Beware those friendly television interviewers.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe

BEFORE TELEVISION, the newspaper interview was a fairly simple affair. Reporters asked questions until they had enough answers to put together a story. No reader was there to watch the reporter in action or overhear the complete interview. It didn't matter how reporters acted during it. They could be inquisitive, fawning, argumentative, rude, arrogant, annoying, repetitive, stupid, silly, or insistent. They could ask questions that were in poor taste or out of line, embarrassing or indulgent. The only criterion on which to judge the interview was whether the story was any good. The emphasis was on the end, not the means.

Still, critics always have been skeptical of the interview, regarding it as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. One magazine writer in the 1860s called the newly introduced technique "the most perfect contrivance yet devised to make journalism an offence, a thing of ill savor in all decent nostrils." That would sum up most of the critical reaction to a pair of TV interviews by journalist Barbara Walters and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey.

Walters cornered Mark David Chapman at Attica Prison, where he is serving 20 years to life for assassinating rock musician John Lennon in front of the New York Dakota apartment building in 1980. It was advertised as the 37-year-old killer's first-ever TV interview. Walters offered Chapman the same sympathetic expression she usually saves for Hollywood celebrities and heads of state. When it comes to ratings and hyperbole, however, Winfrey made Walters look like an amateur. Her much-ballyhooed interview with rock singer Michael Jackson ("Michael Jackson Tells All to Oprah") was a 90-minute love-in with the giggly entertainer. Ninety million people tuned in to see it, making the show one of the most-watched entertainment programs in television history. The local Los Angeles newscast that followed was virtually an all-Jackson half-hour. This non-news newscast also scored enormous ratings, while infuriating every journalist in town.

It really doesn't matter that each of these celebrity interviewers has different qualifications. One is a journalist trying to be a sympathetic listener; the other, a sympathetic listener trying to be a journalist. But both fall into a trap that has plagued TV interviewers since television was born. Knowing they are being watched by thousands and even millions of people, they are reluctant to do anything that will look or sound offensive to the viewer. That...