Bill Moyers, �A World of Ideas�
One of the last classes I took at San Jose State before graduating was a class on interviewing. The final project was to study and analyze an interviewer�s style. Since this was a major project, and I suspect the professor was tired of train-wreck papers handed in on the final day, you had to have several meetings to discuss who you picked and what progress you had made since the last time you had a sit-down meeting with her.
The interviewer meeting was supposed to have some historical significance, so for most people their picks revolved around things like Leonardo DiCaprio interviewing Bill Clinton. At my first meeting, I told her I wanted to use Edward R. Murrow�s interview with Joseph McCarthy, which is almost universally cited as the journalistic event that brought McCarthy down.
I think my instructor would have kissed me, if it weren�t for rules against that kind of behavior.
�Oh, that�s a wonderful choice! That�s exactly what I�ve been hoping for, because that really shows Murrow at his prime in terms of interview skill! It�s perfect! What a great idea!�
For three weeks I searched around various source materials, trying to find the interview. I wasn�t having any luck. My professor kept giving suggestions on where I could find a tape or a transcription. Nothing materialized. Finally, I got a tape of the famed aired episode.
Murrow doesn�t interview McCarthy at all.
Consider this a warning if you think your professors really know more than you do.
So I now had a week left to finish the project, and I had to start from scratch. I was shelving this book at work, when I got the idea to do Bill Moyers, specifically with his two-part interview with Noam Chomsky.
I actually had a copy of this interview, salvaged from my days of working as a librarian at De Anza College. But it was too hard trying to transcribe pieces from the episode, as my computer is at one end of my room, my television is at the other, and I don�t have a remote for the VCR. So I bought the book and used it to help the transcription process.
Of course, this also meant that I had a 500-plus page book to finish, featuring half-hour interviews with 41 different public figures, none of them celebrities. Instead, we�re treated to conversations with anthropologists, management professors, pastors, philosophers and historians, many of whom I�ve never heard of.
As a matter of fact, from that job at De Anza, I already had the episodes of the people I knew and was interested in: � Chomsky, Tom Wolfe and Joseph Heller. My tastes may be varied, but I didn�t really have an interest in what ethicist Sissela Bok had to say.
And that�s why Moyers is such a legendary journalist. Not only did he find these people interesting, but he was also able to make them interesting to other people. To make a series involving such a wide variety of ideas and ideals must have been a monumental task, and Moyers is never once caught unaware or ignorant of the subject matter.
This guy must have done a fuckload of research, and that�s why when he�s dealing with somebody not used to speaking in a public forum, he�s able to get the subjects to dumb it down a little, without being flippant.
I�ve had to interview people like this before. In order for me to make sense of what they�re talking about, I�ve used the line, �Ok, let�s just pretend I got hit in the head with a brick on the way to this interview, and I don�t have any idea of what you�re talking about.�
I�m betting Moyers never thought of that.
But he still doesn�t always hit it out of the park with these interviews; some people will always be boring. That�s a good thing in my case, as when I find somebody interesting, I have a habit of checking out things they�ve written. I have enough to read already, thanks.
Saying that, I should mention that out of all the subjects � those I knew, knew of, or didn�t know at all � the person I found the most fascinating was Isaac Asimov, whom I�ve never read.
Oh no.
For those who don�t know, Asimov is in the Guinness Book of World Records for writing a book under every subject in the Dewey Decimal system. He wrote over 400 books before he died.
Oh no.
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[UPDATE]
Moyers� recently retired. I heard him interviewed by Terry Gross, and he said he�s looking forward to some fishing time. He made it sound like he was pleased. Six months later, he�s starting to talk about it. I really, really suggest you take the hour or so to listen to the speech. You have to wait a bit to get past the standard thanks and memory lane stuff, but then it gets good.
Hoo boy, does it get good.
