Now and then
Interviews used to be like this
This is an interview in February 1980 with the former Prime Minister of Canada who was running to have another kick at it.
Some of you may not remember those days or know the historic context.
That’s okay. You can figure it out from the interview.
What I want you to look at is not so much the content of the interview in the moment but the style of it.
Jack Webster was aggressive and abrasive but look at Pierre Trudeau.
He is confident, looks directly at Webster, and deals with his questions without any sign of short clips and talking points.
Why did that disappear?
Would you get either those questions or those sorts of answers today?
To give you some contrast, here’s Jack with Brian Mulroney six years later. Different setting - they are not in a studio - and even allowing for Mulroney’s different style, is this a changed approach to an interview like this?
Split the difference in time and take a look at Mulroney in 1983, when he was leader of the opposition. Is this more like Trudeau or more like the later Mulroney with the same interviewer?
Let’s try a couple of others.
First Joe Clarke.
This is five days or so before the federal Pea Seas defeated the Liberals. Joe was campaigning as part of Brian Mulroney’s team. In a few weeks he’d be the foreign minister.
There are so many things about this interview that stand out from sensibilities over the past 25 years.
And then there’s Chick Turner. Same interviewer. A couple of days before the Clarke interview.
Turner is Prime Minister at this point.
Style. Content. even the fact they are doing these interviews is all radically different than you’d find today.
Yes, it was 40-odd years ago.
But is it so radically different that we shouldn’t expect any modern Premier or Prime Minister to be the same, to be able to deal with complex issues and controversy as forthrightly as these guys do?
I once asked a veteran reporter if she thought interviews were getting dumber. At that point, about 25 years or so ago, there’d been a fashion on my side of the fence to have your person speak in 30 second clips. The idea was to only give reporters what you wanted and nothing more. Not long after, the fashion became 10 second clips.
The word fashion does a lot of work in those sentences, to use the currently popular phrase, but in many respects it was a fashion. A choice by handlers to control what reporters could do with information. The struggle was to say as little as possible such that a reporter could never do anything but report your perspective. It was entirely defensive, entirely and purely, but there was an aspect of it that was passive aggressive in dealing with reporters. There was a fashionable belief reporters and editors were too powerful.
Frankly, I believe part of the motive behind this was that many of the handlers struggled with the issues and so it was easier to limit the amount of time spent on the defensive by limiting the raw material reporters had. This tendency to cut down on what folks said on camera came at the same time as moves to limit access to information requests, especially if they went to reporters. The same tendencies or ways of thinking continue today. They existed before that change in the late 1990s and early 2000s but they really ramped up around the turn of the century
The tactic adopted to deal with the media ad that perceived power came at the cost of not actually communicating with the audience with whom you had a relationship. You reached them through the reporters. Limiting what you gave one limited what you gave the other and so it became harder to sustain strong relationships with the population generally on the thin gruel of 10 second clips of spaghetti. No small irony, perhaps no coincidence, that this change coincided with the rise of the Internet and what eventually became social media in Internet 2.0.
But all of that allows politicians, governments, and businesses to cut out the middle and go straight to the audience. Many in Canada don’t but in the United States, that ability to speak directly to the public without a filter is exactly what the Grand Old party and then MAGA has done in spades. The same folks also took advantage of the collapse of conventional media and the return of yellow journalism to create an environment where they could create a complete world of fiction inside which politics could operate, at least as far as voters were concerned.
All you have to do is look at the orchestrated theatre/circus surrounding the Fauci hearings to see how much what we see on the news is not news at all but a completely false Matrix-like world in which facts and logic have no place. That spills over into the social media world in which all the same players are involved and the audience becomes active players.
What happens in Canada is another matter. Not totally different but with some noticeable variations.
You can only see the difference if you look at older interviews and look at them less for the individuals in the clips but how what they did.