Yo, American Press: Want Ratings? BE THIS GUY!
by Ouroboros
Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 05:26:11 PM PDT
This is Jeremy Paxman.
This is what American journalists are like when I'm dreaming.
- Ouroboros's diary :: ::
Repeat the question. Force the politician or the politician's mouthpiece to show us how skilled they are at dishonesty. Force them to get creative; to get contradictory, angry, frustrated and upset, or honest. Entertain everybody. I promise you, there will be ratings. Take press conferences, for instance.
I hate watching press conferences. A reporter asks the politician or mouthpiece a question, and said person completely evades the question and gives an answer to a question they wished was asked. And then, if we're lucky, the reporter gets to ask a follow up. If the reporter is unusually gifted, he'll ask the same question again. And then it's evaded, and we move onto the next reporter.
But imagine how incredible it would be if there was a hard rule in all press conferences from here on in: if the question asked by the reporter before you is evaded, you have to repeat the same exact question, word for word. I don't care if you think there are more important things to talk about. The person whose job it is to answer every question is trying to take the easy way out of refusing to answer a question. There's a very good reason this person is refusing to openly refuse to answer. This is when you must press. It'll be completely entertaining. I'd tune in every day, hoping for it to go down like that. The same question being asked of somebody like Tony Snow, Bush, McCain, Dana Perino, or even and especially our top people, 25 times in a row, taking up the entire duration of the press conference, if need be.
That's my dream. It's a thousand times more enlightening to figure out the "tells" a politician gives off when lying than it is to hear any opinion they have about any issue. When we see somebody hedging, we know they're hiding something from us that we need to know. Once they're in this position, you must not let up after one or two refusals (I know I'm dreaming to expect even that from our press). We might not find out what we need to know, but we'll know exactly what to look for when they're lying about something even more important next time. We'll know more about them than they ever thought we'd know.
I couldn't imagine a more important or more entertaining public service.
I do not trust any politician at all, yet I understand the importance of their existence and their work on our behalf. Once they're in public office, they are officially in our lives, and deserve all the scrutiny we'd apply to anyone else who has a direct effect on our existence. If they insist on cloaking secrecy in deflection, we need to expose that and see how far they're willing to take it. That's the "character" part of "character" which is most important to me when I cast my vote.
Do not worry about politicians refusing to come on your show. It'll be considered a rite of passage by everyone in the nation, just like it is in England to be interviewed Jeremy Paxman (go here and here and here to see him interview Americans, and see how they do). Once enough people in the media stop accepting bullshit, there will be nowhere left for politicians to shill bullshit. As the media, you will move the culture into a place where not accepting bullshit is considered normal. This, above all things, is your patriotic duty if you're a journalist.
I'm dreaming. Our press is unapologetically pathetic. They're almost as much of a national embarassment as the politicians they inflict upon us, the cities we surrender to disaster, our infrastructure, our entire foreign policy, and the new Hooverville style tent cities popping up which they can't bother to tell us about.
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