About time for some train-of-thought babbling, yes? It’s been a while.
The usual warning applies: I haven’t read this. I may never read this. I have no idea if it even makes sense. There are undoubtedly spelling and/or grammatical errors. It is my brain channeled through my fingers and into the keyboard on something that has been rattling around in my brain for too long.
The reason politicians can repeat, almost exactly word-for-word, responses to questions — talking points and sound bites — over and over again, is because no one ever asks different questions. Interviews are repetitive dances of call and answer memorization. Little more than theater. Acting. Might as well type out the script, send it around, and skip all the bother of doing the interviews in person.
The reason a particular governor from Alaska was flummoxed by someone asking her what news sources or magazines she read. It isn’t that she doesn’t read or doesn’t read regularly. She wasn’t expecting the question. It was off-script. It made her engage her brain to recall a fact she wasn’t prepared to be asked about, and it tossed her momentarily off her pre-scripted and prepared answers to the things she was expecting to be asked.
The way to become a master interviewee is not to have pre-scripted answers to questions. Speak the truth, as you see it. If you know something, you know it. If you feel something, you feel it. It doesn’t have to be answered exactly the same way every time using the exact same words. Be prepared for all questions by being true to who you are and your beliefs and values.
The way to become a master interviewer is to not ask the same questions as everyone else. Come at things from new angles or even ask things that may seem irrelevant, like “What news sources do you regularly read?” It isn’t a difficult question. I’d say the answer isn’t especially relevant or tells us much about the person answering it. What asking that question, or any question that might not be expected, is seeing how the person thinks while asking the question, and any conversation that may come from that answer. “So, you read the New York Times. Have you read the article they did on you yesterday yet? What did you think about [insert pull-quote from article here]?”
This has recently come to be known as Gotcha Journalism. When I was in and around the newspaper business and considering a career as a reporter or photographer, we simply called it Journalism.
Reporters asking the same damn questions as each other over and over and over again, and being answered by their interviewees with the exact same words and phrases over and over and over again is not journalism. It provides no new information, and so it might as well not even exist. The script isn’t that exciting. We don’t need to see it performed multiple times.
Furthermore, reporters jumping on any variation in the pre-scripted answer as some sort of gaffe or object of derision is not helping the matter at all. I am often asked “Why do you blog?” My answer has never been identical to any other answer to that question. I may word it differently every time, but the core of it is the same, because the reasons are the truth. I actually think about the question every time it is asked, and so the answer changes over time … as things should. I’m sure I could manufacture a stock reply to spit out as soon as I heard the question, and people would like the answer, and they would call it good. The fact that I — or anyone else who also considers the questions asked of them rather than spout memorized replies — don’t doesn’t make me or they wishy-washy or prone to gaffes. It makes us thinking, feeling, living human beings.
Stagnation is death. Talking points are stagnation in the journalism process. So are identical questions asked by competing news services. It isn’t Gotcha Journalism to ask creative questions that haven’t yet been posed. A person who knows what they are talking about and who they are can answer any question you pose them on either subject. A politician who knows how they feel about abortion or gun control or any issue at all should be able to answer questions about them without any preparation at all. All that obvious memorization of answers seems far more tedious and fraught with danger than simply being oneself and standing firm to ones convictions, causes, and beliefs.
Reporters: Ask some different questions and be able to think on your feet to devise more questions based on replies.
Interviewees: Be yourself, consider questions and answers, and speak the truth from your heart and mind.
Also, it is inherently impossible to have more than one exclusive interview. The word “exclusive” has a meaning, and I do not believe people in the television industry know that meaning. If everyone is showing the same show, playing off the same script, on different days of the week, we call that reruns. Since there are some variations in location, time of day, wardrobe and cast due to the live nature of television news interviews, let’s call them encore performances, shall we?
It isn’t just television news either. This problem extends to newspapers and magazines as well. Everyone is locked in the endless loop of asking the same questions, getting the same answers, and pointing out who made mistakes in their reading of the script, which then leads to even more perfectly scripted and memorized answers to the expected scripted questions. It’s maddening, and it’s boring, and I wouldn’t give it an amateur theater award.
And if someone doesn’t want to be interviewed by you, unless you hand them the questions in advance, or because you are known to ask off-script questions, well too bad for them. The interviewee is never the one doing a favor for the interviewer by being there. It has been and always shall be the other way around. Somewhere along the line, journalists forgot the simple fact that politicians and other notable people wishing to be discussed in the news should be courting the news services, not the news sources begging the politicians and such to please talk to them.
Free press is a powerful thing. The power of the press lies in the hands of journalists and reporters and photographers. Unfortunately, they have either forgotten that or become too fat, lazy, and comfortable to care.