Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is moving closer to the center of power in the Republican Party, and the media’s inevitable but unforgivable response to that is not to point out the extremism of the Republican Party but to normalize Greene. 60 Minutes went all in on that Sunday night, abasing itself to the idea that if Greene is powerful in a major political party, she is worth giving a respectful hearing without significant pushback. Lesley Stahl may have been a reporter, producer, and interviewer for longer than Greene has been alive, but she was not ready to handle this.
When a television news show’s segment on a political figure intersperses interview questions about her insistence that the opposing political party is a “party of pedophiles” with clips of her working out and looking at family pictures, the intent was never to take on her extremist views in any serious way. And while Stahl’s questions sort of gestured toward follow-ups on a few occasions, there was no serious challenge present, nothing Greene couldn’t lazily wave off and keep going.
Take this exchange:
Greene complains that the news media harp on things she did in the past, like, as in this video, chasing after a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school shooting.
And things she says that are over the top, like:
Lesley Stahl: The Democrats are a party of pedophiles.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I would definitely say so. They support grooming children.
Lesley Stahl: They are not pedophiles. Why would you say that?
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Democrats, Democrats support, even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.
Lesley Stahl: Wow. OK. But my question really is, can't you fight for what you believe in without all that name-calling and without the personal attacks?
“Wow. OK.” Did the 60 Minutes team really think Greene was going to have backed off by that point and that a prepared follow-up wasn’t necessary? “But my question really is … “ Holy crap, you even think it’s worth asking questions of this person right now? And your follow-up is about civility? Greene just called an entire political party “pedophiles” because they support gender-affirming care for trans kids and civility is where you want to take that?
Stahl, respected journalist, just got fully outclassed by Greene—and everything about the segment suggests that that result was baked into the plan from the beginning. It’s “she says things that are over the top, like ‘The Democrats are a party of pedophiles,’” not, “she says things that are actively hateful and designed to cause harm to trans kids and smear an entire political party with an accusation of pedophilia because they support appropriate medical care.”
Then came Greene’s response:
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Well, I would ask the same question to the other side, because all they've done is call me names and insult me non-stop since I've been here, Lesley. They call me racist. They call me sen—anti-Semitic, which is not true. I'm not calling anyone names. I'm calling out the truth basically.
“They call me anti-Semitic, which is not true” gets no follow-up. You might think that a nationally prominent politician’s well-documented antisemitism would have been one of the things she was asked about, but no, she even brought it up herself and Stahl didn’t bite. Nor did Stahl ask Greene about her appearance at a white supremacist event.
This 60 Minutes segment was a gift to Greene. If her press team was designing it to boost her profile in exactly the ways she wants to be seen, they could not have done any better than Stahl and everyone at 60 Minutes did for her here. She gets the soft-focus human interest family-and-workout shots. She gets footage of herself interacting with enthusiastic supporters. And she dominates every clip of the interview, just completely steamrolling Stahl’s weak efforts to ask tough questions and even weaker efforts to follow up.
This is yet another sign that the media has no idea how to deal with today’s Republicans. No concept of the seriousness of what people like Greene, and their power within the Republican Party, represent. The existence of this segment should be embarrassing to everyone at 60 Minutes, but more than that it’s a warning sign for U.S. democracy because it shows that we have no effective watchdogs at the high levels of the media.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
