Owing to journalistic multiple-personality disorder, Bob often ditched his persons-of-human-interest pursuits for higher stakes inquiries. Thus, in his 20-year-tenure at WNYC’s On the Media, he not infrequently found himself in extremely confrontational conversations with interviewees whose conduct demanded accountability. The outcome was often quite dramatic.
Philip Morris. A top Big Tobacco executive articulates the most cynical justification imaginable for the cigarette holocaust that continues to claim more than 6 million lives per year.
Judith Miller. The ex-New York Times reporter defends, and rationalizes, her conduct in her credulous WMD stories that incorrectly validated the Bush Administration’s casus belli for the invasion of Iraq. You may find her answers a little thin on introspection, never mind contrition.
The Pentagon. In rewriting the “Law of War” manual for American troops, the Department of Defense equated journalists with “belligerents.” This and a subsequent interview caused the Pentagon to backtrack and re-rewrite the manual.
Glenn Beck. The rightwing provocateur made a big show of recanting his former views and apologizing for his excesses. His media tour was a bonanza, as one mainstream outlet after another lapped up his supposed confession. Beck had a different experience on On the Media.
ExxonMobil. Another corporate confession, this one after a top Big Oil Executive was forced to acknowledge decades of climate-change disinformation.
Revenge Porn. The online entrepreneur Hunter Moore relucatntly closed-up shop and relocated to federal prison shortly after his pitiful attempt, in our interview, to rationalize posting nude pictures of women — pictures provided by vengeful ex-partners.
Project Veritas. Media dirty trickster James O’Keefe became a darling of the right by going undercover with cameras and microphones to catch supposedly “woke” institutions in hypocrisy and bias. And it was easy for him, because he invented scenes that didn’t exist and — in violation of all journalistic standards — moved excerpts around out of context to make the benign seem indicting. Here we hear him denying unscrupulousness and using many big words.
Al Haig Advertorials. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig retired to private life, and fronted for World Business Review, a fake business show with fake academic credentials, on public TV, no less. This piece, which won an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative journalism, ended the scam.
$70,000-a-Year Lab Rats? Questioning the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about the ethics of recruiting prospective students in a downward-spiraling media industry. This conversation, unfortunately, has aged quite nicely.
Watchdogs in Tuxedos. This piece documented the 2014 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, DC, an annual exhibit of the unsavory chumminess between the press and officialdom.
Et Tu, Brooke? One of the most tense confrontations in Bob’s radio career came in a conversation with his own co-host, Brooke Gladstone, on the day following Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency. This one — not just unfortunately but catastrophically — holds up, too.
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