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Behind the scenes at CTV: the Dion interview
October 24, 2008
- Posted by
By
Susan Newhook  Here's the scenario: You are in charge of a television newsroom near the end of a tough, close election campaign. Your six o'clock host heads downtown for a late-afternoon, live-to-tape interview with one of the major party leaders. You're a bit concerned about whether he'l be back in time for the 5 pm newsbreak, but otherwise it's a straightforward shoot. Tape rolls, and said leader -- whose first language is not your program's -- finds the first question confusing and asks to start again. As the two cameras keep rolling the host agrees, but then it happens again. This time, the leader's aide jumps in, trying to help. A third time, the guest starts to laugh. The fourth take is fine. You hear about all this just before 5 pm, when the field producer phones from a cab en route to the station. You look at the tape and kick the question upstairs to the network, where the president of news pulls other national newsroom people into the discussion. As this process is going on (and the clock is ticking toward air), the field producer tells you that the aide asked him -- after the host had left -- if the outtakes would air, and he said, "Don’t worry about it." Oh, and there's good reason to believe that if you don't air it, someone else will. What do you, and the others involved, do? That's the situation journalists at CTV faced on Thursday, October 9, after Steve Murphy's interview in Halifax with Stéphane Dion. They decided to air the entire tape, with the 'do-overs' of the questions and the responses, and have been damned widely for it. The Liberals were furious. Gleeful Conservatives jumped on Dion's confusion, which may have worked both for and against the Tories in the election four days later. The public, media colleagues and competitors and some bloggers have been criticizing and challenging CTV's decision ever since. I spoke with three of the people who were involved in the interview and the decision to air the false starts: CTV News president, Robert Hurst; CTV Atlantic news director Jay Witherbee; and, Steve Murphy, the host and interviewer. (A fourth, perhaps the pivotal player, senior producer Peter Mallette, was not available up to deadline.) Hurst, Witherbee and Murphy described a chain of events that were a function of several issues: tight deadlines; network policy; confusion over one 're-do' that turned into several; and having to decide between breaking an arguably vague commitment (from Mallette, not Murphy), and seeming to cover up something others might have reported anyway. One day before the interview took place, the Liberals had offered CTV an interview with Dion during his visit to Halifax. Murphy says he heard "fairly late" -- around 10 or 11 on Thursday morning -- that the Liberals had confirmed the interview for 4:15 pm. There were no unusual rules or agreements around any of the election interviews. As soon as Murphy finished his noon newscast, he started preparing for the interview. "As I would normally do, (I) ran the questions by Jay and Peter and talked about how it was going to go,” Murphy explained. He and Witherbee agreed that the lead topic should be the economy, the first question hooked to Dion's speech on the subject that same day. Witherbee recalls discussing the question, and says he saw no problem with it. It was late in the day for a supper hour host to go downtown for an interview. "Our preference is always live to air or live to tape [taped and going to air without any editing]. We prefer live to air, in studio," says Witherbee. "The reality is that sometimes that can't work. And then we try to accommodate." CTV's studios are at the other end of the Halifax peninsula and Murphy had a live newsbreak at five sharp. Murphy says he'd been told Dion was also heading for the airport by five. When Murphy and Mallette arrived for the 4:15 interview, they had to wait for Global National to finish with Dion. The two outlets shared CTV's lighting setup to save time. Murphy says his pre-interview chat with Dion was light -- preparations for Thanksgiving and so on -- but he thought Dion looked tired; that was why he agreed to restart the interview after it started. "I did feel bad for the guy," he says. "I even said to him, when the tape was rolling, 'I'm okay with that' and I was going to say 'because--' and the 'because' got cut off. What I was on the road to saying was, 'I'm okay with that because it seems that you were in some distress'." But Dion stopped a second time, and this time, Liberal aide Sarah Bain chimed in off-camera, attempting to clarify the question. (Bain declined an interview.) A third take ended almost as soon as it began, when Dion, and then Murphy, started to laugh; the fourth went ahead without incident. Both Murphy and Witherbee say one re-start in such a situation is a bit unusual; several highly so. "My personal sense is if we had to restart the interview once, you and I wouldn't be talking about this today.... Somewhere between that and an aide jumping in to explain the question, and a few other do-overs, we got ourselves to the situation that we're in," says Witherbee. When the interview was over Murphy dashed off, back to the station to make his 5 pm newsbreak. Witherbee explains the conversation that occurred while Mallette was packing up: "One of the aides to Mr. Dion went up to (Mallette) and said, 'Oh my goodness, you're not going to put all of that on the air, are you?' And Peter said, 'don't worry'." He then jumped into a cab with the tapes and called Witherbee en route to say he was on his way. Witherbee says Mallette later told him "something very unusual happened at the beginning [of the interview] that I should have a look at." By the time Mallette got to the station it was almost five o'clock and the two-camera interview still had to be mixed for air. Witherbee "grabbed one of the tapes and rewound it to the