60 Minutes' Steve Kroft Speaks on Clarence Thomas Interview; Leaves a Few Questions Unanswered

One of the treats of the conference on covering race that I'm attending here at Columbia University, was a chance to hear 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft talk about one of his most controversial interviews in recent memory: his Sept. 30 sit-down with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Critics accused Kroft of handling Thomas with kid gloves to get the kind of access he has never given a TV journalist: hanging with him at his boyhood home in Savanna, Ga., riding in his RV (which he occasionally parks at Wal Marts when he is traveling?!) and questioning him with his wife. Thomas was selling a book -- Kroft admits the publishing house was instrumental in pushing Thomas to do the interview in the first place -- and still left CBS producers unsure if he would fully participate.

"I don't think anybody deserves to be defined totally by his enemies," Kroft said, explaining why he agreed with Thomas' feeling that he had been caricatured by the press. "He is somebody who hasn't gotten a fair shake in the press -- in part, because he let people define him."

I was impressed and a little envious at the resources Kroft said he had -- including seven or eight producers to comb through mountains of research to produce two thick "briefing books" which give him everything major that has been reported on Thomas. 

More than anything, I was intrigued by a moment when Kroft was asked about a typical Thomas inconsistency: He has a moment early in the interview where he insists race is not a huge factor in his life or perception of himself. But he also recounts growing up in a segregated south, feeling as if the white world discounted his law degree from Yale because he was black and being told by his grandfather that at a certain age, he couldn't dare look a white woman in the face for fear of lynching or worse.

But Thomas wound up an opponent of affirmative action who married a white woman. Doesn't that indicate that race had some impact on him, despite his protestations? "I didn't think about that until this session," noted Kroft today.

In an odd way, that response proved the value of what we're talking about here at Columbia. If you don't have journalists on hand who know black culture and black issues -- like the reasons why some black people feel Clarence Thomas is in denial about how race and affirmative action have affected his own life -- then you get stories which miss important cultural issues.

Later, we wondered why Kroft's story claimed at the outset that many criticisms about Thomas -- that he was an affirmative action hire who wants to kill affirmative action, for example -- were false. But the story didn't really seem to demonstrate how. And the many inconsistencies about Thomas' life and views weren't challenged much.

Still it was an informative look at how a big institution like 60 Minutes gets those big interviews -- and what viewers may be missing in the process. 

Comments

[Mark Richard]

Uh, about Clarence Thomas being a beneficiary of affirmative action but opposing affirmative action . . . well, Bill and Hillary Clinton attended segregated schools but oppose segregated schools. The fact that the other shoe never drops is just one example of the narrow framing devices on race. If Bill or Hillary had been subject to, say, a busing order, would their parents have relocated them? Would their political courses and attitudes have been quite as liberal about things like affirmative action?

Thomas is accused of 'pulling up the ladder' on other blacks after he had benefited from affirmative action. But the white advocates of these policies are almost always affluent baby-boomer and pre-baby boomer politicians who were doing something similar to a younger generation. It's class warfare by upper-income whites against lower-income whites, and the white liberals hide behind 'minorities' when attacked for their self-serving advocacy.

[Eric Deggans]

Huh?

Your um, unique analysis misses an important point. Segregated schools resulted rom a punitive attempt to subjugate black people -- they were not an effort to help anyone.

Affirmative Action programs, when implemented correctly, simply increase the diversity of candidates for important opportunities like good paying jobs or slots in an important college.

I'm afraid that comparing that system to segregated schools is like comparing student loans to loansharking or a self defense class to a lynching.

And if you want to talk about class warfare, I suggest you look at a GOP administration which has let 40-million Americans go medically uninsured, racked up trillions of dollars in debt to countries such as Saudi Arabia and China and sent 4,000 soldiers to die in a war where almost none of their children actually serve.

Don't be fooled by nonsense "cultural issues" -- the political party which has done more to hurt the working class in the last dozen years is sitting in the White House right now....