’60 Minutes” Missed Opportunity

In the days of the late Mike Wallace, “60 Minutes” was known for hard-hitting, aggressive journalism that asked the questions viewers wanted answered and held the powerful accountable.

The Jan. 27 program on which Steve Kroft interviewed President Obama (at his request, no less) and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fell far short of that high standard. It was the kind of softball toss you might have expected if Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters had conducted the interview.

The president said of Clinton, “…a lot of the successes we’ve had internationally have been because of her hard work.” Kroft should have asked if one of those successes included Russia, a nation with which Clinton promised to push the “reset button.” Yet, as the Washington Post reports, “A poisonous unraveling of U.S. relations with Russia in recent months represents more than the failure of President Obama’s first-term attempt to “reset” badly frayed bilateral relations. It threatens pillars of Obama’s second-term foreign policy agenda as well.” And how about the Middle East, which is not exactly headed toward peace and stability?

Late in the interview, the president rattled off his administration’s foreign policy successes. He mentioned Egypt and said, “…had it not been for the leadership we showed, you might have seen a different outcome there.”

Kroft should have followed up with: “Different from Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s president and Muslim Brotherhood proponent, who agrees with the Koran that Jews ‘…are descendants of apes and pigs’”?

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