the question man

8/13/2019 The Question Man

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The Question Man

Investigative reporter John Sawatsky has become a leading authority on the art of the interview. His

conclusion: Too often we're asking all the wrong questions.

Related reading: What to Do

What to Avoid

By Susan Paterno

Susan Paterno ([email protected]) is an AJR senior contributing writer.

AUTHOR JOHN SAWATSKY,Canada's premier investigative reporter and a foremost expert

on interviewing, is taking me for a stroll down a busy Toronto street. We're coming from the

Canadian Broadcasting Co., where Sawatsky has spent the last two days training veteran

journalists to forget everything they know about interviewingbecause it's all wrong. As I try to

keep up (his strides are nearly double mine), dodge traffic and ask questions, he keeps deflecting.

At some point I realize this walk is leading somewhere else besides back to the hotel, to an

understanding, to an epiphany, to a moment of sheer terror.

I'm trying on Sawatsky the tactics that he has been teaching me since we started talking several

weeks earlier. I remain skeptical about his practices: Avoid making a statement during an

interview. Avoid asking a question a source can answer with yes or no. Sound conversational,

but never engage in conversation. The advice may be simple, but the execution is about as

natural as walking on hot coals. It's hit and miss, hit and miss, until finally I come up with a

question that seems to catch both of us off guard: me because I can't remember what the questionis and him because he seems to have revealed something he is now attempting to sidestep.

He has mentioned that there are holes in his methodology, and those holes are preventing him

from getting started on his latest book on interviewing, number six after five nonfiction best-

sellers in Canada. To Sawatsky, holes are great, unanswered questions, a reluctant admission that

after nearly a decade of inquiry, he still has some way to go in creating the definitive

examination of the interview, journalism's fundamental tool.

Holes, huh? I think smugly. The master stumbles.

"What holes?" I ask, using an open-ended, neutral question beginning with "what"--a strategy

that only one hour earlier Sawatsky had said produces the best results. A direct hit, but I follow

with a misfire: "I didn't see any holes in what you did today." Ouch. I commit one of Sawatsky'sdeadly sins. I make a statement. The savvy source with something to hide uses an interviewer's

statement as an exit ramp, an easy way out of a question. I try to recover. "Where are the holes?"

"Well, mostly the holes are in what we're doing tomorrow," he says. "There aren't too many

holes in what we did today."

"But where are the holes in what we did today?" I repeat. He says nothing. I want to say more;

the silence makes me uncomfortable. Sawatsky's eyes dart back and forth across the street,
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looking for a place to cross. Or maybe he's looking for an exit ramp. I want to give him one,

because I like him and my natural inclination is to try to help out.

Uh oh. I'm doing exactly what he says gets journalists into trouble. I'm giving into my social

instincts rather than remaining a disciplined gatherer of information.

"I guess mostly the holes are in what we're doing tomorrow. You know, it's like when you write

a book. The reader never sees the holes, only the author.""So where are the holes?" The question may be neutral, but my voice is demanding, almost

hostile. The traffic roars; I strain to hear his response. No response. I want to qualify, to explain,

to justify, to say something, but I resist, letting the traffic whiz by, the horns bleat, the wind rush

between us. Finally, he speaks.

"See that?" he says, pointing to the street we're now crossing. "That's Yonge Street. It's the

longest street in Canada." He proceeds with a mini-travelogue about Toronto. Forget it, I think.

I'll drop it. He wins, I panic: How am I going to get him to answer the question? What am I

doing wrong?

Clearly, he's on to me. But it's not just my problem. In Sawatsky's view, it's a problem for all

journalism: Savvy sources are on to all of us, spinning back, all heat and no light, preciselybecause "we're asking the wrong questions," he says. Under attack, journalists are conceding

defeat to well-oiled propaganda machines without really understanding why they're losing. In the

last decade, media trainers have become such a growth industry, "you can even find them among

small businessmen in Newfoundland," Sawatsky says, teaching politicians and executives "how

to run circles around journalists."

"It's a sophisticated battle for control," he says. Despite New Yorker writer Joe Klein's recent

declaration in The Guardian that "spin has become less effective," Sawatsky contends the

"message trackers are winning," thanks to journalists who too often rely on outdated,

conventional approaches to interviewing. Sawatsky denounces standard interviewing techniques

as "the old methodology," often characterized as a power struggle between interviewer andsubject, as a battle of wills, a game to be won or lost.

