Lesley Stahl fields a question from a wowOwow reader.

Q: How do you keep yourself composed when you feel you’re being lied to, spun or simply given bland non-answer platitudes by someone you are interviewing?

Lesley: Great question! I think lying, spinning and “blanding” are three different things. The worst, obviously, is the direct lie. When I’ve been faced with it, the hair on my neck and the heat in my chest rise, the nostrils flare, the ears ring. I find maintaining my “composure” becomes a war with myself. The most difficult is when the interview is live, and there’s no chance to edit. Once, on “Face the Nation,” I got so frustrated and furious when a government official — a senior member of Reagan’s cabinet — said something I knew was not true, I scowled and seethed and scolded him! I never went so far as to call him a liar, but that’s what my eyebrows and general body language said, so much so that his wife — who was in the Green Room — exploded and tried to barge into the studio. It was NOT my finest moment.

When it comes to the less egregious spinning, I’m afraid I have covered government officials and business executives for too long, because I’m pretty inured to the ducking and the filibustering, and take them as part of the game. They are so prevalent as deflection techniques, that I expect them.

Several years ago, Jim Baker (he was either Secretary of State or Treasury at that time) said that his goal when he did interviews was NOT to make news. He would actually rehearse as you put it, the “non-answer platitude.” I see my job as trying to penetrate the fog and mist. But I don’t see this kind of obfuscation as evil.

I wonder, though, if the politician or the businessman who employs the fuzz-it-up smokescreen isn’t hurting herself or himself. Don’t you think the public sees through that?