beginning and just started watching." He says he wasn't really sure if Dion didn't understand Murphy's question or if he just didn't have an answer -- "so I decided that I needed an opinion from the network level." Hurst was busy with election night preparations and didn't see the urgent e-mail from Witherbee in Halifax until about 5:20 Halifax time, he says. After a first phone call with Witherbee, in which they talked about "the issues...the misunderstanding of what the question was, the interjection by Dion's staffer," Hurst told Witherbee to post the material on the network's internal Gateway video system for him and others to view. It took more than 20 minutes for Hurst to see the tape and discuss it with senior staff, including Wendy Freeman, head of national news operations. "I called Jay [Witherbee] back and we made the decision that we thought this was newsworthy," Hurst says. "We talked about, 'how do we handle this', and went through the pros and cons about that, and the rest, as they say, is history." Hurst says he had charged all his journalists to pursue stories aggressively throughout the campaign, and that this was no different. "I told them it is not our job to make any leader look good or bad and we are going to report very aggressively and get it all out there. The conversations between Toronto and Halifax covered a number of questions: "Are we being fair? Was there a clear misunderstanding?... We talked about how it might play in our bilingual country, in Quebec... We talked about our relationship with the political party... "My first question (to Witherbee) was: 'Was there any undertaking by any member of our crew to burn the tape?' The answer was clearly no. There was no undertaking whatsoever." Meanwhile, Murphy says his agreement for one 'do-over', recorded on the tape, didn't extend to the other three. Everyone agreed that the story was worth covering, they say. The only question was how. Another element also landed in the mix. Witherbee says it wasn’t until partway through the discussions with Toronto that he learned "we left the Liberals with the impression that the restarts wouldn't run.... At one point in the review when we were sort of leaning toward running the restarts, Peter (Mallette) told me, 'y'know I think... I gave them the impression that they wouldn't run'." With that information, he added, "I guess we believed there was an implication there, that gave the impression that we were not going to air those restarts." However, he and Hurst "decided that those types of decisions are best made by senior editors in the newsroom, and not in the field." The piece would go to air, Witherbee says, without letting the Liberals know. In an ideal world, he now reflects, "If time allowed, it would've been nice to give the Liberals a heads-up." A couple days after the Oct 14 election, CTV Atlantic aired a response to the controversy on CTV News at Six. In that story, Hurst cited "a policy and a guideline manual" as part of the decision-making process. It's called, the "CTV News Policy Handbook" and regarding interviews, it states: "Interviews must be spontaneous and unrehearsed... permission of the President, CTV News or delegate is required before entering into any agreement limiting spontaneity of the interview. The audience must be informed of the conditions of any such agreement when interview (sic) is broadcast, except in cases where restrictions agreed are irrelevant to the content of the interview." It's not clear what if any influence that particular section -- which might have worked for or against airing -- had on the final decision. By the time Witherbee et al. had agreed to put the outtakes to air, CTV News at Six was on the air across the Maritimes. As the show progressed, Murphy says he got updates on the discussion, but played no part in the final decision to use the outtakes as a lead-in to the interview: "Some decisions are outside one's pay grade," he says. It was all so close to the wire that Witherbee, Mallette and Murphy worked during commercial breaks on the on-camera script that set up the story. It all went to air about 6:40 p.m. In the two weeks since the interview, Witherbee says CTV has been considering "how, if at all, we need to adjust newsroom protocols in dealing with political leaders in live-to-tape situations during election campaigns. Certainly we will have to explain that if we are not doing the interview live it's going to be as if it were live." As the face of CTV News Atlantic, Murphy has taken much of the flak in the ensuing fallout, but he says he did nothing wrong then and does nothing differently now. His final word on the exercise: "I think it is perfectly fair and ethical to debate the decision that was made. And I also think that it is completely fair and ethical to consider the alternative -- which would have seen a broadcaster accede to requests not to air something that had occurred. And in that sense, might we equally have been accused of acquiescing to partisan interests in not airing something and sort of withholding something from the public? I think it can be debated from both sides." Susan Newhook is an Assistant Professor at King's College School of Journalism. For almost 20 years, she was a researcher, reporter and producer at CBC News and Current affairs, and now also produces independent TV productions. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jeff makes very interesting points. One could think of other framings, such as "should politicians care exactly what question is being asked, since many people don't expect a straight answer anyway?" Clearly, Murphy did "frame" this event, by saying that initially Dion didn't understand the question and explicitly referring to a "third false start" when it was simply laughter. Had Murphy said instead "I asked Dion if he were PM now, what would he have done..." and Dion wanted to know whether I meant he was PM in the past or now and I replied right now", that would have been more factual.