Sawatsky changes the framework, taking the mystery out of what many journalists have always

believed is a mystical, serendipitous experience, likened to "lovemaking" by New York Times

reporter Claudia Dreifus in a recent book on interviewing. The conventional method represents

an irrational belief "in magic," says Sawatsky. "If an interview goes well, then we say it's magic.

But it's not magic. It happens for an understandable reason. It's rational. It's a skill. It's easy to

teach someone skills."

And he has, conducting workshops all over Canada, Asia and Europe, as well as at the Poynter

Institute and several daily newspapers in the United States, including the St. Louis Post-

Dispatch, Nashville's Tennessean and Spokane's Spokesman-Review.Sawatsky applies the same discipline to interviews that E.B. White commended to writers--make

every word tell. Using Sawatsky's approach, the journalist is no longer a sparring partner but

more like a therapist, a professional listener who leads the source down a path toward a goal,

staying in control, giving up nothing. He teaches how to focus questions, choose a strategy and

assemble interviews using the same dramatic structure Hollywood screenwriters use to build

movie plots.

"In Canada, John's a verb. We say: 'Have you been Sawatskyed?' Or, 'I'm getting Sawatskyed,' "


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says Steve Wadhams, one of the nation's leading radio documentary producers. Many who've

been "Sawatskyed" speak glowingly of the results. CBC anchor Carole MacNeil holds Sawatsky

largely responsible for her rise from covering local news in New Brunswick to hosting CBC's

"Morning," the Canadian equivalent of NBC's "Today." Her recently launched interview show,

"Newsworld Sunday with Carole MacNeil," debuted at No. 1 in its time slot. "I do nothing but

the Sawatsky method," she says. "When I'm off the Sawatsky method, I'm in trouble."Initially, though, she says she was skeptical, as was nearly every journalist attending Sawatsky's

workshop. What Sawatsky teaches requires a certain amount of discipline, she explains, and it

contradicts how journalists are initiated into interviewing. "We were trained to appear to be

tough by asking accusatory questions," she says.

The rise of the prosecutorial method of interviewing is relatively new, having replaced the

deferential manner of the '50s, derided since as the "What have you to say to a grateful nation,

Mr. Prime Minister?" style. Major reportorial victories--Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the My

Lai massacre--empowered journalists, galvanizing them to ambush and grill unsuspecting

sources, who responded with stonewalling or outright hostility. Oriana Fallaci, Mike Wallace

and Sam Donaldson took center stage; the source became the enemy to defeat at any cost.In 1990, Janet Malcolm unleashed a professional tempest when she compared the journalist to "a

kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust

and betraying them without remorse." Malcolm gave voice to conventional interviewing at its

worst, Sawatsky argues, and it touched a raw nerve. Based on competition and coercion, the old

way often leads journalist and subject to an impasse. And while most journalists eschew hyper-

confrontation and ambush interviewing, many rely on a method that at best leaves information-

gathering to chance, allowing spinmeisters to control what the public learns. In any case,

Sawatsky says, the old way puts journalists in a defensive crouch, attacked by those who believe

the media are biased, left-leaning and agenda-driven.

"People are pretty savvy. They know when they're being coerced. And they don't like it. Withcompetition, the goal becomes winning. The more we win, the more they lose. That's a lousy

way to get openness."

Textbooks and experts have long alluded to bits and pieces of the Sawatsky method, but no one

has deconstructed, rebuilt and explained the interview as coherently and simply as Sawatsky has.

"He is by leaps and bounds the most systematic thinker on interviewing that I've ever met, with a

track record as a journalist to back it up," says Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter

Institute.

Instead of using questions like cattle prods, jolting sources with provocative queries until they

squeal, reporters need to reverse the relationship, Sawatsky says. Resist the temptation to

converse, sympathize, and add value or meaning to questions, he says; use short, neutralquestions that repeat the source's own words. If the source makes a value-laden statement--for

example, "Brian can be excessive at times"--follow up with: "What do you mean, excessive?"

By offering a new way, based on research about what works and why, Sawatsky sees himself "as

pushing the frontiers," as significantly "changing the culture." He sees his method as the

journalistic equivalent of judo. "When someone attacks us, our first instinct is to resist with

force. This is not good news for small people. Judo teaches cooperation, to use the bigger

opponent's size to our advantage. It's the same in an interview. We're playing on their turf. We're


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mine enough explosive material--allegations of deceit, misogyny, alcoholism and the like--to put

Sawatsky back in the news. When the expos was published in 1991, reviewers almost

universally praised it. Maclean's, Canada's Time magazine, called Sawatsky "stubborn and

dogged," the "best investigative journalist in Canada."

