No, this isn’t the way everyone sees it, and yes, there are plenty of people who think we are the problem, period. But a large part of the turnoff, in my judgment, is based on rituals and ceremonies in which both sides eagerly and competitively participate to the ultimate advantage of neither. Chief among these is the question-and-answer session, sometimes in the form of a full-fledged press conference, sometimes as a mere tableau or a seemingly happenstance encounter. People watching these events are often at a loss to decide whether the questions are more disrespectful and outrageous or the answers more unconvincing and duplicitous.
I think I can be of help here. The answer is both. This is because usually what are framed as question-and-answer sessions are not in fact information-gathering events at all. As in court trials and legislative hearings, the people asking the questions have a pretty clear idea of what the possible range of responses can be; they are trying to close off the easy exits and compel the official to reveal or acknowledge something he doesn’t care to. The answering officials, for their part, are not trying to inform (let alone confess) so much as to please and persuade; they do not expect to please and persuade the questioners, of course, but rather the audience that counts, which is outside the room.
It is indicative of the degree to which such events have become a kind of art form judged by standards that have little to do with the amount of information or even news elicited, that in this city, anyway, the question people ask each other concerning both the interrogators and the responders is not what any of them said, but rather how they “did.” How did the encounter “go”? Did the press look too rude? Too in-the-tank? Too clamorous? Did the official look too defensive? Too surly? Too uncertain? Did he “get” them or did they “get” him? A president who, like Bill Clinton a few weeks ago, deliberately walks into the lion’s den and is seen to take on all comers is in large part intentionally undertaking the chore for just that purpose: to show himself as masterful and in charge. It only helps if the press is seen to overreach. You do understand, don’t you, that just as the questioners pretty much know what the answers will be, so the answerer has spent some part of his day practice-answering the questions, which he and his staff have been doping out?
So far as the public boredom with and revulsion at the ensuing production goes, I have a few ideas about which kinds of questions and which kinds of answers do the most harm to those who speak them. First for the Q’s, and then the A’s. There is a whole line of won’t-you-be-so-good-as-to-incriminate-yourself inquiries that invite the official to agree to some self-damaging proposition. These tend always to begin in one of a few ways: “Wouldn’t it be fair to say that (you have failed in your policy)”; “Aren’t you really being (hypocritical to claim that this is what you want)”; “Isn’t it true that (you just lost a big one on the Hill and don’t know what to do now).” There are other forms of politely (and seemingly innocently) requesting self-immolation, to be sure-questions beginning, “A lot of your critics have said. . .” and “How do you square . . . " and so forth. The point is that in the thrust-and-parry of such events, these are legitimate thrusts; but no one should confuse them with information-seeking, what-are-your-views-on-world-peace types of inquiry.
The formulations I listed can be denounced as introductions to trick questions. You may not think much of them, but there is no penalty for asking them beyond perhaps permanently alienating the person to whom they are addressed on prime-time TV and all of his or her friends and supporters. The same is not true of trick answers which are at least as plentiful as trick questions and which can boomerang on those who try them out. Unless it has been outlawed by now, the old saying, “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,” should be adopted as immutable policy by all who would hold a press conference. Clever, as in legalistic and technically accurate but in one way or another misleading, may have a very long fuse, but eventually it detonates. And guess who it invariably gets?
Yet again and again public officials go to sleep at night insanely thinking they have laid to rest some prospective embarrassment or worse with an artful dodge of some kind that seemed to do the job at the moment. But almost without exception, it seems, the thing comes back and importantly it looks worse and gets worse the second time around. It’s surprising how effective such simple responses as “I was wrong” or “I changed my mind” or “It didn’t work out and so we are going to do something different” can be, as distinct from the curly, clever, foredoomed, half-true half-answer. It is much better to take the hit than to delude oneself that secrets will hold or a story once pursued be abandoned by all.
The officials’ misconception here no doubt owes something to their sharing in the general confusion as to what so many of these Q & A sessions that the public complains of are really about. The principal journalistic unearthing of information doesn’t occur in these settings; many of them have become much more show than tell. But the cunningly answered or unanswered questions don’t vanish when the session ends. You can win the press conference and lose the war.
