Yakety-Yak

It didn't quite make sense, but the moment was curiously riveting. The TV program was American Journal and "special correspondent" Roger Clinton, the president's brother, was interviewing Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and O.J. Simpson lawyer, about fissures in Simpson's defense team.

Click. On another channel, on Last Call, a new talk show, a group of people sitting in a living room were doing a half-comic interview with special guest Jimmy Breslin, up on a screen from the streets of New York.

 Click. On another spot on the dial, TV host Charlie Rose was interviewing husband-and-wife political celebrities James Carville and Mary Matalin about their new book. Matalin's own talk show -- Click -- was simultaneously being shown on another channel.

If you don't count the Socratic dialogues, the interview first appeared in a treatise in the Middle Ages as a method of presenting religious ideas, worked its way into American journalism around 1850, and reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Playboy, which used the form to explore the personalities of literary, social, and political celebrities. But at no time has the interview seemed more popular than today.

In network television, it even has a new name, "the Get." Nabbing the right Get -- the interview with the right member of O.J.'s family or the right celebrity in crisis -- can make a show for months. Interviews form part of the backbone of the supposedly "new media" of talk radio and the basis, aside from reruns, of much that permeates cable TV. It is the one part of old news reporting that is certain to survive in cyberspace. We are living in The Age of Interview, a carnival of chat, chatter, conversation, confession, spin, sharing, and selling. But a closer look suggests that in the era of "live," of fifty-seven channels, more turns out to be less. Technology, the accelerating pace of news, the growing sophistication of sources, the increasing competition among news outlets -- all conspire to make many interviews more performance art than newsgathering, often with the interviewee rather than the interviewer in control. "The state of the interview today is not good," says Robert Scheer, the Los Angeles-based wter, one of the few long-form practitioners of the art.

The interview's popularity follows in part because the form is cheap and adaptable and is always focused on people. That makes it ideally suited to electronic delivery. It also tends to elevate exuberant personalities -- Montel and Rolanda, Ricki and Maury, Geraldo and Sally Jessy -- people whose shows are often tasteless and, to the extent that the shows coarsen society, probably even dangerous. Yet it is fairer and more useful to look at the state of the interview in more serious journalistic settings.

Newspaper and newsmagazine interviews today are increasingly conducted over the phone, with reporters assembling stories as much as reporting them, combining elements from electronic transcripts, data bases, and television. A growing number of major events, reporters acknowledge, are covered without going to the scene. The stories are often more complete in the sense of combining more elements. But they lack the advantage of serendipity or the authenticity of having been there.

 One reason for this is the increasingly fleeting nature of what is defined as news. "Most reporters aren't interested in finding out what happened," says William Greider, the Washington author and journalist who has become famous for penetrating forgotten institutions and for probing into the deeper meaning of political trends. "Most journalists are interested in finding out about news, which is another commodity, one interested in what's the angle today, or this week, or tomorrow."

In the culture of Washington journalism in particular, in which print journalists pressed by faster and faster news cycles increasingly emphasize analysis rather than original reporting, the purpose of many interviews is often not to gather information but to gather comment about it. "They want to plug a hole in their story or give their pieces a voice to make their point," Greider says.

With most politicians, moreover, and with others schooled in the art of communicating, the first fifteen or twenty minutes of any interview is a prepared message. Getting beyond the boilerplate requires special creativity, and more importantly, time.

At the Los Angeles Times, writer Barry Bearak has become famous for getting close to society's down and out. He lives in homeless shelters, uncovers the world of subway cheaters or people who live under freeway overpasses. Bearak finds that even these people go into "sound bite mode" the first time he talks to them. "What is obvious to me is just how superficial your first go-round is with anyone -- a crack dealer or a politician," he says. "I think interviewing is not so much a lost skill as it is that newspapers need to give their people more time."

