Irish Independent: Carole did us a service by dishing up an Irish grilling for George

"ON Thursday night, RTE's Washington correspondent Carole Coleman infuriated a lot of viewers with her frequent interruptions of President George Bush in her White House interview with him.
Disrespectful, some thought. Unprofessional, others argued. 
I didn't see it that way. 
Yes, RTE current affairs interviewers - Miriam O'Callaghan is a prime culprit - can often irritate with querulous and counterproductive interruptions of politicians who've hardly begun to respond to the questions just put to them, but Ms Coleman's interview should be viewed in a different light. 
Here, after all, was the most powerful politician on the planet, whose decisions have been so globally momentous, and seem likely to continue to be, as to deserve the most rigid scrutiny. This they don't receive from the mainstream American media, who enjoy an extraordinary - and mostly extraordinarily unhealthy - relationship with the White House. 
In Britain, when Tony Blair or Gordon Brown goes on BBC2's 'Newsnight', he knows he's not going to be treated with kid gloves, especially when Jeremy Paxman or Kirsty Wark is in the interviewing chair. 
In Ireland over the years, our politicians have similarly had to brace themselves for interviews with Brian Farrell and Olivia O'Leary. 
But in the US, both the print and broadcasting media approach their political leaders with a deference that's often indistinguishable from obsequiousness, and that's the antithesis of what journalism should be. 
You only have to consider the craven line of the once-admirable 'New York Times' in its buying into this US administration's justifications for a pre-emptive war in Iraq to see how far American journalism has fallen. 
Because of this, the US administration knows it will get a meek acceptance from the American media of whatever it chooses to say. 
And so, an American president can happily agree to a television interview secure in the knowledge that he won't be asked any really hard questions - and even if he is, they'll be couched so timidly that he can swat them away with a retreat into prepared rhetoric. 
Carole Coleman cut right through that cosy assumption, and in a manner that clearly unsettled President Bush, who had probably assumed he'd be treated with sycophantic Irish blarney and could therefore dish out whatever platitudes he wished to utter. 
Certainly I've never seen him so rattled on television or so testy, the folksy, good old boy mask that he's perfected over the years suddenly slipping and hinting at a less benign personality behind it. 
"Let me finish!" he seethed more than once as she questioned his spiel about the world being a safer place because of his decision to invade Iraq or about his stance on the Middle East.So fair dues to her for her tenacity, which was politely combative rather than needlessly rude and which I thought was a service to viewers, who were confronted by a George Bush they'd never seen before - the same George Bush, let us not forget, who may well have our lives in his hands. 
Doesn't that merit a few hard questions? And even interruptions?"