Category Intellectual Dishonesty

The “no information” interview

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

sham (sham) n. [prob. < a N.Eng. dial. var. of shame] 1. formerly, a trick or fraud  2. a) an imitation that is meant to deceive; counterfeit  b) a hypocritical action, deceptive appearance, etc. (The Tiger Woods interviews on ESPN and Golf Channel were a sham)

It only took seeing the first few seconds of The Golf Channel’s interview to realize something was screwy:

You don’t do a serious interview standing up, in front of what looks like a projected woodlands background, wearing a golf cap; the interviewer raced through questions without seeming to hear the answers; when you’re asked to explain what happened, you can’t just refer the world to the police report!

First of all, in this case, it’s not all in the police report.

Second, even if it were, it’s completely legitimate to want to see and hear him tell the story.  But I didn’t know at the time that The World’s Greatest Golfer Ever had limited the interview to only five minutes.  Kelly Tilghman didn’t have time to follow up: if she asked again—and he stalled again—she doesn’t get to ask any other questions…plus, she doesn’t want to challenge the famously testy TWGGE for fear of losing access later.

Eric Deggans saw what I was seeing: Woods wasn’t doing an interview, he was making something that looked like an interview, and would afford him the option to say “Hey, I already talked about this” and refuse to answer later when a real reporter asked the questions he still hasn’t answered.  (That’s a BS answer anyway, but the sports media lets athletes get away with it all the time.)

I worked in radio (back in the last century) and I understand the professional and promotional value of having the story first.  But the emphasis on “breaking news” comes at the expense of understanding the story: too many media companies use it as an excuse for why they don’t find out what’s really going on in Story A—they’re too busy doing live shots on Stories J and R.

And if they don’t understand that, how do you even discuss the issue of sending out an interviewer who has a private business relationship with the interviewee!

Tiger Woods is no idiot, and smart newsmakers do well to exploit the news media’s self-imposed soft spot to get their story out first—they know that it’s harder to change an impression than to make one.

Sgt. Schultz would have been proud

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said (that I first heard) that while a person is entitled to their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts.  The annoying trait among so many people lately–to accept as fact only that information which supports their beliefs, and to reflexively deny the…the factualness of what does not–is nicely addressed in today’s piece by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

[I] can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as “biased” anything that didn’t support your worldview.

If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.

But that’s the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don’t believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming.

(snip)

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper’s online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.

I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather [than] to the world as it is.

Do you know what you call a person who does see the world as it is, and doesn’t like what he or she sees, and despite having the responsibility and the power to do something about it, doesn’t?  Yep: a member of the United States Congress.   Paul Krugman accuses Republicans, but they’re not alone on this.

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

Know-nothings, and do-nothings.  What worries me the most is the growing number of people in this country who have one foot in each camp.