Why 60 Minutes is Great Television & Terrible Journalism

Chris Kohatsu tweeted me the other day. 60 Minutes was posting an invitation to people to question or respond to Lara Logan’s story on US forces in Afghanistan.

As I had previously tweeted that Logan’s story was terrible, it was an invitation I could not refuse.

I submitted the video above.  So far, no response, but they have posted it.

Logan is in a class of ‘journalists’ that do no journalism.

What they do do is show up somewhere, turn on the camera and say ‘just look at this’.

This is not reporting.

This is TV making.. and there’s a difference.

Because she is with 60 Minutes, Logan gets great access. She hangs out with US forces in Afghanistan and they get shot at.  Great television, but this is not reporting.

She gets into a Humvee and, wearing a helmet, turns to the camera and says ‘this is difficult terrain’. This is also not reporting – this is closer to the kind of local TV news where the ‘reporter’ goes on the ride and breathless says ‘that was scary’.

The rest of the time she is interviewing the commanding officer in full makeup – (she’s in makeup, he is not).

What is missing from this is any kind of real journalism and that is the part that annoys me.

The US forces cannot venuture outisde the perimeter of their protected base, and even there, they are subjected to daily shelling and rocket fire.  When they do make the requiiste photo op trip to the local village, no one wants to deal with them, and they are armed to the teeth.

At one point, Logan turns to the commanding officer and says, “the public wants to know why, after 9 years in Afghanistan, you can’t even go outside the base’.

Well, I thought, a beginning.

But alas, she does not bother to answer her own question. Instead, it’s off on another ‘exciting adventure’ with lots of bang bang.

Journalism requires more than just showing up and turning on the camera.

It requires real digging and real work – something she seems either loathe to do, or incapable of doing.

She’s great at ‘our soliders are heros…’, but she is terribly at answer the ‘why’ question.

And that’s often the hardest one to answer.

Many years ago, a truly great journalist, David Halberstam, covered the Vietnam War. In those days you didn’t fly in the ‘reporter’ to do a few stand ups and then have them leave.  Halberstam spent two years in Vietnam, and what he came away with was some of the best war reporting in American history.  But is wasn’t just showing the bang bang – and there was plenty of that in Vietnam.  Halberstam peeled back the real truth about Vietnam – the corrupt goverenment we were supporting in Saigon, the failure of US military policy in the field, the lies the US government was delivering to the American people daily.

Halberstam’s coverage was so preise and so real that President Nixon called Punch Sulzberger, the publisher of the NY Times and Halberstam’s employer, and asked him to bring Halberstam home.  Halberstams tour of duty was, in fact, nearly up. Instead, Sulzberger renewed Halberstam’s stay in Vietnam for another year.

That was journalism.

60 Mintues is not.