The Larry King-style interview set the standard and set the stage for all others who have followed in recent decades.
But this approach often seems to be fading into extinction. They are nearly gone, with flickers of life emerging only so constantly.
One of the essential attributes of a great interviewer is getting the guest to open up, allowing him to answer questions and offer his insight and unique perspective.
This approach is so rare in news media, and its implementation is complex because it requires something antithetical to most modern-day news personalities. It demands that the host or interviewer simply keep quiet and let the interviewee speak.
As Marty Glickman used to say in the sports realm, “people tune in to hear the game.”
Similarly, during a television news media interview, viewers mostly tune in to hear the guest. Otherwise, they’d have ditched the segment and headed elsewhere for content or entertainment.
In a world of larger-than-life egos, fighting endlessly for “hot takes,” attention, and clicks, a host clamming up and letting the guest steal the show is scarce indeed.
On that note, it was hard not to notice the epic interview last week between Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Michael Saylor, the pioneering CEO of Microstrategy.
Saylor, arguably the largest Bitcoin holder in the world, and one of the asset’s biggest proponents, joined Carlson’s Tucker Carlson Today weekend program last week. A shortened version of the conversation then aired during Carlson’s weeknight primetime program.
Carlson set the table by admitting to being a Bitcoin neophyte before asking the Bitcoin guru to explain the technology and why it is valuable.
“Bitcoin is the first engineered monetary system in the history of the human race,” the forward-thinking Saylor began. “The first question is, what’s money. The second question is, what’s the problem? And the third question is, what’s the solution?”
Over the next hour, Saylor explained why he and the company he runs started accumulating Bitcoin in March 2020. Saylor also discussed the role of money, the risks of inflation, Bitcoin as digital gold, the value of the asset for citizens worldwide, among many other angles related to the digital asset. Carlson nodded often and occasionally commented briefly as the technology genius laid out his case.
“The point of Bitcoin is to fix the money. And money is energy, and energy is life. And if I keep sucking the energy out of the economy, I’m sucking the oxygen out of your system,” Saylor said. “Under the best case, you perform poorly. Under the worst case, I suffocate you to death or freeze you to death. That’s the problem. That’s why empires collapse.”
“You spoke on and off for about 50 minutes,” Carlson pointed out. “That was amazing. That was one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever heard. You’ve made the most compelling case I’ve ever heard for the need for something like Bitcoin.”
True indeed, but only because Carlson did his job as an interviewer. The marvelous content was only the result of Carlson’s wonderful approach.
Fascinating enough, another talk host also discussed this very same facet of communication last week. On the December 2nd episode of his Daily Hope podcast, entitled Learning to Live Wisely, Pastor Rick Warren explicitly discussed the role of a host when interviewing a guest.
“One of the keys is listening. If you don’t listen, then you’re not going to grow,” Warren began his monologue. “I have never learned anything while I’m talking. If my mouth is moving, I’m not learning. I’m only learning when I’m listening. You don’t learn when you’re talking. You learn when you’re listening, so you gotta learn to listen.”
In other words, your audience only learns if you listen.
“I’ve done an awful lot of interviews. ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, BBC, CNN, and on and on,” Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, explained. “What I’ve noticed is that the interview shows have changed. They’re no longer about the guest. Instead, they’re about the interviewer. And the whole goal is, the interviewer wants to draw attention to himself. The interviewer wants to explain his or her opinions, and you’re just the foil.”
Marty Glickman got it. Tucker Carlson gets it, and Rick Warren receives it. Many others do as well, albeit far fewer than we’d hope.
“I long for the old Larry King days,” Warren said. “You know what I liked about Larry King? He would ask a question, and then he’d let you talk. And he realized that the interview, people weren’t going to listen to Larry King. They were going to listen to all of the fascinating guests that he had and learning from them.”
Warren quoted the late King saying, “in an interview show, if the host is talking 50 percent of the time, something is terribly wrong. The host listens the most. The host talks the least. The host sets up the question and then just listens. That’s what a good TV host does.”
Completely different realms – Glickman, Carlson, and Warren – yet each one, in their own way, acknowledges one of the keys to effective communication (and media success).
Rick Schultz is a former Sports Director for WFUV Radio at Fordham University. He has coached and mentored hundreds of Sports Broadcasting students at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, Marist College and privately. His media career experiences include working for the Hudson Valley Renegades, Army Sports at West Point, The Norwich Navigators, 1340/1390 ESPN Radio in Poughkeepsie, NY, Time Warner Cable TV, Scorephone NY, Metro Networks, NBC Sports, ABC Sports, Cumulus Media, Pamal Broadcasting and WATR. He has also authored a number of books including “A Renegade Championship Summer” and “Untold Tales From The Bush Leagues”. To get in touch, find him on Twitter @RickSchultzNY.
I am a recruiter. I have been interviewing jobseekers day-in day-out for more than a couple of decades and I have read piles of content of interviewing skills. This was one of the best articles I read so far that summed it all up in a concise way. You could not make it more clear. The best guidance is to listen closely and let them talk. It makes the interview a lot more interesting.