I put this here because there isn’t really a debate because politicians will do this no matter what. And I’m not particularly exercised about it so it doesn’t belong in the Pit. It is just something politicians do that I and others have noticed.
Anyway, I was watching GW’s rebuttal of the intelligence report section that says that the Iraq war increases the number of terrorists. His method was to pretend that the report said that the Iraq war caused terrorism and then to rebut that. For example he said that the report tied Iraq to terrorism and then sternly pointed out that there was no Iraq war when the World Trade Center was bambed, or when the USS Cole was attacked or on 9/11. Ergo, was the implied conclusion, Iraq doesn’t increase terrorism. This is, of course, the strawman technique and is used all of the time.
When a politician is being interviewed and gets an awkward question one favorite method of ducking it is to say that first some background must be supplied so as to put the matter in context. By the time the “context” has been supplied, chances are the actual question has been forgotten, even by the interviewer. The interviewee knows that the TV interviewer is on a pretty rigid schedule and if enough time can be used up in bafflegab he or she can pretty much answer the easy questions and duck all the others. Or many others don’t even get asked.
Another use of the “background for context” ploy is to slip in the interviewee’s agenda rather than that of the interviewer. And to put in some point that will lead the interview off the topic of the original question and onto something the interviewee wants to talk about.
Now these are all standard methods and everyone uses them.
In my opinion, though, they don’t serve public discourse well. Sure, the interviewer is not God and might not ask questions that will really enlighten the public on important matters. However most serious ones try to do that and their purpose is usually to try to bring some light to the politicians view on public affairs.
Of course, if you watch the performance, the technique does let the listener know what subjects the politician wants to avoid and this has some value.
Anyone have any thoughts as to what interviewrs can do to make sure the interview stays on track? Chris Mathews’ technique is to never let anyone complete a sentence but that leaves me cold.
Sam Donaldson used to ask the same question two or three times and end up saying “so, you refuse to answer the question,” but that didn’t work much better than Matthews.
The point, however, is that the politician did not agree to the interview to serve public discourse. The politician agreed to the interview to advance the politician’s interests. Likewise the business executive who’s asked to explain the company’s alarming drop in stock prices, the noted defense attorney commenting on the latest celebrity trial, etc.
And TV’s limited time is only part of the problem. A really committed interview subject could be put under hot lights and interrogated for days and never go “off message.”
As a man now owning a newspaper and back in the business of interviewing politicians (One senatorial candidate, two congressional candidates, a slew of state reps in the last few weeks and hopefully two gubernatorial candidates in the next week) I can tell you that it’s not just TV that it happens to.
The politician wishes to get message X out.
The interviewer wants to get answers to questions A, B, C.
The politician learns to recast the question so he avoids difficult questions and communicates message X by reframing the question on his terms.
None of this has ANYTHING to do with informing the public.
Hell, that’s why McCain made so much hay with his ‘straight talk express’ routine even though he was still just getting out his message and dodging anything outside of that. ‘Straight talk’, my ass.
I understand that the politician has little or no interest in informing the public about the public’s business. And that the primary purpose of anyone doing this sort of interview is to advance their own iterests. But your newspaper and TV news shows really should have informing the public as one of their main goals… What else is the point of news?
We might have to settle for the interview itself exposing the game being played by the interviewee to the reading, or listening or viewing audience. However, the politicians, etc. have perfected their art. Maybe it’s time for the interviewers to work a little harder on theirs.
Add to this the fact that a great deal of the time we’re listening not to the politician, but to his/her spokesperson. A person trained to obfuscate anything and everything.
Listening to people like Tony Snow, Scott McClellan, and Ari Fleischer, I’m forced to wonder “what’s the point?” I would be pleased if the press corps walked out en masse and refused to cover anything that does not come out of the president’s mouth personally.
In the UK they have “Question Time”. This at least forces the politician to learn to obfuscate for himself.
That doesn’t work as well as you might think, unfortunately.
We also have “Question Time” but the Government usually manages to fill most of it with ‘Dorothy Dixers’ - questions asked by their own side to the Government which elicits a rehearsed answer from the Minister in question and which shows him/her and his/her Department in the best light possible.
The same issues arise at a much lower level. I’m not a spolesman for my employer, but I have got some training from our media people on how to handle interviews. It is remarkably simple. Know what you want to say in advance. Say what you want to say, no matter what the interviewer says or asks.
And this isn’t just for potentially hostile interviews, but for all occasions.
Just a few weeks ago, one of my co-workers forgot these simple rules. She was on a local radio show at 6 AM to promote a special health education lecture we offered. Somehow the hosts went off on a tangent to birthdays, got her to mention that her 50th was in a couple weeks, and these guys were off to the races with this whole, “NO! You don’t look anywhere near it. Really?” thing that ate up the whole allocated time for the story.
There was no harm or offense meant or taken, yet my co-worker finally understood the import of this basic training. Getting a voice on mass media is a pretty rare opportunity that shouldn’t be squandered. Get OUR message out, anything else is just another way of getting THEIR message out.
But news is constrained by objectivity. You cannot say in a newspaper article, “George Bush repeatedly avoided answering the questions put to him” because that leaves you open to charges of editorializing. You can only report the facts – that question X was asked and that Bush answered it by saying y (and since you’re limited in space, you are usually only stuck with summarizing the answer).
And a newspaper’s main goal is not to inform the public – it’s to sell ad space (just like TV news’s main goal is to sell ad space). Remember – journalistic objectivity came into being because it was more profitable than siding with someone.*
Ideally, people can see that the politician is ducking the issue, but it’s the media’s job to report the story, not become the story.
*Back in the old days, people often bought several newspapers each day. If you were a Republican, you’d buy the rabid Republican paper and the independent paper. If you were a Democrat, you’d buy the rabid Democratic paper and the independent paper. So the independent paper gets a bigger audience.
I just had my E-i-C read a reporter the riot act for turning in two ‘stories’ that were just rewritten PR copy. Punk.
I think I disagree, Chuck. It’s perfectly legitimate for a reporter to say ‘I asked questions X, Y, and Z but the Congressman didn’t answer either one. Instead he replied about high taxes.’ or somesuch. If you ask a question on the record and don’t get an answer to it you’re well within your rights to ask from a different angle. I’ve done that all the time. Hell, I had it done to ME just a few weeks ago on the air when a radio interviewer wanted me to say bad things about my competition. Three seperate question spaced over about 10 minutes. I returned platitudes.