http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/09/maddowGlenn Greenwald
Wednesday, Dec 9, 2009 11:10 PST
Why don't the powerful get grilled like this?
By Glenn Greenwald
Rachel Maddow today is receiving well-deserved praise for a devastating interview she conducted last night with Richard Cohen, an "ex-homosexual" therapist who is head of the "International Healing Foundation," which purportedly helps gay people become straight. Cohen's rancid slander against gay people (they're a threat to children, etc.), masquerading as "research," is being used by advocates of a proposed law in Uganda that would allow the state to execute homosexuals. The 17-minute interview is worth watching if you want to see how an extremely smart and well-prepared interrogator can absolutely destroy a guest who is brazenly spouting baseless claims and patent falsehoods (the video is also posted below).
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One can watch what Rachel did in last night's interview -- what made it so effective -- to see why this virtually never happens on, say, Sunday shows when politically powerful people who interviewed:
(1) Rachel had obviously done a substantial amount of work prior to the interview, having even read the guest's books and being able to refer to various parts of them quickly; doing real work and real reading is far too burdensome for most of our coddled, vapid media stars.
(2) Rachel, despite being unfailingly civil and polite, was obviously indifferent to whether the guest liked her. She bombarded him with questions that made him extremely uncomfortable and which conclusively proved that he was simply lying. Media stars who host political interview programs would never subject powerful people to treatment like that for fear of losing access and/or their standing in the Beltway world.
(3) Rather than treat the guest and his claims as entitled to respect and deference, Rachel explicitly pointed out when he was lying, and even more important, demanded that he accept responsibility for his conduct (she told him he has "blood on his hands" for the role he is playing in enabling Uganda's oppression, and possibly execution, of gay people). It's simply impossible to imagine a Sunday morning media star telling, say, an advocate of the Iraq War that they have "blood on their hands," or explaining that those who advocated torture are "war criminals." Words like that are disrespectful and thus strictly prohibited when journalists deal with our elites. Sunday-morning media star journalists are there to obfuscate and elevate elite crimes, not expose them and certainly not describe them as such.
(4) Rachel's guest last night was modestly smart, coy and well-prepared, and pinning him down this way was not an easy task. Rachel was able to demolish his statements only because she is extremely smart, intellectually quick and dexterous, and able to think critically on the spot. To put it as politely as possible, people like David Gregory or, say, Brian Williams and John King don't exactly have those instruments at their disposal. That deprivation is a major reason why they're selected for those positions.
Just imagine how much better things could be if our political leaders were routinely subjected to the kind of surgically probing, lie-exposing interrogation which Rachel imposed on her homosexual-converter guest. But the reasons they almost never are speak volumes about our media stars and their true function.
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