Two heads, passing in the night
The interview as an art of journalism in television and radio is all but dead. I understand why journalists in those media want to record exchanges of conversation, often specifically a set of questions and answers, but until journalists learn how to engage in the technique and, ideally, until persons being interviewed are willing to be honest in the process, interviews are only a waste of time. Consider what the interview is supposed to accomplish. The goal is to get information from an observer or actor about a particular incident, to get the opinion of an expert on a topic, to force the subject of the interview to tell the truth, and so on. In the case of observer or actor, the implicit belief is that a first person account has a special value that the audience needs to absorb. This usage is the same sort of thing that shows up endlessly in a Ken Burns documentary. In his series on the American Civil War, Private Schlemiel’s diary or letters home get quoted at length on the assumption that the poor fellow’s tales of blisters after long marches are somehow the equal of the orders of generals and presidents. And in a novel in which Schlemiel is the main character, that would be true. And when balanced with other reports from people on the scene and from the leaders making the decisions, as Burns provides, “I saw; I did; I felt” fills out our understanding of what happened. But as Jeff Foxworthy pointed out, “If you’ve been on television more than five times describing what the tornado sounded like, you might be a redneck,” and I do have to wonder which deserves more precious air time, the audible qualities of a tornado — the one I experienced reminded me of an industrial ventilation fan, not a train — or the likelihood that such violent weather events are the result of anthropogenic global warming and what we can do to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
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