Chris Wallace interviewed George Bush [Sunday] on Fox News and, after asking Bush about his views on waterboarding, this was the "question" which Wallace -- sitting next to Bush in front of a cozy fireplace (after a borderline-romantic stroll with him down a picturesque, snow-covered Camp David trail) -- asked of him:At least when Bill Clinton got his, it was behind closed doors, not on network television.WALLACE: I want to follow up on that. Whether it is interrogation of terror prisoners or the intercepting of surveillance among al Qaeda members, are you ever puzzled by all of the concern in this country about protecting of rights of people who want to kill us?Wallace's obsequious framing was too brazenly propagandistic even for Bush to accept:BUSH: That is an interesting way to put it. I wouldn't necessarily define some of the critics of my policy that way. I would say that they want to be very careful that we don't overstep our bounds from protecting the civil liberties of Americans.If the subject of a political interview finds the questions from the "journalist" too favorably slanted to embrace (basically: "I think you're being unfairly harsh to my political opponents"), isn't that a fairly compelling sign that there is something profoundly corrupt with the journalist?
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Brezhnev-era Pravda would have been too ashamed to ask such blatantly subservient questions of political leaders. But Chris Wallace is a Very Serious Journalist and Fox is a real news network.
(Cross-posted.)
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