Journalists coddling rather than questioning

JOSEPH N. BELL

It’s mid-morning on Tuesday. I’ve just finished exercising my right

to vote, and it feels good. There was an unaccustomed line of people

waiting when I emerged, and that feels good, too. We’re not sitting

this one out.

There were no lawyers lurking to challenge the legitimacy of

voters or agitators outside. It is a glorious fall day, the new

voting machines are simple and quite clear, and all systems in my

Newport Beach precinct are “Go.” So I have returned home feeling

upbeat to exercise my First Amendment rights by doing this column.

I don’t know who is going to win, but I do know that I’m less than

pleased at the job my fellow journalists did in holding up our end of

this political dance at every level. There are reasons we are called

the Fourth Estate. Our function is not to make pals of the people who

hold or seek public office but rather to hold them accountable for

their promises and actions.

We stand between the voting public and the politicians. Only if

the media does its job can voters properly assess the performance of

their elected officials. And that job is not to do public relations

for politicians.

Admittedly, this poses special challenges for community reporters.

The people in public service they are interviewing locally are often

neighbors or friends of friends. On the other side of that coin, the

local politicians expect a little hometown cheerleading and are often

miffed when the reporter -- or columnist -- doesn’t approach an

interview from that perspective.

But these factors should be much less of a problem when the scope

is statewide or national. Consider “60 Minutes” last Sunday. Did you

see the segment on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger? It was 15

minutes of bodybuilding photos and fawning by Morley Safer, who was

supposed to be interrogating Arnold. Advertisers pay in the high six

figures for that kind of time. Arnold got it for free.

Or did you ever tune into the press conferences of Defense

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? A roomful of allegedly high-octane

Washington reporters repeatedly allowed Rumsfeld to ignore direct

questions and instead use the occasion for endless self-serving

rambling.

There was much of the same at the presidential debates, although

the questioners were operating under a set of rules so restrictive

that there was very little flex room to avoid speechmaking in place

of direct answers. Jim Lehrer was the only moderator to make a pass

at crossing that line when his questions were used as an opening into

entirely disparate topics.

What the candidates were primarily afraid of in setting up these

rigid restrictions was the mother’s milk of journalistic

interviewing: the follow-up question. This is the gambit that simply

keeps rephrasing a question when it is ignored or pursues an opening

offered by an evasive or ignorant answer. In my reporting days, I

once heard Ronald Reagan in his first run for governor of California

tell three audiences that then-governor Pat Brown should be held

accountable for a state unemployment rate 12% higher than the

national rate. (I don’t remember the exact figure, but this is

close.) The third time I heard it, I caught up with Reagan one-on-one

afterward and said: “The national unemployment rate is 5%. Are you

saying that the California rate is 17%?”

The answer wasn’t on the cards he was speaking from, and he

stumbled visibly for an answer. Across the room, Reagan’s omnipresent

alter ego, Lyn Nofziger, saw his confusion, rushed over, asked for

the question to be repeated, then said what Reagan meant was the

California unemployment rate was greater by 12% of 5 -- or about

5.6%. I never heard that statistic used again in the speeches I

covered.

I was also reminded of a performance by Harrison Salisbury,

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter of the New York Times, that I

witnessed in Detroit many years ago. I was there doing a magazine

profile of Henry Ford II when our noon interview was canceled by the

unscheduled arrival of then-President Richard Nixon, followed by his

entourage of reporters, Salisbury among them. Ford took Nixon and his

staff into the executive dining room to consult on some domestic

crisis I can’t recall. When Salisbury tried to enter the room, he was

prevented by security people. So he stood there and beat on the door

until his insistence that this was public business and a pool

reporter should be admitted was acknowledged and so ordered.

These are long-ago and far-apart incidents, but they represent a

time when the Fourth Estate functioned without its hat in hand. Now,

the candidates make the rules, and we get far too much of our news

from hysterics on talk radio and TV shows rather than straight-up

reporting and interviews that aren’t clubby.

Journalistic interviewing is generally -- or at least should be --

an adversary process. The questioner and the subject have different

motives: The questioner is primarily after information and insights

to report to his readers or listeners; the subject wants to make

himself, his views or his product look good by what he says. These

two motives don’t have to be hostile, but they should add up to more

than offering a platform for the subject to be creatively evasive or

self-servingly expansive. A dull interview is as much the product of

dull questions as it is dull answers.

So much for preelection wanderings. I’ve been watching my TV for

the first election reports while I write this. It’s still far too

early, but I just noticed that CNN is about to go to India, where a

group of astrologers are standing by to predict the results of our

elections. So, to steal a line from Peter Buffa, I gotta go.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.