And so the day came to pass: “Your Interview (-slash-Votre-Entrevue) with Prime Minister Stephen Harper” was broadcast on YouTube. It was broadcast an hour late, which turned out to be moot, since the whole thing was pre-taped anyway. It wasn’t a live town hall; it was a video press release.
Was it the gong show some of us had been predicting? No. Gong shows are fun.
It had all the trappings of a broadcast interview, though little of the content. Instead of Peter Mansbridge, we got Patrick Pichette, a nervous Google executive, fidgeting in his chair. (At least he brought a touch of that YouTube amateur-hour spirit to the proceedings.) “This is democracy at work!” he said, knees a-wiggle. Otherwise, it was as standard-issue an interview as anything a broadcast network might have churned out, but without the interesting content.
The event went on for a good 40 minutes; mostly, it consisted of Pichette serving up questions for Harper – some written, some taped – and then letting Harper answer at length, uninterrupted and unchallenged.
Much ado had been made of the exercise’s premise: Canadians were to submit questions on YouTube and then vote on them; the most popular would then be answered. “Unfiltered and immediate access to information” was what the PMO promised. But no sooner had the broadcast begun than Pichette casually announced that “We’ve picked, from the very top tier, a selection of questions.” So much for that.
If the goal was to engage youth or the politically disinclined, the video didn’t do itself any favours. The very first question was in French, and answered in French, without the benefit of any translation or subtitling. Also, it was about structural deficits. If you think listening to a politician run through his talking points about structural deficits is interesting in a language you understand, wait till you try it in a language you don’t.
The Prime Minister looked professional, composed, and grimly amused to be there. After he gave a lengthy response to a question about Senate reform that came from a viewer named Harvey, Pichette – almost involuntarily – burbled “Thank-you, and I’m sure that Harvey would be thrilled by this answer!”
It wasn’t even Pichette’s fault. The format was DOA. Interviews that consist of simply delivering a list of pre-written questions are guaranteed to be dogs. This is why journalists hate doing e-mail interviews. The best interview is a two-way conversation between two personalities that illuminates at least one of them. (Case in point: Craig Ferguson talks to Stephen Fry without an audience, delivering real content in the late-night void.)
You don’t get that when the interviewer is limited to reading a list of questions, even if they come from Bob in Whitehorse or sje7835 in Edmonton, because then the interviewee just reads off answers. It’s ironic that the most interactive of intentions led to the least interactive of interviews.
The format needn’t have been fated to fiasco. Google could have freed their interlocutor to act as a real interviewer – guided by user questions, but not reduced to parroting them – who could ask follow-ups, direct the conversation, and needle the Prime Minister when he needed to be needled, they might have been onto something. They could have broadcast live, and put the Prime Minister in a real town-hall setting, out of his comfort zone, into a setting that would catch people’s attention.
But they didn’t, and what we got was the dullest 40 minutes on YouTube. And that’s enough to turn engaged citizens into a bunch of sleepy kittens.