Earlier this month, CBS’s Katie Couric had a one-on-one interview that produced no news whatsoever. It was a rather embarrassing display, with Couric telling the president that “people admire so much your ability to adhere to your principles” and adding gems such as, “I know you care so much about the soldiers in Iraq.”
The interview was widely panned. So, when Couric sat down Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a 60 Minutes interview aired on Sunday, surely Couric would not make the same softball mistake twice, right? Wrong.
Laura Rozen slammed Couric for the interview, saying, “I’ve never seen another serving official get such softball treatment from a serious news show.” Charles Pierce added, “Are they trying to make Edward R. Murrow rise from the earth and bite off their faces?”
I know I’m a day late on this, but I went back and checked the transcript to see if the interview was really that bad. It was. It was a 2,000-word segment with the most contentious Secretary of State since Al Haig, during a war, and Couric devoted most of the interview to Rice’s childhood and social life.
To be sure, Rice overcame a great deal, growing up in a segregated Birmingham, Alabama. But from a journalistic perspective, that doesn’t justify exchanges like this one.
COURIC: Do you ever draw parallels between bigoted bombers in Birmingham and suicide bombers in the Middle East?
RICE: Sure. Because the people who commit terror against innocents do it for the same purpose. Some people say, `Well, they do it to prove a political point.’ Then why go after little girls or innocent people standing at a bus stop in Britain or in Madrid? And it’s the worst kind of inhumanity to just go after innocent people who are just going about their daily lives, like those little girls, were just in the bathroom after Sunday school.
It’s almost as if Rice wrote the question for herself.
For what it’s worth, the WaPo’s Eugene Robinson also grew up in the South during Jim Crow segregation and believes Rice’s self-serving comparison misses the point.
Just a few hundred yards from my house, three black students were killed in a 1968 demonstration that had begun over a segregated bowling alley. I remember waking up one morning and seeing a dozen highway patrol cars parked across the street, the officers crouched with their rifles trained at a house two doors from mine. They were looking for the supposed “outside agitator” who was stirring up all the local colored folk, but fortunately he was long gone.
That’s one essential difference that Rice ignores — that during the civil rights era, the terrorism was of the kind we would now call “state-sponsored.” It was of the powerful over the powerless, not the other way around.
In her interview with Couric, Rice went on to argue that critics of the administration’s Middle East policies are like the racists who contended that black Americans were not ready to participate in democracy because they were “kind of childlike” and couldn’t handle the vote. But that’s a bizarre analogy. The last stand by white racists against integration and voting rights for African Americans wasn’t about patronizing attitudes some whites might have held — it was about power. It was about the knowledge that blacks were not just ready but also determined to exercise the right to vote.
She makes it sound as if those who disagree with the administration are standing in the schoolhouse door. But no one wants to deny Iraqis or anyone else the chance to practice democracy. The question is whether democracy should, or can, be imposed at the point of a gun.
If Rice really believes what she says, then why does she shun the democratically elected Hamas government of the Palestinian Authority? Are the Palestinians childlike and not ready for the vote?
Or is our Middle East policy such a mess that it has to be veiled in rewritten history?
Good questions, all. It’s a shame Couric didn’t think to ask them.