronald Reagan, which included footage of him giving a speech at Mount Rushmore surrounded by American flags. The next day, she got a call from a White House advisor she knew, and was sure he’d be screaming at her. Instead, though, he told how great he thought it was. She couldn’t understand why, she’d said such harsh things about Reagan. "Oh, Lesley,” the official told her, “the American people don't listen to what you say; they only see those great pictures of Ronald Reagan." As she wrote later, she realized it's all about the visuals. And so, there she was on Sunday, giving the lovely visuals of walking around, smiling with Marjorie Taylor Greene. As I said, I didn't have it in me to watch. So, the specifics are not as issue here. What is clear is that the show was not an exposé on Marjorie Taylor Greene, but an attempt to offer a balanced look at her. And at that, I don’t have a clue what 60 Minutes thought it was doing – and why? After all, they’re not idiots. They know who Marjorie Taylor Greene is. They know she helped enable the Insurrection to overthrow the government. They know she’s still enabling the GOP to undermine democracy. They know she’s a Q-Anon conspiracist. They know she’s ignorant and an anti-Semite, who pushed Rothschild-backed space lasers, among many other lunacies. They know all this – so, I have no idea what they were doing??? And that's the point. Even if they were trying to do a “balanced” piece, this isn’t a balanced person -- in more ways than one. This is a crazy, ignorant, divisive person who is a danger to democracy. And they know that. Balanced is good in journalism. But so it truth and accuracy. Sometimes, there are "both sides" to a story. The Murrow-McCarthy broadcast is a master class in journalism, showing how this kind of thing should be done, fairly and accurately, with meticulous research and video using Sen. McCarthy’s own words. And importantly, compared to what Lesley Stahl did with Greene, it wasn’t interview, but rather an exposé. My recollection is that Murrow and Friendly had no intention of inviting McCarthy on as a guest. (It’s possible they asked, and he refused, but I don’t think so. They kept it very secret, except from the top network executives. They didn’t want anything to leak, so that McCarthy could get out ahead of it. To be clear, Marjorie Taylor Greene is no Joseph McCarthy. Though – if she had a clue who he was, which I’m not certain of, other than him being a “name” she’s heard – she probably would love to be. And is divisive and dangerous and fascist on her own terms. Murrow and Friendly had been talking about doing the show on McCarthy for a while, but weren’t sure of the right now, or focus. They’d done a couple of shows that touched on McCarthy – one about an Air Force lieutenant, Milo Radulovich, who McCarthy tried to destroy because his immigrant father subscribed to several Yugoslavian newspapers to stay in touch with his homeland, one paper which was designated Communist, and another broadcast about a black woman named Annie Lee Moss, who was a low-level clerk at the Pentagon who McCarthy tried to paint as a national security threat. (When his mistakes surfaced, and the hearing turned into a disaster for McCarthy, he left the room and turned the rest of it over to his counsel – Roy Cohn, later Trump’s mentor.) But these shows about newsworthy miscarriages of justice were just precursors to the ultimate See It Now broadcast that focused solely on McCarthy, one which was long-planned as something debated internally for a while to do. As I noted, the broadcast was considered one of the first efforts to erode McCarthy’s power. CBS was very concerned with the broadcast and wouldn’t even take out ads for it. Murrow and Friendly had to take out their own ad in New York and pay for it themselves. Murrow and Friendly made an offer to McCarthy that he could respond on the show any way he wanted. A few weeks later, See It Now turned over their full 30 minutes to McCarthy, who sent them a half-hour film to air. There was a slight bit of criticism about the “reply” not being totally fair, since Murrow-Friendly were professional broadcasters who had all the technology at their disposal, while McCarthy just sat and talked to the camera for 30 minutes. In the end, though, McCarthy came across so badly in his response that that was almost as damaging to him as the Murrow-Friendly report. And then, to reinforce the difference between then and now, in a subsequent broadcast Murrow got the last word, correcting the lies and mistakes that McCarthy had tried to attack with. In fact, here is the way Murrow began his six-minute reply. Compare it to Lesley Stahl response of "Wow" after Marjorie Taylor Greene ranted about Democrats and President Biden being pedophiles. Murrow began this way -- and went on for another 5-1/2 minutes. (Which you can listen to here.) Last week, Senator McCarthy appeared on this program to correct any errors he might have thought we made in our report of March 9th. The larger point of all this is that knowing what CBS/60 Minutes/See It Now once did at its peak, that’s why it was all the more shameful the way the show and Leslie Stahl, an otherwise excellent journalist, didn’t come close to their legacy of how to deal with dangerous, divisive fascists. All she had to do was sit down in the CBS archives and watch how Edward R. Murrow did it. Not that she had to do it the same -- journalism has changed, and few people are like Edward R. Murrow, nor have the gravitas and public support he did to go up against someone so powerful. But she could have seen that you don't have to be ingratiating with the person you're interviewing, and you're allowed to ask follow-up questions and not let someone who is lying or just plain ignorant, racist and fascist get away with it. It's harmful to Lesley Stahl's legacy and to the high-end legacy of CBS and 60 Minutes, which got its start with See It Now. This is how you do it.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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