Charlie Rose has been an absolutely abysmal interviewer his whole career, which is a tragedy considering how good they are at booking great guests. He asks long leading questions, proceeds to answer them himself, and then tacks on an “isn’t that right?” at the end. When the guest inevitably says “that’s not how I think of it, Charlie, let me explain ...”, he then interrupts and repeats his original claim again. Ugh, drives me crazy.

He also kisses up like mad to a few people (Tom Friedman? Yuck.) while stomping all over experts he doesn’t agree with, often because he doesn’t understand their point.

My favorite was when at some point maybe 15 years ago he was interviewing I think Bill Joy, and asked one of his long multi-sentence leading questions. To which the response was ... pause ... “well, duh.”

* * *

Thankfully Terry Gross single-handedly makes up for all the bad interviewers in the world.