June 16, 2003
There has been a lot of criticism about the way Barbara Walters conducted her recent interview of Senator Hillary Clinton that was aired on ABC prior to the release of Clinton’s autobiography, Living History. Much of the criticism directed at Walters was for her failure to aggressively question the former First Lady.
Walters seemed to take everything that the junior senator from New York said at face value. Barbara gushed sympathy when Hillary talked about how she gulped for air when Bill finally admitted the true nature of his relationship with former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Walters also accepted Clinton’s assertion that she had no plans to run for president, much like the media accepted the fact that she had no political plans whatsoever, prior to throwing her hat into the run for the United States Senate.
The fact that Hillary denied planning to run for president is not unusual in the world of politics where "yes" means "yes" and "no" means "I’m thinking about it". However, was Walters wrong in not aggressively questioning what she was saying or what she had written in her memoirs? For example, Walters seemed to agree that Hillary, who was only on the show because she had written a 562-page tome about her life, was entitled to a "zone of privacy". Even though Clinton wrote about her personal life for political and financial gain, she was not to be asked questions about anything that she didn’t want to answer. Hillary’s answers to tough questions would have been interesting. Does she share her husband’s views that oral sex isn’t sex? We’ll never know what Clinton, who has been referred to as the smartest woman in American, thinks that "is" is. She wasn’t questioned about whether or not she has the ability to be president of the United States. As has been noted elsewhere, if she gets so shocked that she has to gulp for air when she finds out the her husband, a serial adulterer, had sexual relations "with that woman", how would she react if Osama bin Laden, a serial bomber, launched another terrorist attack upon the United States. The list of questions that could have been asked goes on and on.
Having said that, those that were disappointed with the way Walters questioned Senator Clinton, stems from a mistaken belief that the interview was somehow journalism. It’s not--it’s entertainment. The purpose of these types of interviews is not to elicit information, or to get at the truth, but to garner high ratings. If interviewers such as Walters and Larry King started asking tough questions, high profile celebrities would refuse to be interviewed, and their programs would be history. The host’s purpose is not to elicit information, but to facilitate the interview by moving it along so that a maximum amount of topics can be covered within the allotted time frame.
The master of this technique is Larry King, who has the reputation of never having asked a tough question in his life. That’s why his show is so popular--anyone, regardless of political stripe or reason for being in the public eye, is willing to appear, knowing that they will not be ambushed or attacked. After OJ Simpson was acquitted of murdering his wife and Ron Goldman, he ran onto Larry King Live. The first question that King asked (so OJ, how does it feel to be out of jail?) was so soft that the question seemed to surprise OJ (uh, it feels pretty good, Larry). Simpson knew that King would never ask a question that a real journalist would ask (by the way, OJ, we’ve all seen that picture of you on the sidelines wearing black leather gloves--if those weren’t the gloves that Mark Fuhrman found, where are they?). Had there been even a slim chance that Simpson would be asked questions like that, he never would have been willing to appear on the show.
Barbara Walters should not be criticized for the way she interviewed Hillary Clinton. It’s not journalism, let alone hard-hitting journalism. It’s not about information; it’s about ratings. It’s not news--it’s entertainment.