This is the thing I hate about media.

Charlie, dude, you're the moderator. You're a journalist who's been schooled and has tens of years of experience in the field, whose duty is to inform your viewers/readers about current events. If they aren't informed, ask the fucking question. "But has FISA turned down any request?" "The -- because -- whatever". "Ok, so has it turned down any request?"

Charlie Rose gets lots of inside access and high-powered guests because his MO is to kiss up to powerful people, ask softball questions, and follow whatever plan he made for the interview, regardless of the answers he gets. He almost never asks useful follow-up questions, often doesn’t seem to pay any attention to what his guests have to say, and asks lots of moronic paragraphs-long yes-or-no questions (my favorite answer to one of these was from IIRC Bill Joy from maybe 15 years ago “[3 second pause] Well, Duh.”). As an interviewer qua interviewer, he’s the worst in public broadcasting. But of course, his show is still sometimes worth watching, because he ends up getting lots of great guests.

I cant disagree with you more . I am long time hn lurker and this is my first post. I have been religiously watching Charlie Rose for the last decade . He is one of the best interviewers in the game . I learned more about the NSA surveillance program from this one hour interview than every other newsgroup ( tv , reddit , hn etc ) combined over the last week.

He really is a genius . He gets more out of the guest than anyone else. People sometime think that interviewer should be aggressive try to catch the interview off guard , make home slip etc. This approach doesn't help anyone.The guest just become defensive and tries to pick and chose every word while the interviewer just comes off the as dick.

I takes a long time to appreciate Charile's Rope-a-dope style of interviewing.He just keeps sucking up to the guest lets him get through all of their talking points they have memorized and then the magic happens.

I’ve been watching Charlie’s interviews since I was in middle school in the late 90s, and his interview style can be roughly broken into two categories as follows:

1. (If the guest someone powerful and mainstream of high status and inside access, someone like a business tycoon or politician or beltway pundit.) Ask inane softball questions, talk the guest up, agree with everything said, and generally make himself seem like an enormous ass-kisser. Praise the guest’s wisdom and insight. (For the most obnoxious examples of this, see his numerous interviews with the invariably clueless Thomas Friedman.)

2. (If the guest is a more marginal figure, e.g. an academic or an activist, or really anyone with an opinion that Charlie hadn’t considered before or doesn’t want to hear.) Interrupt the guest, ask inane questions, when they answer in a way he doesn’t want ask the same question over and over again until they’re thoroughly fed up. Condescend as much as possible. Intentionally chop off their interesting sentences halfway through and redirect the conversation back to whatever “setup” thing Charlie is thinking about.

The occasional sports star, movie director, etc. ends up with a somewhat better interview, because in those cases he’s not spending all his effort trying to push his own point-of-view and sometimes he even listens to the guest.

Find any week when the same guest was on both Charlie’s show and Fresh Air. Listen to Terry Gross’s masterful interviewing in delight. Listen to Charlie’s awful awful interview and bash your head into the wall until all that remains is a dent and some bloody pulp.

You'll enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KHMO14KuJk

(not american, sadly)

This was significant for Michael Howard, and it helped to absolutely kill any chance he had of becoming PM. Jeremy Paxman can be a bit of a dick at times, especially when he's up against someone who has done their research, but he's a fantastic person to put against politicians.

Anne Widdecombe's remark about that he had "something of the night about him" didn't exactly help his chances:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/691317...

I am familiar with Jeremy Paxman's work. It's impressive.

Now that is how you keep your eyes on the prize during an interview.

Yes, this is a failure of the Journalist. You job is to find the truth, if they are evasive you do not just shrug and move on.

As much as I dislike him the US needs a Jeremy Paxman who is willing to ask the same question 14 times in a row. (Yes, I know the reason he asked so many times was because they were running fast, he still had to have the balls to do it.)

The inarticulate, chopped-up sentences are one thing. But he's always been really big on the doublespeak, in my opinion.

The inarticulate, chopped-up sentences are just an artifact of the article's author purposefully being nasty to Obama. Everybody talks like that; it's just not quoted as a matter of course.

I think it makes more sense to say the author is writing it like that to show that Obama was stumbling with his words in response to a "yes/no/I don't know" question. That's useful information that I appreciate the author conveying.

The problem here is that that information is being conveyed solely through contentless innuendo. You can expect the same level of disfluency from a softball

"How awesome is your new program?" "So awesome"

Q&A session. People only think this transcript shows Obama stumbling with his words because they aren't aware that printed media cleans up the natural disfluencies that occur in speech. This transcript looks highly unusual, but that isn't because Obama's false starts and stops are unusual (they aren't). It's because it's unusual for them to be printed in a quote. Thus, the conclusion that the author is malicious. An attack on Obama for refusing to answer the question is fine. An attack on him for speaking like a normal person in a spoken interview makes no sense.

I think your response is valid and an excellent counterpoint.

I would only disagree by pointing out that the President of the United States is not a normal person merely having a spoken interview. He's known as an excellent orator -- that's an important part of his job --, his speeches are carefully crafted and as you (seem to) say this is a softball interview. With all that in mind, why is he stumbling over a seemingly simple question?

Couldn't it just be laziness? Is it customary to clean up someones speeched transcript so that it reads better in written form?

It's not just customary; it is very much against standard practice not to do it. You want to see what people actually say? The Nixon tape transcripts famously didn't clean the speech.

No, people that get flustered or that aren't practiced at speaking talk like that.

Basic speech trick is pausing for a second, thinking through your answer, and then giving it carefully. This gives you time to avoid null words and ums and false starts.

If you're the POTUS, I'd be more than happy to give you a little time to think over your answers about surveillance questions before you bumble through them.

Yea, it does sidetrack from the substance of the discussion.