By Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG
While idiots in “professional journalism” circles and J-Schools (see below featurette on Poynter) speak admiringly of Steve Kroft’s shameful performance, the mainstream media notch yet another mark on their descent into total prostitution for the corporate system (which after all, owns them).—Eds
(Originally posted on 10 May 2011; reposted as a public service)
I N HIS FIRST and so far only interview since the assassination in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden, US President Barack Obama spent half an hour on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” reveling in the details of the extra-judicial killing, while insisting that anyone who questioned the action must be insane. (We also provide a video segment below. BUT CAUTION: Strictly for people with a strong stomach or confirmed masochists. Some of questions are such transparent “softballs” or “setups” for the interviewee to grandstand that it’s hard not to wince or puke upon watching these passages. While ALL mainstream media rarely shy from shilling for the corporate-dominated status quo, CBS has been moving —subtly—ever to the right and is now becoming a Fox News in disguise. In that sense, they’re subtle supporters of the status quo in the “velvet glove thief” tradition of The New York Times and other “revered” media institutions.)
The interview, conducted by CBS’s Steve Kroft, epitomized the role of the corporate media. In its sycophantic and wholly uncritical celebration of the Bin Laden killing, it is indistinguishable from a propaganda arm of the US government.
There were no probing questions, including on the many contradictions and absurdities in the official version of events. There were no attempts to examine the implications of targeted assassinations for relations between states. Nor was there any challenge to the US president on the connection between this killing and broader US policy in the region and internationally.
Among Kroft’s first questions:
“Mr. President, was this the most satisfying week of your presidency?”
“Was the decision to launch this attack the most difficult decision that you’ve made as commander-in-chief?”
“Was there a sense of excitement? Did this look promising from the very beginning?”
Another line of questioning centered on how Obama was able to keep the planned kill operation secret while going about his public appearances as president. This included:
“Was it hard keeping your focus?”
“Did you have to suppress the urge to tell someone? Did you want to tell somebody? Did you want to tell Michelle? Did you tell Michelle?”
The interview was organized as part of a well-orchestrated campaign to rebrand Obama, exploiting the killing of Bin Laden to cast him as a “war president” along the lines of George W. Bush. It is one more indication that domestic political concerns played a pivotal role in the decision to organize the assassination.
Faced with a deepening economic crisis and mounting social tensions at home, the killing is seen, on the one hand, as a means of diverting popular anger and, on the other, forging a more solid political base within the military, the intelligence apparatus and the most reactionary sections of the financial-corporate elite.
Obama was allowed to expound on the decision-making responsibilities of the commander-in-chief, “where you make a decision, you’re making your best call, your best shot” in “tough, complicated operations.”
While he claimed that his overriding concern in carrying out the operation was getting “our guys… in and get out safely,” he also asserted that the intelligence upon which it was based was anything but conclusive.
“As outstanding a job as our intelligence teams did… at the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation,” he said. “I mean, we could not say definitively that Bin Laden was there.”
If this is true, it underscores the extreme recklessness of the entire operation. Obama sketched out one scenario in the event the intelligence proved faulty: “And so if it turns out that it’s a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who’s in this compound, and, you know, we’ve sent Special Forces in we’ve got problems. So there were risks involved geo-politically in making the decision.”
He failed to spell out that such “problems” would stem from the Navy Seal unit murdering said prince and members of his family. This is hardly a hypothetical outcome, given that similar events take place with numbing regularity in Afghanistan, where special operations hit squads conduct night raids that routinely claim the lives of unarmed civilians.
Still greater problems were posed by the possibility that the Pakistani military would respond to the violation of their country’s sovereignty by an unknown invading force.
While hinted at, this possibility was glossed over in Kroft’s interview. He asked Obama, “There was a backup plan?” Obama responded, “There was a backup plan.” What it entailed was left entirely to the viewer’s imagination. It seems obvious, however, that it would have involved the use of military force against the Pakistani military, posing the threat of war.
