Charlie Rose

I enjoy Charlie's interviews greatly--they represent a rare oasis on television, a quiet half-hour or hour devoted to intelligent, thoughtful conversation. How rare is that?! But it kind of breaks down when Charlie is interviewing celebrities, particularly famous actors. Charlie kind of loses it with those people, becoming a bit fawning and, it would seem, a bit envious. I don't know what accounts for this--perhaps Mr Rose always wanted to be an actor, I don't know.

But this perception usually leads me to skip his interviews with actors, unless it's someone who I haven't heard from before. But there were even a couple of such programs where I couldn't get through the whole show because of Charlie's going ga-ga within minutes of the start. In those times I think of Charlie as a red carpet interviewer before the Academy Awards, except the people who do THOSE interviews usually maintain a better emotional balance.

I love watching this show. Charlie comes across as truly interested in his subjects and unlike others in his field, doesn't tend to take sides. He has a sense of humor and he has a wide range of guests, from the Nobel prize winners to the lamest celebrity on earth. However, I enjoy watching them because Charlie Rose seems born to interview and to interview correctly for the person across from him. Tom Cruise? No, I'm sorry, I'll pass on that one. However an hour with Tom Hanks? Could that be so horrible? I doubt it. Everyone needs a break from the constant political backbiting and drum beating once in a while and I appreciate his "fun" shows. Sometimes, you just want to listen to why "Run, Forest, run" was so catchy. Lighten up!

Charlie Rose's hour-long interview with Bernie Sanders on 26 Oct 2015 was, once again, hardly up to the standards one would expect from a televised interview series that has appeared on PBS for nearly a quarter-century.

Rose's aggressive, sometimes shabby, treatment of guests who challenge his neo-liberal bias and that of the show's funders is not new. See, for example, Scott F's comment (23 May 2015) on Rose's variable manner with other political guests:

"Two examples will hopefully illustrate {Rose's 'scrappy' biased interview style}. When Thomas L. Friedman is the guest (as he has been countless times) , I sit and wait for the moment when Charlie is going to bend forward to kiss Friedman's ring, as if everything Friedman says is as epochal as a papal homily. Contrast that with when someone from the political left is the guest (hardly ever, of course). When Noam Chomsky was the guest several years ago, Charlie attacked from every direction everything that Chomsky said, and that was after Charlie fessed up that Chomsky was one of the most requested guests ever by the viewers."

Rose made Sanders his new Chomsky. I did not count how many times Rose (a lawyer by training) put leading questions to Sanders, only to cut him off mid-sentence with additional questions. But it had to number in the dozens. Sanders took Rose's rapid-fire interruptions with good grace, perhaps sensing how many viewers would sympathize with him. And Sanders likely knew that sooner or later Rose was bound to slip up and let him (accidentally?) answer one of Rose's questions fully.

Despite Rose's persistent dismembering of Sanders' concisely articulated and well-supported explanations of his campaign's purpose, Sanders got a number of key ideas across. In the process, he nudged Rose into seeing that health care and education didn't really belong in the "social welfare program" drawer to which Rose had relegated them.

One marvels that Rose seems unaware that, to the politically savvy, the normative overtones Rose takes with guests whose opinions — left, right, economic, medical, artistic — veer from the beaten path betray him as a loyal defender of an elite-consecrated status quo.

Whatever talents Charlie Rose's decades on the air may confer, his most glaring professional deficit is his inability to get out of the way of guests who don't fit his Procrustean mold. Let them make their cases without the badgering, Charlie!

When it comes to effectively interviewing people who hold opinions at odds with his own, Rose has quite a few things to learn from NPR's Terry Gross and former late-night king Jon Stewart. Only, as a 73-year- old establishment-beholden millionaire, Rose may now be too comfortable with his Janus-faced role as darling/bulldog to sniff them out.

While Charlie Rose seems to be a very intelligent interviewer, after watching his show for many years, I come away with the impression that he's quite biased, unless he's in a foreign capital interviewing some tyrant who could easily arrest and jail him if not that he were a famous American talk show host. With guests that he clearly adores, he's overly compliant, and with those whom he quite obviously differs, he's overly scrappy.

Two examples will hopefully illustrate this. When Thomas L. Friedman is the guest (as he has been countless times) , I sit and wait for the moment when Charlie is going to bend forward to kiss Friedman's ring, as if everything Friedman says is as epochal as a papal homily. Contrast that with when someone from the political left is the guest (hardly ever, of course). When Noam Chomsky was the guest several years ago, Charlie attacked from every direction everything that Chomsky said, and that was after Charlie fessed up that Chomsky was one of the most requested guests ever by the viewers.

