The art of interviewing is a little like the art of photography: the magic happens behind the scenes, and only the polished result ends up in the newspaper or gallery. In both cases, what goes unseen is messy and usually dull, whether it is a stack of discarded test shots in the darkroom or an hour of droning conversation captured on a mini-recorder. A political aide extemporizes endlessly on his boss’ reelection chances, or a research scientist spends his lunch hour detailing the ins and outs of organic chemistry, and the monologue is reduced to a couple lines in a front-page article. Usually this is a good thing, as few people want to read the long-form version of Chem 101. At times, if the reporter is especially lazy, pieces of the transcript will be published verbatim, a tactic taken to extremes by the magazine Interview, which promises “conversations between some of the most creative minds from the worlds of fashion, art and entertainment,” but mostly delivers mutually congratulatory ramblings between egotistical maniacs. Donatella Versace opened her back-and-forth with fellow fashion designer Riccardo Tisci by saying, “Let’s talk about your last collection, which I found to be very beautiful—super sexy. I would wear all of it.” A few minutes later and Tisci returns the favor: “I say to you sincerely that what I very much admire about the Versace maison . . . is that from day one until today, Versace is the peak of sexy but never crosses that red line into the vulgar.” How enlightening.
Almost without exception, people speaking off the cuff are not particularly coherent. They repeat themselves, spend fifteen minutes dancing around the same idea, or veer off topic. The appeal of the written word is that it can pick out the best parts and paraphrase the rest, condensing a paragraph into a single sentence. Every four years, the particular limitations of the interview are thrown into the spotlight by the presidential horse race. We watch as a stageful of candidates manages to duck every substantial question and respond with the same focus-grouped talking points they use from Iowa to South Carolina. Granted, multi-candidate debates are not the best setting for incisive questioning, given the need to keep the show moving, but the candidates still manage to show off their ability to speak without saying anything at all. In the Oct. 11 debate, Rick Perry’s energy plan (“We’re sitting on a treasure trove of energy in this country”) was the answer to every question — ironic, considering that in the next debate, he couldn’t come up with the Department of Energy to save his life. A more aggressive moderator would have pointed out that Perry’s response didn’t address the question, but the conversation had already shifted to the next candidate. Maria Bartiromo put forward a good effort in the Nov. 9 CNBC debate, pressing Gingrich to identify an example of how “the news media doesn’t report accurately how the economy works,” but didn’t follow up after he gave an off-topic response about Occupy Wall Street. There is a limit, after all, on how much time a moderator can devote to making a candidate answer the damn question.
While no one would want to get their news solely from raw interviews — it’s the job of the reporter, not the audience, to wade through the dross — uncensored footage is often more revealing than a reported article. Witness the ten seconds of dead silence that elapse before Herman Cain begins to stumble through his stance on the conflict in Libya.
“O.K., Libya,” he starts. “President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Qaddafi — just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say ‘Yes, I agree,’ or ‘No, I didn’t agree.'” And that isn’t even the worst part. His interviewers, a group of editors and reporters from the Milwaukie Journal Sentinel, let him flounder for the next five minutes. (Watch the video here.) They offer prompts and clarify questions but don’t allow Cain to change the topic or get away with a non-answer on Libya. Sometimes being a good interviewer means knowing when to step back and let the subject hang himself with his own rope. Yesterday, Cain bowed out of an interview with a New Hampshire newspaper, The Union Leader, which planned to post video of the interview on its website. Cain’s spokesman blamed “a scheduling conflict,” but one has to assume he was nervous about another gaffe going viral — as one soon did. The Times reports that, at a news conference today in Florida, “Mr. Cain’s remarks on Libya – including a suggestion that the Taliban, way over in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are at least partly running the government – raised new questions about his foreign policy qualifications.” Note to Petraeus, et. al.: The Taliban are now in Libya.
For as often as politicians seem to get a bye from their inquisitors, dodgy statements from celebrities and businesspeople go unchallenged even more frequently. The relationship between politicians and the media is historically and necessarily adversarial, but a reporter writing a feature on Steve Jobs or Tom Cruise is playing on the subject’s home turf. President Obama is never going to stop holding press conferences, but access to an executive or movie star is far from guaranteed. An interviewer who pushes too hard risks being frozen out altogether, and may end up staring at a blank page with a tape recorder full of “yes” and “no” responses. Women’s magazines are by far the worst offenders; no one picks up an issue of Glamour with Jennifer Aniston on the cover expecting to read a take-no-prisoners expose. The profile is often a boiler plate combination of a Hollywood press release and a list of weight-loss tips. Business publications, which regularly praise their interviewees as the next Henry Ford or Albert Einstein, aren’t much better. The questions are mostly softballs: How did you achieve such fantastic success? or Does your wife know you’re a genius?
Steven Levy’s interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, which ran in the November issue of Wired, is the epitome of such fawning. Levy isn’t someone you’d pin for a wide-eyed sycophant; he wrote the bestseller In the Plex and has interviewed Steve Jobs — who, after his death, was compared by an enthralled mourner to Gandhi. In terms of hyperbole, the Wired interview is only slightly less dramatic. Levy pitches the softest of softballs — for example, “How has Amazon been able to reinvent itself so consistently over the past 15 years?” Bezos, naturally, doesn’t miss the opportunity to wax on about “our greatest cultural strengths.” When Levy asks about Silk, the new browser that comes pre-installed on the Kindle Fire, Bezoz gives a standard line about leveraging “the cloud” to “accelerate a lot of what makes mobile web browsing slow.” Not mentioned is what everyone believes is Silk’s real appeal for Amazon: the fantastically lucrative ability to keep tabs on the buying choices and entertainment habits of its customers. Would this have been a good issue for an interviewer to bring up? Yes. Does Levy even broach the question? No. He just moves on to the next topic. Granted, we can assume that what the magazine refers to as “a series of interviews” has been edited or condensed, but I would rather know that Bezos said “no comment” than think that Levy didn’t bother to ask.
Similarly, when Levy brings up Amazon’s battle against collecting sales taxes in California, the answer he gets could have come straight from a PR flack: The company has been “clear and consistent” on the issue, and does “great” in the five states where does collect taxes. Profit margins is “not what this is about.” What is it about? “We want federal legislation.” A pretty disingenuous statement, to be sure, but it goes unchallenged by Levy. I’ll buy the fact that Amazon wants federal legislation, but it’s hard to believe the company wouldn’t launch a California-style campaign against any laws requiring it to collect sales tax. Had Levy chosen to write his article as a standard narrative, he could have provided this sorely needed context. As it is, the bare-bones back-and-forth style gives Bezos an unrestricted platform for his views.
It’s unfortunate that Levy allows the interview to serve as a big ad for Amazon, but he’s bullish about the company even in his own remarks. He concludes that the Kindle Fire “showcases how forward-thinking Bezos has been,” and fairly gushes when he posits that the Amazon founder “may well be the premier technologist in America, a figure who casts as big a shadow as legends like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.” Bill Gates, Steve Jobs – big names, both. I suppose I should just be thankful that he doesn’t mention Ghandi.
. . . So Well Read. . . 