Charlie Rose's hour-long interview with Bernie Sanders on 26 Oct 2015 was, once again, hardly up to the standards one would expect from a televised interview series that has appeared on PBS for nearly a quarter-century.
Rose's aggressive, sometimes shabby, treatment of guests who challenge his neo-liberal bias and that of the show's funders is not new. See, for example, Scott F's comment (23 May 2015) on Rose's variable manner with other political guests:
"Two examples will hopefully illustrate {Rose's 'scrappy' biased interview style}. When Thomas L. Friedman is the guest (as he has been countless times) , I sit and wait for the moment when Charlie is going to bend forward to kiss Friedman's ring, as if everything Friedman says is as epochal as a papal homily. Contrast that with when someone from the political left is the guest (hardly ever, of course). When Noam Chomsky was the guest several years ago, Charlie attacked from every direction everything that Chomsky said, and that was after Charlie fessed up that Chomsky was one of the most requested guests ever by the viewers."
Rose made Sanders his new Chomsky. I did not count how many times Rose (a lawyer by training) put leading questions to Sanders, only to cut him off mid-sentence with additional questions. But it had to number in the dozens. Sanders took Rose's rapid-fire interruptions with good grace, perhaps sensing how many viewers would sympathize with him. And Sanders likely knew that sooner or later Rose was bound to slip up and let him (accidentally?) answer one of Rose's questions fully.
Despite Rose's persistent dismembering of Sanders' concisely articulated and well-supported explanations of his campaign's purpose, Sanders got a number of key ideas across. In the process, he nudged Rose into seeing that health care and education didn't really belong in the "social welfare program" drawer to which Rose had relegated them.
One marvels that Rose seems unaware that, to the politically savvy, the normative overtones Rose takes with guests whose opinions — left, right, economic, medical, artistic — veer from the beaten path betray him as a loyal defender of an elite-consecrated status quo.
Whatever talents Charlie Rose's decades on the air may confer, his most glaring professional deficit is his inability to get out of the way of guests who don't fit his Procrustean mold. Let them make their cases without the badgering, Charlie!
When it comes to effectively interviewing people who hold opinions at odds with his own, Rose has quite a few things to learn from NPR's Terry Gross and former late-night king Jon Stewart. Only, as a 73-year- old establishment-beholden millionaire, Rose may now be too comfortable with his Janus-faced role as darling/bulldog to sniff them out.