And lastly, two of my pet peeves. After asking a question of a guest, as soon as the guest begins to answer, Charlie compulsively interrupts with a further refinement of his question. Some guests then just keep talking, leaving Charlie no choice but to button up and listen. The other peeve is how Charlie talks with his left hand, and leaves it frozen in the air in front of the camera after his voice trails off. I want to say to him, "Charlie, put down your hand!"

I've been fortunate to have spent some time living in the South and getting to know southerners, including many in Charlie Rose' home state of North Carolina. The South is a singular region and contributes significantly to the American mosaic. I'm not talking about the `Big South'; Atlanta, Charlotte, etc. but the South of small to mid-sized towns where traces of authentic regionality still remain. Once you get past the almost inescapable, low-grade xenophobia that southerners often exhibit, they can be amazingly good-natured and generous. People everywhere have this capacity, of course, but southerners have a certain, unique way of doing it, a certain style. They also can, if one steps over lines that are often invisible to all except the natives, be quite judgmental and unforgiving. But again, it's all done with that certain style. Because I appreciate southerners, I appreciate Charlie Rose who is nothing if not southern. A product of the granitic Americana that still lives below the Mason-Dixon, and further polished by matriculation at Duke, the Stanford of the East, or Yale of the South, whichever works for you, Charlie Rose has enough suave for an entire ballroom of people and is slicker than snot on a glass doorknob.

This is one reason why his show works so well. Another is that Mr. Rose is a lawyer by training (Duke Law, of course), and he does not interview guests as much as cross-examines them. But he does it with such riveting savoir faire that his guests seldom know what has hit them; no need for anyone to be under oath. We are reminded that it's not what one does so much as how one does it; an understanding that must absolutely be grasped for successful navigation of the bayous of southern society. Rose's interviews of relevant figures in diplomatic and political circles, as well as his timely foci on other critical current affairs are often real public services, more than worthy of our time and attention. In the days following 9/11, there was seldom a better place to be on the tube than the Charlie Show. Mr. Rose has certainly paid his dues and established his well-deserved niche. But why is he such an unabashed Celebrity Hag?

Watching Charlie Rose fawn over someone like, for example, Tom Cruise, actually seeming to care what he thinks, is highly embarrassing. Sure Mr. Cruise is a competent actor. I admire his integrity and lack of obvious vanity in such films as Born On The Fourth Of July. Hell, I didn't even mind him in Legend. But let's keep it real. There's something about getting paid cyclopean amounts of money that tends to bring out the best in many of us. I certainly appreciate film, but if I find myself even slightly concerned about the details of Tom Cruise's thought process, or that of almost any actor, so many of whom are remarkably uninteresting `in person', I'll know that I no longer have a life. I mean, do Julianne Moore or Nicole Kidman, both undeniably luminous, really have anything to tell us, especially now? Tom Hanks? For the entire hour? (If only Charlie and I were both black so I could say, `N****r, please.' ) Sure, Tom's a nice guy, but so am I, despite my lack of millions, and I have had more than a few reasons not to keep the nice going.

We, and Charlie, genuflect to such people because we are becoming a society of actors; unauthentic, psychologically-truncated role players and poseurs. We just don't get paid big bucks for it; the dubious index by which we almost all measure our worth. We want to be someone else but without ever having discovered our true selves. Charlie Rose may not quite understand this, but he definitely knows how to use it. Sorry, Charlie, but when I see a Hollywood mug at the oak table, I'm gone, especially when said mug belongs to the astonishingly successful Michael Crichton, the person whom, I suspect, Charlie himself really wants to be. Crichton, ever gracious, as someone with his cash reserves can be, seems almost embarrassed at times by Charlie's slightly goggled-eyed supplication. You're cool too, C.R. Trust me. We all are, if you know how to see it. But, when the dust settles, I'll keep my Confederate money on you, Charlie, even if Benjamin Netanyahu rather snoidily rejected your offer to bear diplomatic communications to Hosni Mubarak. (Hey, Bibi's on the bench. You're still out there, plus you had to leave something for him to do, right?) You're still ok, even when your impatience at not being allowed to define international policy on the air nearly gets the better of you. Thanks for the many good moments. Keep up the good work.