Instead, the framing Murphy gave to it implied the question itself was fine. But, really, -- "If you were an astronaut right now, today, what space travel would you have already done?" -- where I've used Murphy's explanations and second wording, just to illustrate how much control he had over there being a third start. As to Dion laughing on the third start, he was certainly in better humour than I would have been.
Faced with an ethical dilemma, the first question we should ask is whether we have a journalistic purpose?
Having viewed the YouTube version of the start of this interview several times - a luxury that CTV editors did not give themselves because of the fear of being beaten on their own interview - I could argue reasonably, "Yes, this tells me something new and relevant about a man seeking Canada's highest elected office." What it tells me is that a guy who helped write the Clarity Act really does want clarity in questions before he answers them. It would have made a nice sidebar story or second-day story.
Unfortunately, CTV felt it did not have the time to frame the story that way. Instead, the intro to the story - as it went to air the first time in Halifax - draws attention to the false starts. The intro (written during commercial breaks) suggests that in other circumstances the viewers would not be seeing this material, but for some overriding journalistic or public interest reason CTV is departing from the norm in this case.
The second issue is whether CTV reneged on a commitment to a source. Did anyone at CTV leave Dion with the impression the false starts would be edited out? It would be nice to know what was Dion's understanding as he uncliped the lapel mic and left the set.
CTV editors gave themselves no time to frame the story as a "Dion is a stickler for clarity" story and little time to clarify what Dion expected would or would not be aired.
Is the public interest harmed if you have to wait until the next newscast to get enough information to make a sound journalistic decision?
What's happening here is what I call the First Law of Journalism: If shit is going to happen, it is going to happens on deadline.
There is a corollary, and we all learned it in the first year of J-school: When in doubt, leave it out. This applies not just to questions of factual accuracy, but also to ethical questions.
(And full disclosure, it has taken me about an hour to think through what I wanted to say in this post.)
A common justification given for airing the false starts is that there were so many of them. I think Steve Murphy had a lot of control over these.
Personally, I would not have stuck the word "now" in the orginal sentence because I'd be embarassed to be on TV talking that way. However, if I had a long day and had posed the question that way, when Dion asked his first question, I would simply have responded "Yes. If you had been prime minister, what would you have done,..." and then continued on. I would then have asked to have the first part cut so that Canadians did not have to listen to me posing a poorly worded question. But, I am not a professional interviewer. Murphy is.
Carole, we're not talking here about Dion's "communication skills." We're talking about his failure to fully understand a poorly-framed question. There's a difference. If anybody suffers from communication skills, it's Murphy in this case. He was unable to put his question in a form that Dion could understand. Thus, running the false start is nothing but the celebration of a cheap "gotcha" moment--a decision that says less about Dion than it says about CTV's news standards.
Yvonne - what were Hurst's comments regarding the clarity of the initial question? Did he think it was up to standard for a live-to-tape interview?
Thanks for the explanation of the pool camera- that's the first time that's been noted.
To Rob and Catherine.....I teach Broadcast Journalism at the Nova Scotia Community college and CTV President Robert Hurst came in yesterday to discuss the Dion controversy with our students. At that time, he told us there was a pool camera at the Dion-Murphy interview. Although I can't speak for Sue Newhook, I suspect this is what she is referring to.
I believe any media organization has the full right to air anything that happens once the tape is rolling, even before the tape is rolling. Period.
To determine otherwise would set a precedent, not a single person on this board would like to live with, I am sure.
Was it right to do so?
In my opinion, there are two initial questions that needed to be asked and answered
when considering whether to air the re-starts:
Are we deviating from normal practice?
Is there a good reason to do so?
and often this question will help to clarify,
What happens if we don't run it? Do we then possess knowledge that the
viewers do not?
As someone who has been in the business for 20 years, I know that
running false starts is highly unusual practice. But then again, having
so many to contend with is also unsual.
As for the question of whether there is a good reason to run it, Mr.
Dion's communication skills have certainly been an issue in the press.
One significant problem here is that there was an agreement, however informal,
however inappropriate, that these restarts would not go to air,
therefore depriving Mr. Dion of the chance to explain himself right then
and there. I think that CTV could have
given the Liberal leader a heads up and opportunity to explain why he
was having difficulty with the question(s).
And second, as others have noted, there seems to be no consideration given to the confusion around the question itself.
However, it's not the first time a journalist asked an ambiguous question. (I'll play a few of my own interviews for you as an example ) but in the end the audience was left to judge the situation for themselves. CTV left both their anchor and their guest up for inspection. I say, in the end, it was unkind, but fair enough.
Who is Susan Newhook referring to in "there's good reason to believe" that "someone else will" air it?
