Ugh, are you kidding? Charlie Rose is a terrible interviewer, fawning all over people he thinks have high status, and constantly interrupting and pissing on people he disagrees with. [He’s maybe better than cable news shows, but that’s a pretty low bar.] He asks far too many ridiculously leading questions, cuts off insightful lines of discussion by his guests to bring them back to whatever point he’s trying to make, and often just starts rambling about something irrelevant. His show is worth watching because of the fantastic quality of the guests, not his skill as an interviewer. My favorite Charlie Rose moment was maybe 10 or 15 years ago, in an interview with I think Bill Joy, but it might have been someone else. Charlie asked some rambling minute-second “don’t you agree that...” type question, and his guest responded with a bored look, “well, duh.”

Go listen to a couple of episodes of Terry Gross’s truly masterful interviews on Fresh Air, or watch interviews by, say, Bill Moyers, and then come back and watch an episode of Charlie Rose. Try paying attention to the different ways they lead an interview, and the resulting differences in the conversation. Often someone will be in the news or have a new book out, and will appear on both Charlie Rose and Fresh Air at about the same time; the Fresh Air interview is always dramatically better.