Other sections of the interview dealt with the well-worn themes of glorifying the military and the intelligence agencies, while hailing a successful assassination as the confirmation of American strength and ingenuity. Obama declared that “the skill with which our intelligence and military folks operated in this was indescribable.”
He added, “So it was a moment of great pride for me to see our capacity as a nation to execute something this difficult so well.”
Needless to say, Kroft did not ask Obama whether he thought other nations would be entitled to take similar pride if they proved capable of executing similar operations against their enemies abroad.
At the end of the interview, Kroft asked what was perhaps his most interesting question: “Is this the first time that you’ve ever ordered someone killed?”
Obama responded, “Well, keep in mind that, you know, every time I make a decision about launching a missile, every time I make a decision about sending troops into battle, you know, I understand that this will result in people being killed. And that is a sobering fact. But it is one that comes with the job.”
Kroft made no attempt to follow this up and allowed Obama to evade the fact that this is indeed not the first time he has “ordered someone killed,” and not only in the general sense of authorizing military actions that result in deaths.
The “60 Minutes” interview was conducted on Wednesday and broadcast on Sunday. On the Friday in between the shooting and airing of the program, a US Predator drone carried out a missile strike in Yemen that killed at least two people but missed its intended target, Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen born in New Mexico. Al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric, has never been charged with any crime, much less found guilty in a court of law.
Early last year, Obama’s then-director of national intelligence testified to Congress that the administration reserved the right to carry out “targeted killings” of US citizens overseas as part of the “war on terror.” Administration officials subsequently confirmed that Al-Awlaki had been placed on a “hit list” along with other American citizens. While they alleged that the cleric had some unspecified involvement in terrorist plots, no evidence has been presented and his assassination has been authorized on the sole say-so of President Obama.
The killing of Bin Laden also came just one day after a missile strike that claimed the lives of the son and three grandchildren of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was the intended target of an assassination attempt. There is no question that such an attempted killing of a state leader could only have been carried out with Obama’s approval.
If Obama were to offer an honest answer to Kroft’s question, he would have had to acknowledge that there was nothing unprecedented in his order to kill Bin Laden. Rather, assassination has become a standard instrument of US policy, on a scale that outstrips the infamous period of the 1960s and 1970s when the CIA earned the name of “Murder Inc.”
In his final remarks in the interview, Obama concluded: “The one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking Bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”
Here one has the essence of the Osama Bin Laden operation. “Taking him out,” a phrase generally associated with gangland killings, is equated with justice being done. Anyone questioning this equation is dismissed as sympathetic to Bin Laden and mentally ill.
This bullying by the US president, however, only underscores the administration’s desire to silence the very real questions posed by the Bin Laden killing. This was made clear by the evolving claims made by administration officials over why Bin Laden was killed. Initially, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, claimed that the Al Qaeda leader was killed in a “firefight,” while using a woman as a “human shield.”
This was later acknowledged by White House spokesman Jay Carney to have been false. According to his account, Bin Laden was, in fact, unarmed when shot to death. One woman, Bin Laden’s wife, had been shot and wounded when she allegedly “lunged” at the Seals, while another woman had been shot and killed for unexplained reasons. Neither woman, Carney admitted, had been used as a “human shield.”
Carney claimed that the Seals were operating under a “capture or kill” order, and that Bin Laden had resisted capture in some unspecified way. “Resistance does not require a firearm,” he said. As in the earlier “firefight” account, the aim was to provide a “self-defense” justification for the killing.
Georgia Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was briefed repeatedly on the operation before it was carried out. In an interview last week with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he reiterated what military officials said on condition of anonymity immediately after Bin Laden’s death the order from the White House was to kill, not capture, the Al Qaeda leader.
The Navy Seals, he said, “went in with the idea of killing him, not capturing him.” Chambliss added, “We needed to take this guy out, and I know that’s what the executive order said.”
That such an order is illegal under international law is unquestionable. The real issue is why the Obama administration was determined to kill Bin Laden and not capture him, interrogate him and try him for his alleged crimes. Here a number of elements come into play.
What would have come out at such a trial?
