One of the treats of the conference on covering race that I'm attending here at Columbia University, was a chance to hear 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft talk about one of his most controversial interviews in recent memory: his Sept. 30 sit-down with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Critics accused Kroft of handling Thomas with kid gloves to get the kind of access he has never given a TV journalist: hanging with him at his boyhood home in Savanna, Ga., riding in his RV (which he occasionally parks at Wal Marts when he is traveling?!) and questioning him with his wife. Thomas was selling a book -- Kroft admits the publishing house was instrumental in pushing Thomas to do the interview in the first place -- and still left CBS producers unsure if he would fully participate.

"I don't think anybody deserves to be defined totally by his enemies," Kroft said, explaining why he agreed with Thomas' feeling that he had been caricatured by the press. "He is somebody who hasn't gotten a fair shake in the press -- in part, because he let people define him."

I was impressed and a little envious at the resources Kroft said he had -- including seven or eight producers to comb through mountains of research to produce two thick "briefing books" which give him everything major that has been reported on Thomas. 

More than anything, I was intrigued by a moment when Kroft was asked about a typical Thomas inconsistency: He has a moment early in the interview where he insists race is not a huge factor in his life or perception of himself. But he also recounts growing up in a segregated south, feeling as if the white world discounted his law degree from Yale because he was black and being told by his grandfather that at a certain age, he couldn't dare look a white woman in the face for fear of lynching or worse.

But Thomas wound up an opponent of affirmative action who married a white woman. Doesn't that indicate that race had some impact on him, despite his protestations? "I didn't think about that until this session," noted Kroft today.

In an odd way, that response proved the value of what we're talking about here at Columbia. If you don't have journalists on hand who know black culture and black issues -- like the reasons why some black people feel Clarence Thomas is in denial about how race and affirmative action have affected his own life -- then you get stories which miss important cultural issues.

Later, we wondered why Kroft's story claimed at the outset that many criticisms about Thomas -- that he was an affirmative action hire who wants to kill affirmative action, for example -- were false. But the story didn't really seem to demonstrate how. And the many inconsistencies about Thomas' life and views weren't challenged much.

Still it was an informative look at how a big institution like 60 Minutes gets those big interviews -- and what viewers may be missing in the process.