Terry Gross vs. Bill O'Reilly

Old Hag has pointed out that NPR's Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has given Terry Gross (host of the popular Fresh Air program) a spanking over her interview with rightwing dickhead Bill O'Reilly. I happen to have heard Gross's interview with O'Reilly, as well as her related interview with liberal humorist and author Al Franken a couple of weeks earlier, and I have to agree with Dvorkin that Gross was not even-handed in her harrassment of O'Reilly.

In her prior interview with Franken, she was possitively fawning, while she spent the whole time challenging O'Reilly with accounts from Franken's book about what an asshole O'Reilly is. The best part of the interview, right before O'Reilly stormed out of the studio (giving a 50-minute interview, first), was him demanding of Gross, "Were you this hard on Al Franken? Well, were you? Were you??" to which she could only meekly reply, "Well, no, but..." (or words to that effect) before he cut her off to rant a bit more.

All of which makes me think I agree with Curtis White's essay "The Middle Mind" (which I read a couple of years ago in Harper's) to the effect that what passes for intellectual thinking in America, as embodied by Gross and Charlie Rose, is pretty lame. I mean, what percentage of those two's interviews are celebrities, for starters?