...but maybe thats because I'm doing the business side of media?
anyway. this week I have been thinking a lot about interviewing, and paying attention to news and interviewing techniques etc.. I think the one reason that I have felt that I will not end up being a journalist is because I don't have the same passion and drive as other people around me. I don't want to have a 'lead' and chase it, unless maybe its something very near and dear to my hear, but I honestly don't see that happening.
All this talk about interviews made me think of why I don't want to be a journalist. I'm not very good at asking questions unless I have prethought them out and they are written down in front of me. If the interviewee goes off topic I tend to get nervous. I'm not really into asking the hard hitting questions. I'd be too nervous. Also when I'm interviewing I feel like I dont have a place to pretend like I know what I am talking about, unless it is on a topic I know well .I know interviewing is done so you can learn more about the person or the thing that they are talking about, but I still feel like I'm not of authority to be asking those kinds of questions.
All these thoughts for some very strange reason kept making me think of Michael Moore. I haven't seen his documentaries in a couple years, but his interviewing techniques have stuck in my brain. From ..what it seems like..rushing politicians on the street to ask questions, usually uncomfortable one. Or his interview during Bowling for Columbine, when he interviewed I think it was the unibombers brother. How could he sit there and act like everything this crazy man was saying was okay? Also, he went to Charleton Heston's house, under the pretense of seeming like he was a fan and then starts turning the tables and bombarding him with questions on is involvement with the NRA and some of his insensitive appearances. This only bothered me because of the false pretense he had, in order to make Charleton Heston meet with him and also....the man is old, and I'm pretty sure senile. I heard later that he didn't really remember a lot of that stuff, and isnt exactly lucid, so it seemed mean to go to this man's house and ask him these kinds of questions with him thinking you were on his side. Is it write to do that kind of thing to get an interview? Is there no line drawn? Would most other journalists consider this a good thing? That he is making progress or is he just being abrasive?
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I don't think anyone should consider Mr. Moore a journalist. At the very least, he is a filmmaker, but his methods are such that his movies seem to be more about his personal agenda, regardless of what the truth might actually be.
A journalist should remain objective (ideally), and it's obvious in his films that Moore has a political axe to grind and doesn't care who he hurts in the process of spreading his ideology.
When I saw "Bowling for Columbine," I was appalled by Moore's interviewing tactics with Heston. Never should a journalist present false intentions to the person whom they are interviewing. He should have admitted from the beginning that he did not support Heston's NRA affiliation, and if this meant that he would not have been granted an interview, so be it. Anything else is just sensationalism.
Good post and good comment. So, one thing at a time. Many journalists have good careers without being particularly aggressive interviewers, though I don’t think you can be much of a journalist if you constantly refrain from asking questions that you think might embarrass a subject. The more interviews you do, the better you get a drawing out subjects; at preparing beforehand; at understanding how many people are not embarrassed by questions you find embarrassing. It is also true that many TV interviewers appall us by asking confrontational questions to get an answer but just to get striking, often-decontextualized, video. All that said, I think too many U.S. interviewers don’t press hard enough in interviews, but knowing when to press hard comes only from doing lots of research beforehand and working out in your own mind how important the story is.
Now for Michael Moore: The short answer is that documentary film is … documentary film. Point of view is the whole point, given the fact the filmmaker is editing together hours and hours of footage. There is no simple one-to-one relation between the raw footage and the “truth” as presented. Even if you are just shooting interviews, you will still leave most of what people say on the cutting room floor, to use an old description that is now a metaphor. What I *like* about Michael Moore is that his POV is out there, for all to see. Sometimes he gets things – or *makes things* wrong. Can’t defend that. But his ambush interviewing doesn’t much bother me because we see what he is doing.
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