Sawyer v. the Dixie Chicks

Unlike Atrios, I hadn’t remembered the interview, so I looked it up. And yikes:

That wasn’t good enough for Sawyer. She spent an hour trying to bend the Chicks with a combination of false sympathy and crass sensationalism. Time and again, she cut back to a typeset insert of Maines’ original remark, as if Maines had called for the pillage of Crawford. “Ashamed?” Sawyer said, incredulously. “Ashamed?” In the tradition of a Stalinist show trial, the women were forced to affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops. At every point they—who are, after all, entertainers with no particular training in political science—were thoughtful, modest, and firm. At every point Sawyer tried to force them into a crude, Manichaen choices. “Do you feel awful about using that word about the president of the United States?” she asked at the start of the interview—in a prime example of the sort of leading question no self-respecting first year AP stringer would ask. “Well,” replied Maines, carefully, ” ‘awful’ is a really strong word.” Later, when Maines was trying to apologize and clarify, Sawyer said, “I hear something not quite, what, wholehearted.

More here.

As Duncan says, this was just straightforward cult-of-personality stuff. Leaving aside the question of whether singers have some obligation to be publicly patriotic, she was just talking about a particular public official, not the country. If conservatives want to make an issue out of it they can, but what was Sawyer doing?