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Re: Wednesday, October 22, 2003
The ombudsman's critique (which now seems to have disappeared... curious) put in words the discomfort I had felt during and after the interview. Terry Gross usually does an excellent job of probing without aggression, of being curious without an agenda beyond bringing fresh responses out of her subject. She did that, I thought, when she asked O'Reilly which of his opinoins might surprise people. She didn't do that when she kept trying, repeatedly, to make him defend himself against accusations leveled by Franken and others. I don't agree that it was appropriate to give the tough guy a tough interview -- or that being tough was the only way to approach the challenge of having such a prickly beast for a guest on the show. And leveraging Al Franken and a negative People review was probably not the best way to probe a guest author who's out to promote his new book. Why not probe more of the interesting stuff in the book, as she did with O'Reilly's revelation that he once came to fisticuffs with his father. Jay Rosen suggested that going on the attack was exactly the wrong way to deal with O'Reilly, because it would be playing his game. I agree. Terry's approach after awhile seemed less curious than prosecutorial. It seemed out of character. So did her apparent nervousness. In any case, it went poorly for both sides. But walking out O'Reilly clearly lost no points with an audience that mostly didn't like him anyway, while he won big with his own audience. FWIW, I don't believe for a second when O'Reilly says he had nothing to do with the Fox lawsuit to block the publication of Franken's book. Any good lawyer would know that the suit didn't have a chance. Clearly that was a case of a network coddling a pompous star with a huge temper. Anyway, I mostly wanted to agree with Jay about the two forms of mass media journalism we have today -- one hot and one cold, one passionate and the other dispassionate, one for which "fair and balanced" is a slogan, and another for which it's a principle. I also wanted to suggest that there's a third form of journalism emerging: the one we're engaging in now, trying to understand each other a little better, and to wring more sense out of an event like this one.
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