The Media Interview

I’m not sure how straight many of the answers were 20 years ago - questions were just avoided with less pinache perhaps - but this journalist makes a good point about the effects of media training on political interviews:

…twenty years ago you could interview people and ask them straight questions and have a reasonable chance that you were going to get a straight answer. Now you’re very, very lucky if you interview … in fact you will never interview anybody who has been in public life for any length of time who hasn’t done that first basic media training course in which they’re taught this one rule: don’t answer the question that you’re asked; answer the question that you want to answer [what's often referred to as 'bridging']. And so our job has evolved from just asking questions and asking tough questions and you know, keeping on bashing away asking more tough questions; to very much trying to get through a series of stonewalling answers, in which a politician answers the question that he or she wants to answer, and you try to get them to answer the question that you want them to answer. And that can become like a fencing match. Sometimes the interviewer wins and sometimes the interviewer loses, but if you can get the tone right in an interview like that, and if you can penetrate that brick wall, then that’s the best that we can hope to do at the moment, I think.

- Mark Colvin, presenter for ‘PM’, ABC News and Current Affairs
on “The Art of the Interview”, Sunday November 13, 2004
a radio discussion panel which was part of the Cultures of Journalism series from Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National