Is the idea that Steve Murphy would give (or sell) the tape to some other individual or group or that someone else at CTV would air it, even if this group decided otherwise? Is the integrity of the other CTV staff being questioned here? Like the previous poster, I don't understand this particular allegation in the original article. Could someone clarify who "someone else" is and why they would have the tape?
Hmmmm. Steve ran the questions past Jay and Peter and none of the three recognized the poor construction, the ambiguity? Murphy says on the tape that Dion tried to answer the question - yet when you watch the tape you see clearly he doesn't attempt to answer at all - he asks Murphy what he means. And Dion was right - there were at least two distinct responses to that question and Murphy needed to tell him what he was trying to ask.
This one has been settled in the court of opinion and Steve and Jay and Peter come off looking either like serious hacks or unethical. I'm guessing, due to the manner in which this piece was written, probably both. I still don't understand how CTV's out-takes were going to get on the internet - who would have had access? Who was in a position to call them on the restarts?
These folks (Jay, Peter, et al) were sunk before they even got to the decision to air out-takes. They were harpooned by Steve Murphy.
"The question employed the same mixed tenses used by M. Dion in his speech a few hours earlier..."
I just noticed this comment, posted by Steve Murphy.
If that is the reporter, I have to ask: why would you purposely pose an ill-worded question? Trying to mimic your non-native English speaking guest? Why would anyone do that, but particularly, a news interviewer who was being taped?
Regarding the phrasing of the question, Fred Kuntz's piece in the Toronto Star did a thorough line-by-line dissection of the interview transcript. Kuntz's piece is linked to above as one of the "media colleagues", or go directly to
http://www.thestar.com/article/516042
Mark, to get a sense of the question and confusion, it is best to watch the tape yourself. The question was poorly worded, but I found the reporter's answers, when Dion asked for clarification, even more confusing.
I wonder what other interviewers think of the question and subsequent exchange when clarification was sought? Is this how they would have handled the question and Dion's request for clarification?
It struck me that the reporter could have simply cleared this up by answering "yes" when Dion first asked "If I had been prime minister two and a half years ago?". My guess is that the interview would have continued on with no retakes in that case. Instead, the reporter responded "If you were prime minister right now", and then he emphasized "today". When they restarted, he rephrased the question to contradict his answer, by emphasizing the past. This nulled out the entire so-called clarification and they had to once again discuss whether the reporter was asking about now or the past.
If CTV truly believed that their interview demonstrated Dion's confusion about what the Liberals should do about the economy--something that voters deserved to see for themselves--then why not act accordingly, as any creditable news organization should? Why not do a little more work and make that "confusion" the story, with the interview as a centerpiece, and develop it with other reporting to show that the Liberals were floundering on the economy (if in fact that was the case.) I may be old-fashioned, but I always thought that's what this business is all about--news, analysis, scope, balance and fairness. CTV's decision simply to air the entire interview was shoddy, mean-spirited and unprofessional, but more than anything, it was lazy journalism.
The network, through Mallette, made a committment to the party. They then broke that committment.
This is the paramount issue. If a journalist does not keep a committment to one source, what reason does any source have to believe that any committments the journalist makes to them will be honored?
The issue as to whether it was newsworthy or not died when the committment was made. If Mallette made the committment in error, he should be reprimanded/demoted/fired for doing so, but journalistic integrity requires that journalists honor their committments to sources. Anything less threatens the relationships that journalists need to maintain to get solid reporting.
I showed the entire seven-minute You-tube clip, including Murphy's explanation of breaking the promise to Dion's people, to my first-year intro to print class. They were aghast at CTV's breaking of its promise to Dion. I agree. CTV's ethics in this were dreadful. Anyone who has just seen the interview out-takes without Murphy's "explanation" is missing a lot.
I also think the writer of the piece glossed over the very confusing wording of the question and CTV's own belief, stated by Murphy, that some kind of promise did exist with Dion's people.
Did I miss something, or does this piece neglect to mention what the question was that was posed to Dion? Given the other comments posted here, the phrasing of the question is obviously a critical issue!
I agree it was a badly phrased, badly structured question. It took me a couple of times to understand what the heck was being asked. I think CTV blew it on this one.
The question employed the same mixed tenses used by M. Dion in his speech a few hours earlier, which I quoted in the preamble. The essence of the question was what would M. Dion have done to deal with the economic crisis, that Mr. Harper had not done.
What bothers me is there seems to be no recognition on the part of the TV journalists that it was phrasing of the question that was also throwing off Dion.
There was no attempt to fix the question, with its tortured grammar, in an attempt to gain offer clarity. It was almost as if the interviewer was unaware that the way he was phrasing the question was causing much of the confusion and Dion's evident, increasing frustration.
Great article. Interesting to see how it all played out behind the scenes.