Returning from a trip to Iran for an upcoming 60 Minutes story on the authoritarian regime, correspondent Steve Kroft appeared on Friday's CBS This Morning to preview the piece and made an observation about the nation's nuclear weapons program: "...they're convinced that they're not building a bomb. They don't believe – we didn't talk to anybody who believes they're building a bomb. That the supreme leader has dictated that it's against their religion, you know, and that a fatwa was issued. It's on his website." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
At the top of the exchange, Kroft praised Iranian President Rouhani and his government as "pragmatists" who wanted to "stop all the bad talk" and try to "get a few things accomplished."
Steve Kroft
CNN anchor Jake Tapper blandly admitted the obvious in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. The same reporters that insist their former GOP favorite Chris Christie is ruined for 2016 by traffic jams on a bridge are letting Hillary Clinton skate for embassy-security neglect that led to four dead government employees at Benghazi.
Why would so-called watchdogs of government suggest Hillary is a shoo-in in ‘16 as if Benghazi never happened? Tapper strangely suggested that Benghazi always seemed like more of a White House scandal than a State Department scandal, and don’t blame him, because Hillary didn’t grant him an interview.
The New York Times published an unintentionally humorous headline on December 23: “When ‘60 Minutes’ Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at the Door.” Times media columnist David Carr is suddenly stunned that “60 Minutes” has aired a puff piece on a serious political matter.
In his article, Carr didn’t breathe a word about Steve Kroft’s long history of servile interviews with Barack Obama, most recently in January when he threw softballs at both Obama and Hillary Clinton at the president’s request. Carr’s never written about Kroft.
On Sunday's 60 Minutes, CBS's Steve Kroft boosted the agenda of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-identified socialist, by granting him 30 seconds of air time to attack billionaire Pete Peterson, who was featured on the November 17, 2013 edition of the news program. However, this half-minute block was 2.5 times the amount that Peterson got during Charlie Rose's report [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
Rose merely played a 12-second soundbite of Peterson during the segment, and mentioned the former Nixon Cabinet official's involvement with a group of philanthropists, who are donating at least 50 percent of their wealth to charity:
As timing would have it, my 12-year-old daughter read Orwell's "Animal Farm" for school just before I encountered an eerily similar human version of one of its characters.
Do you remember Squealer, the propagandist for the pigs who ran the farm after the animals seized control of the property? He was described as "a brilliant talker" who when arguing "had a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which was somehow very persuasive." (Audio after the jump)
The New York Post offered an op-ed on Monday adapted from the new paperback edition of Ed Klein's book The Amateur. Klein says Team Obama and Team Clinton made a deal last summer: Bill Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the Democratic convention in Charlotte endorsing Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor. But after he won his second term, Obama had second thoughts about endorsing Hillary in 2016.
"Bill Clinton went ballistic and threatened retaliation. Obama backed down," Klein asserteed. "He called his favorite journalist, Steve Kroft of '60 Minutes,' and offered an unprecedented 'farewell interview' with departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton."
In the days of the late Mike Wallace, "60 Minutes" was known for hard-hitting, aggressive journalism that asked the questions viewers wanted answered and held the powerful accountable.
The Jan. 27 program on which Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama (at his request, no less) and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fell far short of that high standard. It was the kind of softball toss you might have expected if Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters had conducted the interview.
Contrary to CBS's Steve Kroft, CNN's foreign affairs reporters actually asked the tough questions of outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in their Tuesday interview on The Situation Room.
While Kroft spun his foreign policy questions into softballs for Clinton and Obama on Sunday's 60 Minutes, CNN's Jill Dougherty confronted Clinton on Egypt and Libya. She started off asking if the Egyptian state would survive amidst bloody unrest, and then zeroed in on Libya:
A truly shocking thing happened on the CBS Late Show Tuesday.
Host David Letterman actually challenged guest Al Gore about his recent sale of Current TV to al Jazeera saying, “So you, Al Gore, are doing business with this country that's enabling your ultimate foe of climate change” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
As NewsBusters reported, CBS's Steve Kroft told CNN's Piers Morgan Monday that President Obama likes going on 60 Minutes because "he knows that we're not going to play gotcha with him."
On Tuesday, Fox News's Bret Baier quoted NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard's opinion on this matter (video follows with transcript):
Did you see that hard-hitting report on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, the one that charged that one of our nation's most famous leaders and role models is a shameless liar, a ruthless intimidator and even “incinerator” of enemies, a man who operates like the Mafia?
No, that wasn’t the interview with Barack Obama, alongside Hillary Clinton. It was an interview later in the same show about the drug-enhanced bicyclist Lance Armstrong. That’s CBS News for you – a guy who pedals a bike through France is hammered as if he is the most powerful man in the world, while the most powerful man is treated like a lovable celebrity -- because that is precisely how they feel.
MRC Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor appeared on CNBC's Kudlow Report on January 28, to discuss Steve Kroft's "60 Minutes" interview with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Kudlow asked Gainor to comment on the interview. He told Kudlow, "I did a tally and there were 15 questions, and 11 of them were complete and utter softballs. I wrote a piece for Fox and said that if CBS had a team, they should sign him. And the four tougher questions, two of them were very quick about Hillary's health, and he really didn't press her on that, and then two nominal questions where he really let Obama get away with just awful claims including that things had gone well in Egypt.
"We've got Morsi there coming out--we've found out that he's bigoted and anti-Semitic. We, now we're sending him jets. The Arab Spring has been a disaster, we didn't talk about Iran, we didn't talk about expansionist plans from China. I mean, it was like he didn't read the international page before he asked his questions," Gainor said.
(Video Below)