First, there is Bin Laden’s long record as a valued “asset” of the CIA, going back to the early 1980s when he funneled CIA aid to the mujahideen guerrillas fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan and continuing through the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Second, any trial would have necessarily opened up the circumstances of the 9/11 attacks to judicial review, raising questions as to what prior knowledge elements in the US government had about these attacks and why they were allowed to take place.
Finally, there was undoubtedly the conception, worked out long in advance, that a “clean kill” of Bin Laden could be marketed as a triumph for the Obama administration and the military, setting in motion the propaganda barrage that has been unleashed over the past week.
Obama’s attempt to intimidate notwithstanding, these questions will not go away.
Among those raising them is Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II. “This can’t be done, not in this way,” Ferencz said in an interview with the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. “People cannot be killed in cold blood.”
In a letter to the New York Times, Ferencz contrasted the treatment of Bin Laden with that meted out to the leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich, responsible for the deaths of millions.
“The Nuremberg trials earned worldwide respect by giving Hitler’s worst henchmen a fair trial so that truth would be revealed and justice under law would prevail,” he said. “Secret non-judicial decisions based on political or military considerations undermine democracy.”
Bill Van Auken is a senior political writer with the WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization.
BONUS FEATURE
How J-schools (!) deform and stunt budding journalists’ sociopolitical consciousness.
Making cogs for the system’s propaganda machine
CASE IN POINT: The Poynter Institute (other schools, even the illustrious Columbia Journalism School, do not rise much higher.)
Below, what the Wiki says officially about this entity:(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
The Poynter Institute is a school and resource for journalism located in St. Petersburg, Florida. It owns the company that publishes the St. Petersburg Times and Florida Trend Magazine. It is in close proximity to the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library on the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. It was founded in May 1975 by Nelson Poynter, chairman of theSt. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly bearing the name Modern Media Institute. [1] In 1984 it changed to The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
In 1976 the Poynter Institute counted no more than 4 employees and 267 students. In 2002 the respective numbers were 59 employees and more than 1,200 students.
And here’s the product of such institutionalized imbecility. Read this absurd gusher closely, by one Al Tompkins, supposedly an authority in professional journalism:
Steve Kroft explains why he broke interviewing rules when questioning Obama about bin Laden death for ’60 Minutes’
by Al Tompkins Published May 9, 2011 3:21 pm Updated May 12, 2011 7:53 pm
When Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama last week about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s headquarters in Pakistan, the “60 Minutes” veteran violated many of the guidelines that we teach about how to conduct an interview. And it worked.
Why? Kroft kept the questions short and constantly mixed up the types of questions he asked to alternately seek facts, emotion and insight.
Kroft told me that when he sat down with the President, he had, in his hands, a list of 62 questions that he might ask. “We wanted to do the interview in three sections; the raid and the planning, the Situation Room and Pakistan. I knew I was not going to get through all of the questions,” Kroft told me by phone on Monday.
I teach journalists that there are three kinds of questions:
- The Objective (or Closed-Ended) Question: This type of question usually results in a “yes” or “no” answer. The objective question is used when you are searching for facts not opinions. Sometimes the objective question poses a choice, such as, “Do you mean X or do you mean Y?” The objective question seldom is the type that journalists use to elicit memorable quotes or soundbites.
- The Subjective (or Open-Ended) Question: This type of question seeks a thought, opinion, feeling or emotion. The question often begins with word “how” or “why.” This question is the one that produces the most memorable soundbites.
- The Non-Question Question: Kroft sometimes repeats words that the President just said as a way of asking for clarity or emphasis. This is more of a statement than a question. The non-question question is a signal to the subject to keep going, similar to saying, “That is really interesting, tell us more about that.”
Kroft told me “there were almost no outtakes from this interview. We aired almost everything we shot. We only cut out five minutes, not even that much, in editing.”
He said he consulted with others before drafting a list of questions. Then “I got up at 5 o’clock Wednesday morning and went through all of them again. I was very cognizant of eliminating questions that would lead to long answers.”
