Grading Tenet's 60 Minutes performance.

Grading Tenet's 60 Minutes performance.

Grading Tenet's 60 Minutes performance.

Slate in motion.
May 1 2007 5:43 PM

Was George Tenet's 60 Minutes Performance a Slam Dunk?

A Slatevideo news graph.

It took long enough, but former CIA Director George Tenet has finally decided to tell his side of the story. In both a new book and during an appearance on last Sunday's 60 Minutes, Tenet denied that his infamous "slam dunk" remark referred to the intelligence case for invading Iraq. (Tenet says it actually referred to beefing up public support for the war.)

Our partners at MediaCurves.com played an excerpt of Tenet's 60 Minutes appearance for a group of 311 survey respondents to see how they rated his believability. Click on the player below to watch the video of the respondents' real-time reactions.

We asked voters to watch a clip of president, and record their level of agreement with his remarks via the Internet. Here are the results, organized by party affiliation.; bush; george bush; Iraq; Iraq War; speech; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid717013245 http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=78144477

You can also click on the graph below, which offers further details of the MediaCurves survey.

Click image to expand chart

MediaCurves News Graphs are compiled by the market-research firm HCD Research. HCD surveys people over the Internet by allowing participants to rate a video as they watch it on their computers; HCD then displays the results on a graph as the video plays. In this case, HCD played a clip of the 60 Minutes program for a group of 311 Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Participants were asked to rate how believable they found George Tenet to be at any given moment on a sliding scale that ranges from 100 percent (totally believable) to -100 percent (totally unbelievable). Each colored graph represents the average of the responses from everyone of that party affiliation.

For more information about how HCD conducts its surveys, click here.

Comments: podcasts@slate.com (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless the writer specifies otherwise.)

Andy Bowers, the creator and executive producer of Slate podcasts, is the co-founder and chief content officer of Panoply.