What’s happened to ’60 Minutes’?

Many reasons might attract one to watch President Barack Obama and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton do a joint interview on the television show "60 Minutes."

There's that whole coalition-of-rivals thing going on between Obama and Clinton. She woulda-coulda-shoulda been president in 2008 if not for the remarkable campaign of Obama. And there remains those who think she'll still run again in 2016, raising the question of whether Obama will lift up Hillary in the primary over his own VP, Joe Biden.

So I get why "60 Minutes" liked the idea of an Obama-Clinton interview.

What I don't get is why the interview was handled in such nonhard news way. You have the president and the secretary of state in the same room together after the murder of four Americans in Benghazi and brutal Muslim terrorism in North Africa. Questions about these events, which directly bear upon Obama's contention that Hillary Clinton was a very good secretary of state, serve the public interest. Yet "60 Minutes" treats the interview like Obama and Clinton were a pair of mindless celebrities.

One writer called Steve Kroft's approach "fawning." Kroft defended himself saying the White House likes Steve Kroft and "60 Minutes" because the president knows "that we're not going to play gotcha with him" and "we're not going to go out of our way to make him look bad or stupid."

Steve Kroft should save that gem of an assessment of "60 Minutes" journalism for his own headstone.