For his famous 1976 interview with Jimmy Carter in Playboy, in which the future president acknowledged having lust in his heart for women and musing over how God might react to that, Robert Scheer interviewed him in depth on five separate occasions over three months. Alex Haley, another former Playboy interviewer, used to go to his subjects' hometowns and interview the people who knew them as children before he ever met them face to face. For one thing, this demonstrated to suspicious and oft-interviewed people that he was serious. Before Playboy writer Eric Norden interviewed the former Nazi minister Albert Speer, he spent six weeks studying the subject. Their interview lasted ten days and nights and left both at the brink of exhaustion. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes once spent fifty-five hours in preliminary talks with H.R. Haldeman before going on camera (in the notorious paid-for interview).

 Other fine reporters develop their own interview techniques. In his reporting days, Gene Roberts, now managing editor of The New York Times, had a knack for using silence to get people to reveal themselves, to fill the uncomfortable voids. Les Whitten, the former investigative reporter for The Washington Post and Jack Anderson's Washington Merry-go-Round, was a master of using the bluff, persuading subjects that he had more evidence about their misdeeds than he actually did. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post is one of the best at winning his subjects' trust, by wooing them gently over a long period of time and persuading them he will honor promises of what is on and what is off the record. Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, says such trust comes with a track record, as reporters establish over the years that they are fair and balanced.

 Whatever the technique, a common ingredient of the superb interview is a knowledge of the subject matter so thorough that it creates a kind of intimacy between journalist and interviewee. Consider Mike Wallace exposing the brutal deceptions of the Shah of Iran in 1976.

Wallace: Well, they talk about psychological and physical torture.

Shah of Iran: Physical, I don't believe.

Wallace: I talked --

Shah: Not any more. Maybe in the old days. Maybe.

Wallace: I talked just today to a man, whom I believe, who told about torture.

Shah: How many years ago?

Wallace: Within -- I want to be very careful. Not yesterday.

Shah: Ah, well, maybe. I don't know.

Wallace: The word has gone out to stop it?

Shah: To stop what?

Wallace: Torture.

Shah: But a long time ago, yes.

Wallace: How long ago?

Shah: Well, I won't tell you, as you don't tell me.

Or note how Wallace provokes entertainer Barbra Streisand into revealing herself in a 1991 interview, as her movie The Prince of Tides was opening.

Wallace: You know what your mother told me about her relationship with you?

Streisand: What? What? What?

Wallace: She says you haven't "got time to be close to anyone," quote, and . . .

Streisand: She said "to anyone," or did she say to her?

Wallace: To anyone. That's your own ma. And even now, Mom's judgment stings.

Streisand: You like this that forty million people have to see me, like, do this?

Wallace: Barbra, what am I going to do? "And then I wrote . . . ," "And then my next song was . . ."?

Streisand: No.

Wallace: That's what the picture's about. That's what Prince of Tides is all about.

Streisand: Here's the truth, OK? -- that I wanted to make a very strong point in the movie about grieving and about crying. If you notice, I do it through -- obviously, it's the story of a man's catharsis, a man's getting to the point where he can feel again.

Importantly, both of these interviews were on tape. They encompassed several sessions that were then edited together into as coherent and meaningful a profile as the 60 Minutes team could produce.

The kind of access, meanwhile, that these examples represent has become more difficult to gain today, journalists acknowledge, particularly with public figures. The main reason is related to supply and demand. The proliferation of media outlets has ceded power to those being sought after, not to the interviewers. "There is so much competition that [interview subjects] can pick and choose and exercise enormous control," says Scheer. And often they are not picking print. Some of the best interviewing in print today tends to be with less famous people, whose stories are unknown.

Such competition is having an even more pronounced effect on TV. During his 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot talked plainly about how he preferred live television over taped, because it offered him more control. And Perot managed to exercise a lot of choice in the matter. "Live interviews, like live press conferences," says Mike Wallace, "are the easiest thing for a politician to control." The live interview, meanwhile, has become the dominant form of discourse in the media.

Live is nothing new, of course. It was the norm for interviews in the 1950s, on shows like Nightbeat with Mike Wallace. The Today show began using satellites to do live interviews at news events in the mid-1970s. But it became omnipresent in the 1980s, as the spread of portable electronic newsgathering equipment allowed local and national anchors to interview people from anywhere. Ted Koppel began using the live interview format on Nightline in 1980. Soon, interviews began popping up in the middle of the evening news shows and every local outlet in the country began going live to the fire or the fallen tree, and to a live interview with the firefighter, witness, or police officer on the scene. Yet even with subjects at the highest level, the form has profound limitations.