How the interview progressed
The story opened quickly, assuming any reasonable person watching would be familiar with the basic facts of bin Laden’s death. That was a great decision.
Kroft gets right to the interview with, interestingly, an objective (or closed-ended) question. Not what journalists might expect.
STEVE KROFT: Mr. President, was this the most satisfying week of your presidency?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, it was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my presidency but I think for the United States since I’ve been president. Obviously, bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism but a mass murderer who had eluded justice for so long and so many families who have been affected I think had given up hope. And for us to be able to definitively say, “We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States” was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.
I would have expected a subjective question to work best at the beginning of the interview. I might have asked the question, “How satisfying was this week?” But Kroft’s question was better than mine. His question would reveal any hint of gloating.
Kroft told me he carefully chose the word “satisfied” for the first question. “I played around with a couple of other words — ‘happy’ for example, but it brought up ‘celebration,’ which didn’t seem right to me, so I settled on ‘satisfying.’ ”
Kroft’s second question was also closed-ended:
KROFT: Was the decision to launch this attack the most difficult decision that you’ve made as Commander-In-Chief?
Kroft is aware he used a lot of closed-ended questions, and he did it on purpose because of time pressures and because of how this President answers questions.
“I have interviewed him before and you don’t want to ask him open-ended questions — you get long answers,” he said.
Kroft explained, “It is difficult to interrupt the President — it is not something I particularly like to do. The thing about this president is he will give you his thought process if you ask him about it. He will explain the complexities that weigh on his mind.”
A little later, Kroft asked a “double-barreled” question, two questions at once that can allow the interviewee to escape the first question and choose the second one.
KROFT: How much of it was gut instinct? Did you have personal feelings about whether… he was there?
Notice that the first part of that question, the subjective part, produced a quote, a soundbite when the President responded:
OBAMA: The thing about gut instinct is if it works, then you think, “Boy, I had good instincts.” If it doesn’t, then you’re gonna be running back in your mind all the things that told you maybe you shouldn’t have done it. Obviously I had enough of an instinct that we could be right, that it was worth doing.
Kroft used several other double-barreled questions, some a bit indirect that could have been more direct:
KROFT: When the CIA first brought this information to you…
OBAMA: Right.
KROFT: …what was your reaction? Was there a sense of excitement? Did this look promising from the very beginning?
The last part of the question is the useful part. I would have asked it as a closed-ended question, “When the CIA first approached you with information, how promising did that information seem to be?”
Then, I would have followed up with, “What was your reaction when you saw what the CIA had?”
Here is another example of how a double-barreled question allowed the President to escape without a direct answer. Kroft asked:
KROFT: Did you have to suppress the urge to tell someone? Did you wanna tell somebody? Did you wanna tell Michelle? Did you tell Michelle?
But the President never said whether he told his wife. The President chose to respond to the first question over the more interesting last one, a danger when asking multiple questions at once.
Kroft followed with single, direct questions, all in the perfect order to build our understanding of the sequence of events:
KROFT: When was that when you set that plan in motion?
KROFT: How actively where you involved in that process?
KROFT: Were you surprised when they came to you with this compound right in the middle of sort of the military center of Pakistan?
The objective questions were the right tool because Kroft was trying to get facts, not opinions, in this part of the interview. This information will not generate a quote or soundbite in anybody’s story but will be important copy or narrative text:
KROFT: Do you have any idea how long he was there?
OBAMA: We know he was there at least five years.
KROFT: Five years?
OBAMA: Yeah.
The value of short questions
Even when he asks double-barreled questions, Kroft’s questions are short, 15 words or less.
That brevity makes this interview so watchable.
“I probably wrote the questions longer, but the good thing about writing your own questions is you know the material,” Kroft told me. “I had to keep moving. I was so cognizant of the clock.”
Kroft also know the interview is not about him. Less confident interviewers have a habit of asking long-winded questions to make themselves look informed and commanding. Kroft is authoritative.
Look at this quick, open-ended question that produced an answer which made its way into newscasts around the world.
