Very briefly… Bob Costas showed he’s one of the best political interviewers on the tube right now when he interviewed President Bush. The only problem: he’s not a political reporter. Wolf Blitzer is a political reporter who, by comparison, has come to excel in non-interviews as he bangs out meaningless questions almost on par with Larry King’s interview of Jerry Seinfield.
3 thoughts on “Comparing interviewers: Wolf Blitzer and Bob Costas”
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Funny you should say that. My wife and I watched the Costas interview. In short, we disagree with you.No interviewer yet has appropriately lambasted the President directly, in the interview itself, for Bush’s failing and failed outlook on the world. Costas’s interview is certainly no exception. Instead of challenging Bush (as should have been done years ago), he fed him tepid, neutral questions that enabled Bush to continue to simply excuse himself.
In that interview, Bush claimed to have criticized Putin for Russia’s recent actions in Georgia. At that very moment, Costas failed a critical moral duty shared by fair reporters everywhere in the USA: why didn’t Costas challenge Bush on this obvious hypocrisy.
Larry King is pablum, but Costas in this case is simply slicker pablum. His interview style produces merely more apologist garbage. His style is not one more iota better for getting reality to the public.
Actually Bush was taken to task for his actions a few years ago by a reporter from Ireland during (I think) the run-up to Iraq. It *seriously* put Bush on the defensive because she asked questions that NOBODY here in the States would have asked….yet were items the public needed to know about.
“asdf” – true on the real depth of the Costas, but relatively, it was intelligent and researched. (I had to look up “pablum” — great word.rickf – yes, that was a serious interview that must happen more often. Here’s the link for that. I’ve said before that we need to have a direct accountability of speech that includes hard interviews, changing the role of the President’s press secretary to resemble the UK Prime Ministers Official Spokesman, as well as implement a more transparent engagement more closely aligned with the UK’s Prime Minister Question Time.