 | Charlie Rose is greeted by students during his visit to campus as a Poynter Fellow. He delivered the annual Gary G. Fryer Memorial Lecture on April 18. |
If there was one thing that the reaction to television and radio personality Don Imus' racial slur made clear, it was a need for a national dialogue about such issues as race and journalistic integrity, said Emmy Award-winning television anchor Charlie Rose to an audience that gathered on April 18 to hear him deliver the annual Gary G. Fryer Memorial Lecture.
While the national headline-making Imus story was rightfully blown off the airwaves after the mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI), Rose pointed out he is concerned that this much-needed national conversation in response to the Imus affair will be forgotten.
"Last week and on Sunday, everybody said we have to have a conversation, we have to do something about this [Don Imus event] that has exposed us to our crudeness, that has exposed us to our coarseness, that has exposed us to something that doesn't belong in a country and a nation that believes as we do about ourselves," Rose told his audience.
"I worry that [because of our change in focus] we will not have that dialogue," he continued.
Rose, the executive editor and anchor of the nightly one-hour roundtable interview that bears his name, spoke for an hour in Levinson Auditorium, focusing much of his talk on the importance of the interview in journalism. His lecture was sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale.
Known for his own conversational style of interviewing, Rose said that both events -- Imus' on-air comment denigrating the black female basketball players on the Rutgers team and the nation's most deadly mass shooting -- demand a national conversation about "the society we live in.
"We've got to insist on this dialogue, and we've got to insist the interviews that we [journalists] do play a part in a national conversation about who we are," he asserted.
The television talk show host said the interview "is at the heart of journalism" and is the only aspect of journalism that has not been changed by technology and the expansion of the media.
"Think about VPI: there were people on cell phones communicating there that day," said Rose. "It is the new phenomenon in terms of tragedy, whatever it is. There are people who are doing their own reporting, and they are communicating to CNN or FOX News or other places, and it's on the air because they are the only observers."
Yet, all of the journalists -- whether print, radio or television -- who converged on campus were on a "search to get the interview" that would shed light on the events of the day and on the possible motive of the killer, Rose said.
Whatever the event being covered, Rose noted, for every journalist the story revolves around the standard questions of "who, what, when, where and why."
"These are the questions we ask every day," said Rose, and "sometimes those questions can bring extraordinary results."
To these, Rose said he has added his own "rules" to interviewing, which he cited as: to understand the psychology of the individual being interviewed; to prepare for the interview like an athlete before a match or an actor before a stage performance; to listen both to the subject's answer and the "nuances" of that response; to "seize the moment"; to have a genuine desire to understand and learn from the interviewee; and to be spontaneous.
The journalist also related some of the questions he will ask when other efforts to "unlock" his interview guest have failed, including such questions as: What have been the conflicts in your life? What are some of your cherished moments? Who has had a profound impact on you? What is your favorite book (or movie or painting)? If you are in trouble, who do you call?
Rose said that he admires many contemporary television and radio journalists, but that the most famous interview of his lifetime is the one David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977 when the former president, for the first time, apologized to the American people and admitted he had broken the law during the Watergate scandal.
Rose lamented the fact that many of the interviews on television today are the result of "a kind of game" to see who can get interviews with particular celebrities.
"What's missing most in the interview today is the idea of conversation -- people engaging in each other or people having a dialogue with each other," he said, noting, "Conversation today has become almost an overused word. Politicians say 'I want to have a conversation with the American people.' Even French politicians say it. ... America needs to have a conversation about important ideas. And because conversations are not about sound bytes, not about two minutes, they have found a decreasing avenue to be seen on television.
"I am part of the process that believes conversations belong on television, conversations about who we are [as a society], but also conversations about who [individual] people are. You can't do that in five minutes."
Rose noted that the Gary G. Fryer Lecture was established at Yale in memory of the University's former Office of Public Affairs director in honor of his own sense of ethical responsibility in communications. For himself, said Rose, that responsibility means "taking no cheap shots, realizing that not everything has two sides but you have to find out if there is another side that is worthy of hearing" and having no agenda, among other standards.
Having ethical standards in one's personal life, he concluded, is also important.
"We can, on the Imus story, make too much of it or too little of it," Rose told his audience. "It is not the first time there was an atmosphere that failed, on television, to take note of racism and sexism for whatever reason. Too many times in our life and work we've failed to stop and say, 'I will not let that pass. I will not participate, even though I know it would be easy for me to.' ...
"The last two weeks remind us that there is never more of an imperative to do that, to regain our sense of purpose and stability," he continued. "The imperative of journalists and people who have the national focus -- people who have the capacity to bring us together -- is to not forget, not be in a room where things happen that we don't particularly like, that we not forget that we can use this instrument [of national visibility] that we have been given access to to make a difference and make the world we live in better."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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