KROFT: This was your decision whether to proceed or not and how to proceed. What was the most difficult part of that decision?
OBAMA: The most difficult part is always the fact that you’re sending guys into harm’s way. And there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I mean there’re a lot of moving parts here. So my biggest concern was if I’m sending those guys in and Murphy’s Law applies and somethin’ happens, can we still get our guys out?
So that’s point number one. These guys are going in, you know, the darkness of night. And they don’t know what they’re gonna find there. They don’t know if the building is rigged. They don’t know if, you know, there are explosives that are triggered by a particular door opening. So huge risks that these guys are taking. And so my number one concern was, if I send them in, can I get them out?
Not every question is perfect. This one missed the mark:
KROFT: It’s been reported that there was some resistance from advisors and planners who disagreed with the commando raid approach. Was it difficult for you to overcome that?
Of course, the President is going to say “no.” Anything but a “no” would make him look like he has a divided circle of advisors.
A different closed-ended question might have elicited better information, like “What did you say to your closest advisors who told you they didn’t want you to approve this raid?” Or an open-ended question could have worked: “Your closest advisors were reported to be divided about this raid. How important was it to have unanimous agreement on something so important?”
Kroft asked a great question about how past failures shaped this mission but without providing long background in the question.
KROFT: How much did some of the past failures, like the Iran hostage rescue attempt, how did that weigh on you?
He had to assume that people watching this interview knew something about history. It could be a risky assumption, in some cases, so journalists have to know their audiences.
By using short, punchy questions, Kroft added an urgency to the part of the interview where the President talks about watching and listening to the actual raid. Look at the length of these questions:
KROFT: I want to go to the Situation Room. What was the mood?
KROFT: Were you nervous?
KROFT: What could you see?
KROFT: Right. And that went on for a long time? Could you hear gunfire?
KROFT: Flashes?
A nice mixture of objective and subjective questions, facts and feelings. About the release of those bin Laden death photos, Kroft didn’t re-state the debate. He just asked the question that people wanted answered:
KROFT: Why haven’t you released them?
Later, Kroft tried a non-question question.
KROFT: There are people in Pakistan, for example, who say, “Look, this is all a lie. This is another American trick. Osama’s not dead.”
Kroft needed to gather another fact about the burial. So he used a closed-ended question:
KROFT: Was it your decision to bury him at sea?
One of Kroft’s craftiest questions came late in the piece. It sounds innocent enough, but the answer could have generated headlines:
KROFT: Is this the first time that you’ve ever ordered someone killed?
The direct question gets at a key issue about the raid, was this a “kill mission” or could it have been a “capture mission”? It was the most sobering moment of the piece, set up by a simply worded question.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, keep in mind that, you know, every time I make a decision about launching a missile, every time I make a decision about sending troops into battle, you know, I understand that this will result in people being killed. And that is a sobering fact. But it is one that comes with the job.
While I spend a lot of time talking with journalists about how they open their stories, the “60 Minutes” interview is more remarkable for the way the piece ended.
Kroft moved toward the final soundbite with a statement, so the President was not backed into a corner and offered a remarkable ending:
KROFT: This was one man. This is somebody who has cast a shadow, has been cast a shadow in this place, in the White House for almost…a decade.
OBAMA: As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.
“We put that at the end because I thought it had a real sense of finality. I thought it was the strongest answer,” Kroft told me. “I was interested in whether he had moral thoughts about it.”
Again, the subjective answer proves to be the most memorable answer in the interview.
The “60 Minutes” interview was laser-focused. Kroft didn’t swerve off into politics and only lightly treaded into international affairs regarding Pakistan. Those issues will find their place in other shows at other times. This interview was about the decision-making process that led to an historic capture.
Nearly 14 million people tuned in as the interview began, (even more viewers watched the second half of the interview), making “60 Minutes” the most watched program of the night.
CBS and Kroft proved that skill can turn a straightforward interview with a politician into great TV if you ask the right questions and let the person answer.
Editor’s conclusion: This is pathetic. And we’re not making this up. Below the link to the actual page:
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