After the Mulroney furor abated, word was getting around about Sawatsky's research on

interviewing. Reporters and editors began inviting him to share what he knew. He accepted acontract with the CBC to do a few months' worth of workshops, mostly in the provinces. Like a

comedian with new material, Sawatsky tried out his incomplete methodology on the road, in

places like Yellowknife, Regina, Halifax. During the workshops, Sawatsky would position

himself between two video monitors showing tape after tape of journalism's elite making one

boneheaded mistake after another. The reaction was universally hostile.

"It was a radical method," recalls Bob Allison, formerly a national reporter and senior producer

for the CBC, now a university professor. "He was telling [TV reporters] to shut up at the very

point you think you should open your mouth."

The journalists wanted none of it. "Some of them took it very personally," Sawatsky recalls. "It

was constant, continual opposition. I was challenged at every step." It became a crusade. "Whensomebody tells me I'm wrong when I know I'm right, I need to get up and show them I'm right."

He identified the weaknesses in his theory, digging deeper into his research, spending thousands

of dollars out of pocket to analyze, refigure and repitch the methodology to new audiences. The

resistance continued and was often so robust he wanted to pick up his videotapes and leave the

room.

In Halifax he was nearly eaten alive by a band of "hard-bitten old journalists we were trying to

turn around," recalls Allison, who as senior producer was overseeing the training effort. To a

room "full of egos," Allison recalls, Sawatsky showed Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes"

interviewing John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon aide during the Watergate era. After being asked a

"nine-pound question," Ehrlichman responds:" 'Is there a question in there?' " Allison recalls. "Some of the bad boys wanted to know: 'What's

wrong with that?' They thought [Wallace] made Ehrlichman look like an asshole." In fact,

Allison says, "it was clearly the other way around." ("We disagree with that analysis," says "60

Minutes" spokesman Kevin Tedesco. "Mike Wallace is the acknowledged expert at interviewing.

In this case he did exactly the right thing.") By the end of the week, Allison says, Sawatsky's

quiet intensity, firm grasp of the material, self-confidence and what he was teaching "won them

over," says Allison. "He helped that TV newsroom immensely."

In 1994, the CBC invited Sawatsky to train journalists who do the "really big show," he says, the

Canadian equivalent of network nightly news. At the end of the week, he came off the elevator

and into the newsroom. "It was the size of a football field," he remembers. "I had walked about10 feet into it when a producer came running up. 'It works, it works,' he told me, and he

proceeded to explain what he'd done differently, how he'd tried it, and gotten much better clips.

Then somebody else came up, 'It works, it works,' then another and another. I was being stopped

every 20 feet by people telling me 'It works, it works!'... That's when it hit. I knew I was

changing the culture."

Sawatsky says he no longer meets much resistance in Canada and Europe, mostly because his

reputation precedes him. Because engagements keep him booked and overseas six months at a


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Tall and slightly bent from years of cycling, Sawatsky tends toward shirtsleeves and comfortable

shoes, blending easily into crowds. He lives in the capital, Ottawa, where he lives and does most

of his writing. He is modest to a fault, eating takeout Chinese from a brown paper bag in his

hotel room, preferring walking or buses to cabs and limousines, even while on an expense

account. Despite his fame, he is far from wealthy. His books, so narrowly focused on national

issues, have little appeal outside Canada, where best-selling authors "sell about one-tenth thenumber of books you'd sell in the States."

He is, though, a journalist devoted to the story, and the story he needs to tell is about

interviewing. And so he presses on, mostly in evenly moderated, well-reasoned and rational

tones. But occasionally, with Mike Wallace or Sam Donaldson as foils, he works up the fervor of

a Baptist minister preaching the gospel, railing against journalism's conventional interviewing

techniques.

To illustrate his point, he shows a tape of CNN anchor Jeff Greenfield interviewing Sam

Donaldson. Greenfield has accused the veteran ABC reporter and his White House

correspondent cohorts of succumbing to the "Perry Mason syndrome," adding, "You guys think

that if you ask the right question in the right way that they'll crumble, they'll admit something.""They're not going to crumble," Donaldson replies emphatically. "The point is, you should ask a

pointed question that hangs in the air.... You ask a pointed question and the audience can say to

itself, 'Why didn't he answer the question?' Or they say, 'Why did he ask that question?' But the

point is, it's there even if he doesn't answer it."

