Whose Ambush Was It, Anyway? : ‘The CBS Evening News’ Face-Off Dispenses Irresistible Television

It was just another ambush interview. Only this time, the interviewee ambushed the interviewer.

Vice President George Bush claimed that CBS News misled him by telling him that it wanted to interview him only for a “political profile.” If that’s true, then CBS News is guilty of shoddy ethics.

But c’mon, now. Bush was shocked? Flabbergasted? Stunned? He didn’t anticipate that Dan Rather would press him hard on his role in the Iran-Contra affair during their Monday night clash on “The CBS Evening News”? He didn’t expect Rather to extensively and forcefully pursue the issue most on the minds of the media these days when it comes to Bush’s presidential candidacy? Bush is that dense?

If he is, then heaven help him--and us--if he’s elected President and has to prepare to talk turkey with the Kremlin’s You Know Who instead of with America’s most-watched anchorman.

Of course he isn’t . You can bet that Bush was lying in wait for Rather, more than vice versa, and that Rather walked right into a trap and never knew what hit him. You can bet it was well planned and no ad lib when Bush rendered Rather momentarily speechless by saying: “It’s not fair to judge my career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?”

Gulp .

The reference was to Rather’s walking off “The CBS Evening News” set last September in a snit over his newscast being trimmed when the network’s tennis coverage ran past schedule, and leaving the network with embarrassing dead air time.

It was CBS News that was dense, in fact, for allowing itself to be set up by agreeing to Bush’s condition that the interview be live and thus unedited. It’s one thing to agree to that for a program with no time limit, one in which the interviewer doesn’t have to worry about the clock. It’s quite another on a closed-ended newscast, where the person being interviewed can merely run out the clock like a guard dribbling the basketball as the game’s final seconds tick away.

That’s exactly what Bush did. He finessed, filibustered and stalled, interrupting and evading Rather when the anchorman headed into touchy areas, and in turn getting interrupted by a clock-conscious, hard-charging Rather who sounded desperate. To some viewers, both men probably resembled petulant brats. But to many others, it must have appeared that Bush was being bullied and that once again, that the media were doing the devil’s work. The Bush people must have been turning somersaults.

Yes, it was great television, irresistible and electrifying, throbbing with conflict and movement, the kind of live, argumentative television that makes the medium so exciting, television that people talk about the next day and perhaps even throughout the campaign.

It was also meaningless.

The Bush/Rather interview, plus a taped lead-in on the Vice President, ran 15 minutes. And the only news it produced was that the interview took place.

What kind of nutty process is it when an interview consumes more than two-thirds of a 22-minute newscast, and the only news it yields is that Bush and Rather fought? What kind of a bizarre system is it when the process doesn’t merely overshadow the news, it is the news?

The trend is ongoing and increasing. Nothing newsworthy was said when NBC’s Tom Brokaw interviewed Soviet Leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow recently, for example. The news was that the interview occurred.

At least Brokaw and Gorbachev didn’t hiss at each other. The Bush/Rather event went a giant step further--its confrontational, almost hysterical tone and its pictures of an arguing Bush and Rather distracting from what was said. I got only a sense of what they were saying while watching the interview live, grasping the details only when replaying a tape of the interview and taking notes.

It’s a given that news anchors will always be the stars of news programs. But there has to be a way of lowering their profiles so that their presence doesn’t get in the way as Rather’s did Monday night.

If it had not been Rather interviewing Bush--with the anchorman apparently feeling he had to play a game of one-upmanship to maintain his personal prestige--the interview probably would have been swifter and less combative, passing into the night as a minor footnote instead of a media spectacle.

Rather’s questions were legitimate. He had every right to again push Bush to reconcile conflicts in his accounts of Oval Office briefings on the Iran-Contra affair.

But when faced with an evasive, feisty and counterattacking subject, Rather fell apart and evoked images of Capt. Queeg in “Caine Mutiny.” At times, he sputtered and stuttered. He preached. He seemed rattled. He spoke very fast and incoherently, running sentences together. And he jumped out of his impartial anchorman’s skin in emotionally challenging Bush to justify participating in the White House’s Iran arms deal.

“Can you explain that? You are supposed to be--you are--an anti-terrorist expert. Iran was officially a terrorist state. . . . You made us hypocrites in the face of the world! How could you do that?”

It was not a question of Rather being right or wrong about Bush and White House policy, only that there was no excuse for him assuming the roles of judge and jury in a newscast. Being an anchorman is one thing. But who appointed him America’s shrieking ayatollah of truth?

Rather is usually cool under fire. Yet it was impossible to watch this sideshow without comparing his performance with Ted Koppel’s work on ABC’s “Nightline.” After seeing Rather, you had to marvel anew at Koppel’s ability to process information and shift gears on the spot and conduct tough, challenging, often combative interviews without losing control.

Rather polished off Bush while the Vice President was in mid-sentence, just cut him off. He asked Bush if he would be willing to answer questions from all comers at a press conference before the Feb. 8 Iowa caucuses. Bush began evasive action, answering that he’d held “86 news conferences since March and. . . .”

Rather: “I gather that the answer is no! Thank you very much for being with us, Mr. Vice President.”

On KABC Radio Tuesday morning, Ken Minyard summed up the entire incident succinctly: “Rather Bush.”