"In-your-face isn't our style"

The National Public Radio Ombudsman, Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has recently written about complaints regarding an NPR interview with Dick Cheney. In the interview Cheney was allowed to get away with making statements already know and proven to be false. Listeners criticised NPR interviewer Juan Williams heavily for not dismissing such erroneous statements.

In response Dovrkin said:

Many asked why NPR is not more like the BBC. However the "in-your-face" interview style as practiced by the BBC ("Oh come on Prime Minister. Do you really expect anyone to believe that?") is not done on NPR and American political interviews -- for a number of journalistic, cultural and stylistic reasons that are probably good subjects for a future column.

Now I for one would really like to know exactly what those "journalistic, cultural and stylistic reasons" are that prevent NPR setting a standard for all other interviews to follow. I regularly listen to BBC interviews on the radio, and grew up with them. Its only after ten years of living this side of the big blue wobbly thing that I have come to appreciate how refreshing the so called "in-your-face" BBC style is. By comparison USA news interviews are conducted with "white-glove-and brown-nose" style. News channels are afraid if they will alienate guests by asking them frank and intelligent questions, instead they accept canned sound-bite responses at face value and with happy smiling faces and thank yous. Such a weak and afraid press is a dangerous thing, it is left disempowered and lets interviewees simply use the national news media as a platform to broadcast unchallenged party propoganda.

I believe that the NPR should seek to pursue higher goals of journalisitc achievement and in doing so that it can lead the rest of the weak and timid media masses in the right direction. In the UK the BBC is the standard, and no politician can get away with refusing a BBC interview and not looking cowardly. After all to survive a BBC interview one need only speak intelligently on topic and be prepared to defend a view or point, exactly as anyone able of intellectual debate should be capable of.

As someone in the UK recently pointed out to me, the world would be a better place if the President of the United States could stand up in a forum similar to the British Prime Ministers Question Time and take on all comers without an army of policy makers and political advisors to massage and vet every word spoken. If such a thing happened we could probably expect to have far fewer "yes-men" running the country in the interests of their and other peoples pocket books, and even those that did make it to power could at least be easily put on the spot by the press and shown in their true colours.