Sawatsky stops the video. "OK, now I'm going to start my rant."

Donaldson, he says, is "voicing the conventional wisdom. 'The question is not going to get an

answer: It just hangs in the air.' This is an avowal of failure. Sam Donaldson doesn't use the

question to gather information. He uses it to let...it...hang...in...the...air.

"Journalism is about directness, precision, clarity, about not confusing people," Sawatsky says,

more worked up than he has been all week. "Sam Donaldson is saying: 'Let the audience figure itout. Let them read between the lines.' Basically, he's saying he can't do his job. Questions are

supposed to get answers. Questions that fail to get answers are not tough enough. We have to

redefine what tough is."

("How silly," responds Donaldson. "You can't always ask questions that are guaranteed to get

answers." If a source refuses to answer a question, he says, "you press it to a point. But if they

don't want to answer, you've got to stop. You can't keep going. At some point, you give up. No

one likes to see a reporter badger past the point where [the source] is not going to answer the

question. Then you have to move on to another question.")

But Sawatsky disagrees. His method is based on asking questions beginning with what, how,

why and to a lesser degree, who, when and where. Not exactly a novel concept. But whatSawatsky succeeds in showing is how even the best-constructed questions will fall flat if laden

with the interviewer's attitude. He shows various videos of Larry King grilling guests: "Are you

bitter?" "No." "Angry?" "No." "Were you surprised?" "No." "Did you feel guilty?" "No." "Were

you disappointed?" "Oh yeah, I guess I was disappointed."

King "takes a stab in the dark and finally he hits one. This," he says, "is where the coercion

comes in." Leave the values out, he says, and problems solve themselves.

Instead of asking Sarah Ferguson, for example, "Is it hard being a duchess?" ask: "What's it like


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being a duchess?" Instead of asking Ronald Reagan, "Were you scared when you were shot?"

ask: "What's it like to be shot?"

Effective interviewing requires "overcoming our social conditioning and instincts," he says. "The

goal of a conversation is to exchange information; the goal of an interview is to receive

information." In a conversation, two people compete to make a point, and "it becomes a contest

for control." Since most sources decide before an interview how much they'll reveal, thechallenge becomes "compelling people to go further than they normally would."

The best questions, argues Sawatsky, are like clean windows. "A clean window gives a perfect

view. When we ask a question, we want to get a window into the source. When you put values in

your questions, it's like putting dirt on the window. It obscures the view of the lake beyond.

People shouldn't notice the question in an interview, just like they shouldn't notice the window.

They should be looking at the lake."

"I get it," says a voice from the back of the room. "Mike Wallace is like a stained-glass window."

"That's right," Sawatsky says. "Stained-glass windows are beautiful to look at, but it's all about

the window, not about the view."

THE DAY AFTER SAWATSKYdodged my question about holes in his methodology, he

offered up an anecdote that answered it. It wasn't luck or magic that brought the answer, as I

might have suspected a few days earlier, but his charity. The holes were bothering him much

less, he said, than the frustration he felt from having no time to work out the few remaining kinks

in his theory. He then told the story of a young reporter in Oslo, Norway, who approached him at

a break during one of his seminars.

"She asked me: 'Don't you ever get bored doing the workshop over and over?'

"I get interviewed a lot, and I've been asked that question over and over, so I have a message

track for it. I say, 'No, not at all,' then I go into spin: 'The methodology is not finished. I'm

building it brick by brick. As long as I keep working on it, I'll never get bored,' et cetera, etcetera. She stopped me in the middle of my message track and blurted out: 'I just asked you a

closed-ended question! You of all people! Let me start again, and do it properly: How do you

feel about giving this workshop?'

"When she asked me, 'How do you feel?' I gave an answer I'd never given before. I told her: 'I'm

always upgrading the methodology, and every time I try to put new stuff into it. Lately, though,

the demand for the workshop has grown so much, I sometimes feel very frustrated, because I

know I'm not doing the job I want to be doing.'

"My answer actually surprised me. I had never said 'frustrated' before. I had my message track. I

thought I loved doing this. So why didn't I give that answer to the first question? Because she

asked about being bored. The content of the second question changed from specific to basic. My

answer," he says, "surprised even me."

And that's pretty hard to do.

the question man

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