Terry Gross = Waste of Time, Funds, and Breath

Terry Gross sucks.

She tries to challenge those she thinks she can outmatch (like Gene Simmons, who showed her to be unequipped for her task), and just moves on when a guest like Boyden Gray (politically a scumbag and conversationally a dick) talks rings around her. Listen to her pathetic interview with Gray (aired on the WBEZ today, likely on their site soon). Check out his defense of William Pryor as mainstream. He basically does it by saying that Pryor is part of a mainstream, conservative movement. Gray never addresses the ludicrous statements read by Gross from Pryor's amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas (in which, in part, Pryor could find no legal or logical distinction between same sex sodomy, as the brief and Texas law quaintly put it, and incest, rape, and prostitution, were same sex sodomy legalized). She lets Gray walk with his “mainstream by association” argument, without rejoinder or remark, and moves on to something that interests her more than being made a fool, some topic that might bamboozle her less.

She gets guests who have brains or at least have things to say and she softballs, she doles out rhetorical passes, and she gets huffy when her shoddiness is revealed. I don't think that I could necessarily do better from my couch without preparation, but with her resources, and decades of experience botching opportunities with unusual and varied guests, I think I, or anyone else reading this, would do a better job than her.

She is the Barbara Walters of radio.