60 MINUTES

I haven't watched 60 Minutes for years! Some people are now saying that it isn't as good as it used to be, yet it's always been somewhat overrated. Too many of the show's reports are sloppy and tendentious.

Consider a report they did on communist Albania back in the '80s. The reporter said that the communist regime was installed by force of Soviet arms. Now the truth is that Albania was taken over by local communist insurgents who always considered themselves independent of Moscow, thus Albania stayed out of the Warsaw Pact and sided with China in its 1961 split with Russia. I can't believe that their researchers were that all-informed; I think it's more likely that they made a cynical decision to "simplify" the facts.

Then there's their famous 1993 report about the health benefits of red wine. In fact, the report's central revelation--that the French have a terrible diet but red wine protects them from heart attacks--was junk science. Firstly, the typical French diet isn't nearly as bad Morley Safer claimed with his characteristic glibness. Second, France uses different statistical methods so that many deaths that would be recorded as a heart attack in the United States are recorded in France as "cause unknown." No doubt the report increased excessive drinking...

Mike Wallace, with his trademark confrontational interviews, came to seem a self-caricature. I recall his interview with Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, which was more like a third-degree interrogation. (He asked whether the current Mexican regime's corruption showed that the Mexican Revolution of the World War I era was a mistake, which is like asking whether Watergate shows that the American Revolution was a mistake.) But Wallace was still a better interviewer than Lesley Stahl. I remember the time when she asked an interviewee a question, and as he started to answer she interrupted him to elaborate on her question. As he started a second time, she interrupted a second time for further elaboration. That's how not to interview!

More recently, I hear they did a story about how the subsidies given to solar and wind power and alternative-engine vehicles are a waste of money. (No mention of the far greater subsidies given to the coal and oil industries, of course.) A short while later they interviewed Elon Musk, mogul behind the celebrated Tesla electric car. Among other things, he mentioned that government subsidies played an important role in getting the car's production off the ground. They were careful enough to edit that bit out.

And don't get me started on Andy Rooney's semi-educated triviality...