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Media Views

Talking Points Memo: Charlie Gibson: McCain's Favorite Network Anchor? (9/8/08) by Greg Sargent

Noticing that Charlie Gibson's scheduled ABC interview of Sarah Palin "was the second exclusive granted to Gibson by the McCain campaign in less than a week. He was the only anchor to interview McCain during the GOP convention," Sargent takes a look Gibson's technique:

While Gibson did confront McCain with a few tough questions, the opening of the interview was heavily freighted with questions like this one: "Senator, you're going to be accepting the nomination for president of the United States tomorrow night. You spent 5.5 years in a prison camp and you had a lot of time to think during that time. Did you ever, in your wildest imagination, think of such a thing?" ...and this one: "Your image has always been sort of the outsider, the straight talker, the hell-bent, swashbuckling Navy pilot. Now that you're to be the nominee, is it in any way constraining?"

Sargent points out that after Gibson, describing his questions for McCain, declared that "I finally decided not to even bring up the issues with her family,for they are issues of family and should remain so," he was coincidentally picked the very next day as the journalist who would exclusively interview Palin.

Check out some more examples of Gibson's tough brand of journalism in the FAIR magazine Extra!: Dubious Debates: How Media Moderators Lowered the Level of Election ’08 (7–8/08) by Jacqueline Bacon

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