Mike McQueary Interview: CBS Interview Nothing but a Ratings Booster

On Tuesday, we witnessed one of the most laughable interviews that has been conducted in a long time.

CBS Evening News' Armen Keteyian interviewed current Penn State receivers coach Mike McQueary on Tuesday.

It should have been a good interview, given McQueary allegedly saw former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sexually abuse a 10-year-old boy in one of Penn State's locker room showers in 2002.

Instead, we were treated to 25 seconds of comedy, in which McQueary was noticeably distant and all we got out of it was his emotions were "all over the place...like a snow globe."

Before the interview, Keteyian promoted the interview on his Twitter account with these words:

After the uproar across the nation following what turned out to be a joke, Keteyian tweeted:

That's right, you don't run it.

Why?

Because it gave us absolutely nothing. It shed no light on the scandal, no light on McQueary and no light on the email he sent a former classmate saying he indeed contacted the police about Sandusky's doings.

The Huffington Post speculated that perhaps McQueary was turned off by the very fact that his private email was revealed and that's why he had little to say when Keteyian approached him at his doorstep.

Keteyian said after the interview, "Most of the off-the-record stuff was strictly me trying to drill down into what he did, when he did it, what his feelings were, what he did after the game, where he was he, death threats."

And there's that whole thing about Sandusky interviewing with Bob Costas on NBC Monday night and looking bad in the process.

But Keteyian, if he wasn't hyping the interview, had a responsibility as a journalist covering a high-profile story to be more clear in his tweet before the interview.

This isn't some fluffy story. It's an extremely sensitive matter that has caused a lot of pain, and a lot of people were tuning in on Tuesday night because they believed Keteyian would possibly shed more light on the story.

He didn't, nor did McQueary, and we were left with whatever that was.

The New York Times pointed out on Tuesday that ABC boasted about its ratings on Monday night, its interview with Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head, trumping the Costas interview with Sandusky.

Maybe all this is about is ratings.

If so, we're going about covering this story all wrong.