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| Home | Impartiality | Accuracy | Fairness | Respect | Independence | |
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 BBC interviews should be well mannered and courteous but not partial or emotionally attached to one side of an argument. Interviewees should be given a fair chance to set out their full response to the questions. Questions put by reporters to public figures as they come and go are part of legitimate newsgathering. But in all other cases, doorstepping should be a last resort. The art of interviewing - by Kelly Shephard, Broadcast Journalist, BBC World Service New Media Interviewees can be many things: guarded, enthralling, gushing, fake, flawed, demonstrative, intimidating, they can even be scripted. Depending when you catch them, they can be quiet and shy or bold and direct. Interviews are false situations; whilst they should always be polite and purposeful discourses, it is often hard to listen to what is being said whilst all the time thinking of the next question. The conversation must flow without becoming weighted in one direction. Being impartial Often it is hard not to pass judgement on the speaker. They may be quite dislikeable. They may be lovable. But in the end it is the journalist's job to tell the story, not draw conclusions. The point is that it is virtually impossible to predict the way an interview will go and the interviewer must be prepared and alert, keeping the conversation on track without influencing the speaker's words. Even the simplest of subject matters can become complicated, particularly if the interviewee has an alternative agenda. Entertaining strangers Some time ago, I interviewed a well-known television chef and it was very hard to keep the conversation on course. What should have been a simple chat about a forthcoming book turned into a platform for him to divulge his wild plans to raise money for a stage production of a "mushroom opera", complete with pirouetting porcinis. Our charismatic chef's mind was obviously elsewhere and it was my job to make sense of the conversation. Conscious that soon his publicist would call time and I would be left with nonsense, I recalled an inscription I had once seen that said, "entertain strangers for among them may be angels". I had no choice but to go with the flow. Turning my mind to mushrooms I found myself seriously asking, "and who will play the lead in your opera?" Our cherubic speaker smiled, his eyes glistened and he proclaimed, "Madame Chanterelle of course - the queen of fungi". It may sound a little crazy but at that moment it all made perfect sense. |
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