"Mr. Vice President, thank you for being with us tonight," Dan Rather began on that January night in 1988. "Donald Gregg still serves as your trusted adviser. He was deeply involved in running arms to the Contras and he didn't inform you. When President Reagan's trusted adviser Admiral Poindexter failed to inform him, the president fired him. Why is Mr. Gregg still inside the White House, still a trusted adviser?"

Rather's attempt to tangle with George Bush live on the CBS Evening News tested and exposed more clearly than any previous interview the constraints of live interviewing in the modern era. He had a simple aim: to pin down Bush on how much the then vice president knew about the Iran-Contra affair. And Rather used nine of his twenty-two minutes of the newscast to try, extraordinarily long by TV standards. Bush countered by repeatedly questioning the questions, accusing Rather of ambushing him, and finally attacking Rather for once walking off the set. The incident helped reinvigorate Bush's campaign, and may have damaged Rather. As a newsgathering event, it was a failure.

 Rather was operating on the outmoded assumption that the live TV interview can be a real interview, a process by which a reporter can truly explore his subject to gather information. Nowadays, most live interviews, instead, are a kind of ceremonial ritual that only resemble the real thing, with strict boundaries beyond which the journalist cannot trespass, inadequate time to go beyond the carefully prepared, and a tacit conspiracy between interviewer and interviewee that this be good TV.

"My husband calls live interviews performance masquerading as conversation," says ABC's Diane Sawyer, whose husband is the film director Mike Nichols.

Indeed, on network television, where the level of production quality tends to be higher, most interviews are preceded by lengthy "pre-interviews," in which producers find out what the interviewee will say and outline what he will be asked. Such predigestion is considered essential if the interview is to pass as adequate television. This process of "casting" interviews, often in search of conflict or other television values, takes place even on such hallowed ground as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

The mythology of television as a kind of psychic "X-ray" whose "piercing stare" would expose the liars and charlatans and drive them from public life, the kind of imagery that inspired the CBS unblinking-eye logo, has long faded away. Live may provide a sense of spontaneity, but not the electricity of revelation.

Perhaps that is why two of the most successful live interview programs on television today are those hosted by Charlie Rose and Larry King. Neither asks tough questions. Rather, they elicit something else from their subjects, interesting chat perhaps, or a sense of what someone is like, "the cut of a person's gib," as ABC's Jeff Greenfield once put it. Rose, however, is particularly good at gently guiding an interviewee back to a certain point by rephrasing the point as Rose understood it. "Are you saying . . ." or "Do you mean to say . . ." Rose asks, over and over, as with his November 3 interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. "I'm trying to make sure we understand what the book is about . . . are you saying that genes determine intelligence?"

Even Ted Koppel, perhaps the strongest interviewer in a hard-news setting, acknowledges that there are strict limits on what the live interviewer can accomplish, although he thinks there are ways to operate within them. Koppel says that in any TV interview, there is a natural affinity between the viewer and the interviewer. "The most fundamental rule is to keep the viewer identifying with you," he says, by knowing what the viewer might be thinking and moving along those lines. "You can lose that identification easily by losing control of the interview, or by being too aggressive or rude, or by not asking the right type of questions."

To maintain this subtle relationship, Koppel thinks it is important to let the person being interviewed have his or her say on the first question or two. Then at a certain point, if a person is going on too long or avoiding the question, and "everyone at home gets it," the interviewer has license from the viewer to become more aggressive. In Koppel's mind, it is as if an alarm has gone off, and the viewer is saying, "Ted, get in there."

If the subject continues to be evasive, however, "the best you can do is leave the audience with the impression that this person just doesn't want to answer the question." You can ask a question two or three times, "to sort of underscore it, underline it," Koppel says, but imagining that you can wring the truth of out of somebody is unrealistic.

