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Perhaps the most controversial missed opportunity came when Greene denied her past comments about the Parkland school shooting. “I never said Parkland was a false flag,” MTG insisted on air. The show’s producers added a video clip of a tweet where MTG agreed with someone else’s tweet calling Parkland a “false flag planned shooting.” But that evidence went unremarked upon at any point thereafter in the segment. This was, shall we say, a missed opportunity.
Stahl tried to put Greene on the spot by telling her that 60 Minutes had “fact checked” her Parkland comments, but Green quickly hijacked the moment, asking if Stahl had also “fact checked all my statements from kindergarten through 12th grade.” Stahl never bothered to point out that what Greene might have done 30 years ago in high school (Greene is 48) is not the same as suggesting a school shooting that happened in 2018 was a “false flag.”
As a conservative who has long criticized liberal media bias, it feels weird to chastise the mainstream media for finally giving a Republican a softball interview.
But the goal should not be for the MSM to go from unfairly attacking Republicans to wrongly coddling them. The goal should be to inform the viewers and accurately portray the subject. If the goal of those weightlifting clips was to help us “find the real MTG,” well, that didn’t happen.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Greene is not a normal Republican or member of Congress. She is not a normal person. She is a conspiracy theorist who has advanced a conspiracy theory about 9/11, suggested Barack Obama was a Muslim, and that the Clintons are guilty of murder. And of course, there’s the QAnon thing, the Jewish space lasers thing…but we don’t have all day.
We’re witnessing a larger systemic issue here. Instead of relying on the same old packages they’ve been producing since Gerald Ford was in office, 60 Minutes (and the mainstream media, writ large) should rethink everything.
They can start with this: Instead of using media personalities and TV hosts who formed their opinions about politics decades ago, it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of journalists who are well-sourced, real-life reporters, and not afraid to ask tough follow-up questions. For whatever reason, interviewers who are not from the United States (see the aforementioned Australian-born Swan—or British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan) seem to have fewer reservations about asking uncomfortable follow-up questions.
This doesn’t mean the MSM should hire journalists who are more liberally biased; it means finding journalists who are more aggressive, more prepared, and just plain better at their jobs.
Right-wing populists like Greene have long argued that American institutions such as the mainstream media and establishment elites are decadent and soft and impotent.
The irony is, as 60 Minutes demonstrated, they’re right.
Whatever the institution is that you want to preserve, doing so will require fighting to keep it. Otherwise, it won’t survive this moment.
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