In my morning
summary of editorial pages, I wondered why Cheney's three interviews on cable channels made so little splash. Well, I have read the transcripts of the three interviews and I now know why - the interviewers botched the interviews. I am not surprised that Fox (aka the Republican Cheerleading Network) didn't have a tough interview, but the interviewers for
CNN and
MSNBC, Wolf Blitzer and Lester Holt respectively, did an awful job.
Continued below...
The first problem with both is that they tried to cover to many topics in 10 minutes, which doesn't allow not nearly enough time to ask follow up questions to get around the boilerplate answers. For example, Wolf asked questions about 10 different topics in his ten minutes. They would have done much better to focus on just two or three topics.
A bigger problem is that many of the questions lead immediately to known answers. When Wolf asked, "[D]o you have confidence in George Tenet as the CIA Director?", the answer was as it always has been, yes. I would say half of Wolf's questions lead immediately to known answers.
The follow ups to questions, if there was a follow up, were always awful. When Wolf asked if terrorism is getting worse in Iraq, Cheney said "these attacks are desperation moves by al Qaeda-affiliated groups that are -- that recognize the threat that a successful transition in Iraq represents." Wolf could have then tried to pin Cheney down with, "Does that mean the terrorism is going to approve soon there?". He could have pointed out that this bombing is just one in a string of bombings in Iraq and that the administration has been saying from practically the beginning of the occupation that the attacks are a sign of desperation of some groups, so why should people believe that there isn't far more of this to come? Instead, Wolf followed up with, "[G]ive us some evidence that this is orchestrated by Osama bin Laden", letting Cheney off the hook for answering his initial question. Holt doesn't ask a follow up when Cheney gives a BS answer to where are the Iraqi WMD's, but asks 5 follow ups on whether Cheney really, truly will be running again as Dubya's VP.
The biggest problem was the questions didn't hit on the weakest points in the administration's talking points. To me, it's nuts to ask was Cheney or US intelligence wrong about Iraqi WMD's when administration officials have said "Blah, blah, blah...the NIE...blah, blah, blah" millions of times. Instead ask, "The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD's that has been released to the public was done 6 months before the invasion and before the UN inspectors went into Iraq. Was another intelligence estimate done after the UN inspectors found no evidence of WMD's in Iraq?". If the answer is yes, ask when will this later intelligence estimate be released. If the answer is no, then follow up with, "Are you saying the administration invaded based upon an out-of-date intelligence summary?" You know that the administration has been talking up the creation of 366,000 jobs over the last few months. If you are going to ask about jobs, you need to ask something like, "Are you proud or disappointed that over the last 5 months the economy has added only 30% of the number of jobs that the prior administration averaged over its 8 years?"