Credit is merited when it’s due: CBS News’ newly minted “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat landed a thoughtful, emotional interview with the person who may have elicited more speculation than anyone else this year.
Patrick Clancy is the grieving father of three children killed in January 2023 by his then-wife, Lindsay Clancy. (Lindsay testified to killing them, in the throes of post-partum psychosis, during her criminal trial, this year.) As the “60 Minutes” segment points out, he has been the subject of predictably intense scrutiny, with much of the TikTok commentariat convinced he did the deed.
Whether or not Patrick Clancy came off as credible is up for debate. To this viewer (someone who has literally never used TikTok and is generally skeptical of citizen journalism) he was the picture of bereavement; to others, it may be a judgment call. But he read to me like a person who’d been through, to say the very least, a horrible ordeal, doing the thing that he needed to do to silence the relentless commentary — if that could even be possible. And “60 Minutes” deserves credit for letting him share his side of things after social media has adjudicated his guilt.
Douthat, until recently slotted into the New York Times opinion desk as one of the providers of that newspaper’s conservative perspective, can count this as his first “60 Minutes” story. That, between his bearing and his interests, he’s not a natural for TV may have worked in his favor here; had the Clancy family tragedy happened in a previous era, a true-crime-hungry newsanchor might have pushed harder than Patrick Clancy was willing to go into the gruesome details of the night. (This would’ve been a classic Diane Sawyer or Connie Chung interview, and, as such, might have pushed into more uncomfortable territory.)
What’s been most interesting, to this viewer of the trial from afar, about the story is Patrick’s ability to forgive his ex-wife for what she has admitted to doing to their family. Douthat asked about that: Patrick has forgiven Lindsay, even though she did not ask for it. Were Douthat, perhaps, a more seasoned question-asker on camera, he might have asked how often the two speak and what else passes between them. Douthat let opportunities like this go.
Regardless, this is a win for CBS News at an interesting time: The network’s news division, run by former opinion journalist Bari Weiss, has tended toward a thumb-on-scale favoritism toward establishment narratives, even as the establishment itself seems to be tilting toward derangement. On Tony Dokoupil’s first night as “CBS Evening News” anchor, during the U.S. attack on Venezuela that resulted in the capture of that nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro, the “Evening News” featured a lengthy and incurious with Pete Hegseth. I was similarly unimpressed by the season-leading “big get,” Norah O’Donnell’s interview with an Air Force officer shot down over Iran; taking nothing away from his experience, her questions seemed overly deferent to the U.S. military’s narrative.
With that in mind, Douthat deserves praise for being genuinely thoughtful and curious about how Patrick Clancy is doing these days. This was the interview every TV outlet sought, and “60 Minutes” can be doubly proud: Its name and heritage may well have helped book the most-talked-about figure of the moment, and its on-camera talent was more open to deep questions than to relitigating the legal case. The question remaining is whether, in weeks between massive gets that exist entirely outside the narrative of an increasingly unpopular presidency whose functionaries Weiss courts, “60 Minutes” can maintain this momentum.
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