As an aside, I think a huge number of people think the liberal racism bit is spot on. As translated elsewhere in this thread, "erasing representation to avoid the discomfort of confronting racism" is a real phenomenon.
Yeah, unless the interviewer is a big name in their own right (so not in this case), your aim is to let the subject shine and fade into the background. The quality of your questions is only judged by what answers they elicit.
Larry King, on his interview technique, said "The key of interviewing is listening. I hate interviewers who come with a long list of prepared questions, because they're going to depend on going from the fourth question to the fifth question without listening to the answer"
Though I can't say I blame the interviewer. If I spent that much time flipping through a thesaurus crafting my questions, I wouldn't want to divert from them either.
I saw some instances of there being responses / references to previous answers inside the interviewer's questions, though, which led me to believe otherwise.