No, No, Norah

I am so glad I ended my beautiful-women picture blog.

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I ran that blog was including TV newswomen among my subjects - not just because I was prioritizing them for their looks as well as for their skills (which is why I excluded Fox News personalities, as if that made it any better), but because the same TV newswomen I featured whom I thought had professional scruples turned out to be sellouts to Trump.  First, Kaitlan Collins.  Then Kristen Welker.  Last Sunday, on CBS's "60 Minutes," Norah O'Donnell's number got called.

I touched on this earlier this month,  but I have to return to this issue.  Norah O'Donnell interviewed Trump for "60 Minutes," and the interview was pared down to fill two of the program's three main blocks between commercials.  (The name of the program is a gross misnomer; anyone who records it and watches it later will zip through the commercials and can watch "60 Minutes" in 45.)   Thus, the Trump interview took up the bulk of last week's broadcast.  In all of that time, O'Donnell neither asked Trump softball questions or asked tougher questions that he provided fudged answers to without any pushback or challenge.  That is, based on what I read and heard about the interview.  I didn't have the stomach to actually watch it.

It gets worse.  In going over the full transcript of the interview, voting-rights attorney and  activist Marc Elias found that O'Donnell had not only failed to challenge Trump in the footage that was actually broadcast, she had not challenged Trump in the parts of the interview that weren't included in the on-air version. "When I read the full transcript of the interview," Elias wrote on his own Web site Democracy Docket, "I realized there had been no pushback, no corrections, no challenging follow-ups. The entire interview had been an open-ended opportunity for Trump to tell rambling lies, only to have them cleaned up into a more polished product."

The decision was made to conduct an interview that didn't so much resemble Mike Wallace's hard-hitting one-on-one talks with national and world leaders as it resembled MTV interviews of the early eighties, in which the on-camera hosts would ask rock stars perfunctory questions about irrelevant topics (like the time Elton John discussed his role as a co-owner of the Watford soccer team - hardly anything to do with his music or anything most of his fans didn't know about).  O'Donnell, in interviewing Trump, seemed to have more in common with MTV host Martha Quinn than with ABC journalist Martha Raddatz.  But the decision on how to conduct the interview wasn't made by O'Donnell, or "60 Minutes" producer Tanya Simon.  It was made by new CBS News chief Bari Weiss, whose conservative politics jibe nicely with Trump's reactionary agenda, and whose motto for CBS News  - "Do the fucking news" - suggests that all she's doing is the fucking of the news.  Which is news in and of itself.

I don't think I can watch "60 Minutes" anymore.  Not even the arts and entertainment pieces, like Lesley Stahl's engaging story of Rob Reiner's long-awaited sequel to This Is Spinal Tap earlier this season, because those stories will likely skew more toward entertainers whose work has no value and who prosper largely for being good at self-promotion or savvy enough to do what it takes to stay hip.  In other words, people like Trump.  As for Norah O'Donnell, she has forfeited any right to be mentioned in the same sentence among pioneering CBS newswomen like Nancy Dickerson and Marlene Sanders.

And to think she might get rewarded for this MTV-style sham interview by being returned to the CBS Evening News anchor desk.