Quality live interviewing, Koppel says, requires two elements that most such interviews lack: adequate time and an ability on the part of the interviewer to edit the interview in his or her mind as it is occurring. "The essence of journalism is editing," he says. "And editing while you are on the air is extremely tough. It means sifting out the extraneous from the relevant, the new from the old" -- in your head, while listening to the person talking, and thinking of the next question.

The taped interview, of course, offers the opportunity to edit in comparative leisure. On the prime time magazine shows, where most such interviews appear today, people have the time and resources and the freedom to veer away from the flow of news to do the kind of thorough preparation that makes for great interviews.

On the magazine shows, too, there is time to provide context, to check facts, to do multiple interviews -- to do meaningful, if not penetrating, interviews. So, what are they doing?

It is premier week for NBC's Dateline, which is stripped across three nights of prime time, and the show is featuring three nights of an interview with O.J. Simpson's children by his first marriage. (His daughter professes that she knows her father cannot be guilty, and both repeatedly decline to discuss certain topics that Katie Couric alludes to.) ABC, meanwhile, is giving a three-part interview to Nicole Brown Simpson's family on PrimeTime Live, and CBS has O.J.'s mother and sister on Eye to Eye with Connie Chung.

The competition between media, along with the growing sophistication of those who are interviewed, has markedly changed how these taped television interviews are conducted and altered what ends up on the air.

By the mid-1980s, Mike Wallace says, the confrontational style for which he made his name on 60 Minutes no longer proved useful. "It used to work for me years ago because it was unexpected. We did get some truth-telling." But once the 60 Minutes reputation became better known, he says, "it wore off."

Also, he says, many of those interviewed these days, even private citizens without media experience, have lawyers handling contracts and TV consultants coaching them on what questions will be asked. Wallace says that Don Tyson, the chicken producer from Arkansas, was fully prepared that way. Tonya Harding had one group of lawyers to handle her case and another set of lawyers to handle her negotiations with the media.

The techniques that movie studios developed playing hardball in selling their movie stars for interviews to the network morning shows in the 1980s, playing shows off against each other, have been picked up by people involved in news stories. Lawyers for Michael Fay, the American youth caned in Singapore, played the different magazine shows successfully enough to secure promises of forty minutes across two nights on NBCDateline. In the case of one network, whose name I have agreed to withhold as a condition of learning this information, a prominent person involved in a recent crime case even secured the right to approve the script of the interview about her to ensure that the tone was positive.

"All of these people have representation," says one network senior producer. "These are not so much interviews any more as deals."

Even a large percentage of the softer feature interviews done these days are a form of deal making, keyed to a celebrity's newest book or movie or album. Consider PrimeTime Live's profile interview recently with comedian Tim Allen, or Dateline's with Dolly Parton or Audrey Meadows -- all celebrities with books just out.

 When such celebrities or heavyweight authors are hot, their agents are in a position to exert some leverage over the shape of the interview. "I would never ask that [an interview] not be aggressive. What I'd do is ask what the tone of the interview is likely to be. That's different," says Cathy Saypol, who runs her own public relations firm and has represented books from Oliver North's Under Fire to Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's recently published Strange Justice, about Clarence Thomas. "I might say, 'Is the interview going to be aggressive?Is it going to be a puff piece?Is it going to get into this or that?' They might say, 'Our guy really wants to get into this,' or, 'Oh, no, our audience is interested in softer material,' or whatever. Then, you have the option to appear or not to appear."

Saypol says she might request that an interview run a certain length, that certain areas of inquiry be off limits, that certain areas of inquiry be included in an interview, and so forth. "We can ask, we can suggest, we can do all of that. The final word is in the hands of the journalists," she says. "You try to get the best possible coverage for your client."

Journalism's most enduring form is suffering the same phenomenon that has affected reporting of politics and government. In much the same way that politicians and interest groups came to understand how the press operates better than the press understands itself, lawyers and consultants and spin artists are mastering the grammar of journalism and exploiting the competition between journalists to use the press to their advantage.

The interview is everywhere, but more and more, it seems to go nowhere.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe