Politics: OMG, a discussion moderator with a spine!

[womzilla]

I'm listening to the News Hour (audio rebroadcast on WNYC). A long article just finished on Larry Wilkerson's statements about the "cabal" which hijacked foreign policy after September 11th and lied us into the Iraq debacle. The show followed up with the mainstay of The NewsHour: a moderator discussing the news with a centerist and a right-wing liar.

But the segment went off the rails in an important way: moderator Margaret Warner slapped the right-wing liar down twice in the course of the discussion. Wilkerson claimed that the WHIG plan was to go in, topple Hussein, put in Chalabi, and get out within four months. Now watch this:

MARGARET WARNER: Let's take one other thing that Larry Wilkerson talked about and he also laid at the foot of both the secretary of defense and the vice president what he calls the poor planning for the postwar situation. Now, how much of a role did the vice president have in that?
RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, you know, I guess if the plan was to install Ahmed Chalabi immediately after the invasion, the cabal didn't prove to be very effective. I mean--
MARGARET WARNER: But that isn't the question. The question is: Were they responsible for that plan, which Larry Wilkerson said went completely awry, and they had no follow-up -- that's what he's saying, that we're now playing a pickup game.

Warner had previously allowed Scheunemann to insult Wilkerson's sanity ("I mean think soon we're going to need a psychologist versed in dealing with paranoids to understand his theory"), but when hetried to completely misrepresent Wilkerson's actual statements, she actually slapped him down.

And then again, at the end of the segment:

MARGARET WARNER: I have a very last final question, very brief to both of you: Where was the national security adviser, then Condoleezza Rice, who is supposed to be the honest broker in this?
RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, I'll tell you where she is now --
MARGARET WARNER: No. Excuse me, where she was then.

Smack! Christ. The transcript doesn't convey the anger in her voice as she stopped him from answering the pointless question he wanted to answer and kept him on the subject.

A few more panels like this and I might start believing we have a press, again. It's amazing what the press will do when they decide they don't need to prop up the Preznit anymore.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Much as I agree that Ms. Warner showed some spine, interviews and journalism are not the same thing. Journalists often (not always) make good interviewers because they know what questions to ask and should know enough about the topic to prevent the subject from lying or going off topic. This is one of the reasons we have so few good interviewers today: They didn't pay their dues in the trenches.

Knowing what questions to ask, and of whom, is an important skill for a journalist, but that's not the same as being a good moderator. Moderators control the debate, pay attention to the ebb and flow of comments, not letting one party dominate. Moderators are often seen as conducting a series of one-on-one interviews, which is a useful thing for a journalist to do in a news broadcast, but too often it isn't actually news, it's merely eliciting commentary on the news.

Commentary on the news is good. It helps place events in a larger perspective. And reporters are, sometimes uniquely, situated to see more of the story than anyone. If they look. If they're good. The skills overlap and augment each other.

For example, what Scheunemann says about Rice isn't actually news. Warner was entirely correct to get him to answer the question, which he did, and it wasn't useful... yet. That the Chairman of the NSC chaired meetings of the NSC is not particularly surprising. That Warner got Scheunemann to answer the question let Corn make the real point: Rice was chairing meetings where Dick Cheney was lying and she didn't have the balls or the competence to find out the truth. The next step, for journalists, is to ask why a) Cheney was lying and b) why Rice let the lies determine policy. Her job was to handle National Security, and she failed.

But I digress. I just wanted to make the point that Warner showed good interview skills, not necessarily good journalism skills.

Well Yeah

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

We have Jeremy Paxman over here (UK) but even he's not as on the point as could wish.