Charlie Rose wastes more excellent guests than most hosts ever get to talk to

Just changed the channel after seeing Charlie Rose “interviewing” the Bradlees (Washington Post’s power family) talking about the new “memoir” book their son Quinn has written. So, okay, the kid has overcome some difficulties that might have crushed others, I get it. But I had to tune out when Charlie starts asking Quinn about going to a brothel (which very obviously made his father Ben uncomfortable) — the conversation went something like this:

Rose (to Ben): …so, what did you say when he told you he went to a brothel?
Ben: I don’t want to talk about this.

Rose (smiling smarmily): No, really, what did you say to him?

Quinn (grinning): He gave me a high five!

Rose (warmly turning to mom Sally Quinn): So tell us this story.

Quinn (smiling proudly): Well, so we were on vacation on St. Martin’s…

[at that point I just tuned out]

Can anyone tell me how this was the most important thing to talk about with them?

Charlie Rose somehow has the reputation of a “great interviewer” when really he’s just got a very good booker, who gets guests so interesting that even Rose’s overwhelming tendency to interrupt guests with what appears to be mulitple-choice answers to his question cannot disrupt their interestingness. Occasionally, though, his own desire to show what an “insider” he is overwhelms even his desire to show how he knows all the possible answers because he’s so smart.

This could have been a great opportunity to examine how difficult it is to live with serious heart defects, to perhaps examine how the costs of dealing with such problems mean that you have to be a wealthy Washington power couple who vacations in St. Martin’s to afford that care. He even could have bitten on a a line that Quinn seemed to offer (“I seem to be an animal released into the wild”) about what it’s like to grow up the troubled child of a Washington power couple, but instead he chose as always to demonstrate how he, Charlie Rose, is so personally plugged in to the Washington power elite that he can make them talk about prurient episodes in their own lives, even momentarily remind them, as he did Quinn, to pause and explain to the plebes what St. Martin’s is (“oh, Charlie, that’s an island in the Caribbean”).

Just once I would like Charlie to somehow summon his inner Bill Moyers, or even just his inner Peter Jennings for god’s sake, and not reduce his astoundingly interesting guests with interesting lives to just boring people who aren’t quite as smart or interesting or as perceptive of the conventional wisdom as Charlie Rose himself. Some day the ghost of Studs Terkel will float down from heaven and bop Charlie on the head with a rubber mallet and say, “not THAT impertinent question, you idiot!”