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EYE ON EUROPE |
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The Celebrity's Friend  LARRY KING ...stretched out of all proportion to pose as a journalist? |
Interview: Faulkner reveals his mother was an alligator
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
It was the late James Reston who defined good interviewing as “the art of getting people to say things they didn’t intend to say.” It’s a subtle game that separates the good journalists from the hacks. This matters for anyone who sees the media as being primarily about information and analysis, not entertainment.
And so in the current climate of self-criticism among the big media institutions I find it hard to watch a television interviewer at work without demanding some basic standards of persistence, objectivity and distance.
They are not all bad at their job. In Europe, the BBC sets the standard, led by Tim Sebastian and his backups on the program "HARDtalk". No elision, ellipsis or elusion gets by them. The French can be just as persistent whether facing a Muslim activist or the intimidating Prime Minister Dominque de Villepin. Patrick Poivre d’Avror has reinvented French interviewing with a mix of softness and the quick stab of the followup question. From Italy, no one has exceeded the talents of the formidable Oriana Fallaci, still the benchmark reporter-interviewer in my book.
Living abroad and watching international television news, one also gets an occasional taste of the American variety, most frequently on CNN, the home of some of the most schmoozy, softball conversations that ever passed for interviews.
Two recent encounters with the odious Lawrence Ziegler, alias Larry King, made me wonder if the CNN news editors in Atlanta are even aware of the integrity crisis rocking American journalism. If they are, they choose to look away.
Always decked out in a television producer’s idea of a working journalist’s getup--shirtsleeves and embroidered suspenders--King has one thing going for him and that’s a biological accident: his voice. In broadcasting it’s called “dark chocolate.” To borrow a music critic’s description of a particularly vulgar Russian baritone, he enjoys a “fortuitous juxtaposition of thorax and vocal chords.”
As interrogator he is the interviewee’s friend and he wants you to know it. The guest’s charm works just as well turned back on King, making him a willing participant in the conspiracy. This violates the first rule of the trade: Keep a safe distance from your sources or they will end up owning you.
In one description of the King phenomenon
I read recently the writer unintentionally summed up the weakness
of the format. “Larry King Live,” he wrote, “has
become a stopover for celebrities plugging and book or politicians
making a statement.” Okay, we are forewarned. This is about
celebrity-watching, not information or insight.
But now King has gone beyond the schmooze. He is at the heart
of a co-dependency that formerly was limited to Hollywood star-gazing,
the medium in which you let me be your buddy for an hour and
I will help you advance your career. CNN has tried to legitimize
King by turning him into the reporter he never was, assigning
him to produce vapid prattle at political conventions.
Two recent broadcasts from King sent up warning flares that things are getting steadily worse.
In his chat with Judith Miller, the shadowy ex-New York Times reporter, he let slip that Ms. Miller had made it her business to write to him from her jail cell where she was locked up for refusing to reveal a source. Miller was cleverly paving the way for a King schmooze on the air and she got it. Every direct question King read off his cue card was deflected with Miller’s evasive charm, but King didn’t mind. He had the big name opposite him. The “Hang on a minute” follow-up question is not in his repertoire.
Equally disturbing was the recent appearance by criminal lawyer Robert Shapiro, a member of the O.J. Simpson defense team, plugging the creation of a foundation in memory of his son Brent, who died last year of a drug overdose. King, always working to bring in the big fish, had gone so far as to attend the boy’s funeral. Distance is not in his repertoire.
One of the more fascinating books I have read in recent years is an anthology called “The Penguin Book of Interviews,” edited by British journalist Christopher Silvester. In his perceptive introduction he skewers the very format of the celebrity interview article as a form that makes the journalist “complicit with the celebrity in the perpetration of some immense exercise in deception.”
Silvester quotes Wilfrid Sheed as demolishing even the classic Paris Review question-and-answer interviews with authors. Sheed says the twin motives of the writers who sat down with George Plimpton and his staff were “self-creation and self-containment.”
The Silvester anthology reveals the techniques of both parties in public figures ranging from Joseph Stalin to Tallulah Bankhead. Many of the interviewees poke fun at the format. William Faulkner, irritated by years of repetition of his curriculum vitae, told the Memphis Scimitar: “I was born male and single at an early age in Mississippi, I am still alive but not single. I was born of a Negro slave and an alligator, both named Gladys Rock. I have two brothers, one Dr. Walter E. Traprock and the other Eagle Rock, an airplane.” At least the Scimitar journalist understood the joke and made it work in print.
I wonder what Lawrence Ziegler would do, confronted by Faulkner’s rapier wit. I think I know: read the next question off his staff’s cue cards.
©2005 by Michael Johnson. The illustration is an artist's impression of a photo of Larry King. This column was first posted Dec. 5, 2005.
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