I have gone on at some length in forums other than this blog regarding my opinion that Terry Gross is The Worst Interviewer Ever. This opinion is not an original one, and in the interest of full disclosure, I feel I should say that I have only come around to it in the last few years. Prior to that, had you asked me, I would have told you that I liked Terry Gross, but in retrospect, it was largely because a) she almost always has interesting guests on her show, and b) I met her once, and she was a very nice person.
However, as an interviewer, she is next to useless. She asks bone-headed questions, and when she doesn’t get the answer she was expecting, she keeps asking the same question again and again, as though this tactic will eventually extract the expected answer from the interviewee.
The reason that this comes to mind is that I tuned in last night to Fresh Air and caught most of her interviews with Frank Rich, the culture and politics columnist for the New York Times, and Tim Winters, the executive director of the Parents Television Council. Rich was interesting and entertaining, but that’s more or less what I expected, given that I enjoy his columns and generally agree with most of what he says.
Much more interesting, I thought, was the interview with Tim Winters. The Parents Television Council are the people who have been bombarding the FCC with complaints since the nation was assulted by Janet Jackson’s boob during last year’s Super Bowl halftime show. In other words, people I generally consider to be, at best, annoying, puritanical, moralistic busybodies who are obsessed with smut and filth.
My casual understanding up to this point of the PTC’s agenda is that they have been pushing for the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the content of cable television in the same way that it regulates broadcast TV. However, according to Winters, what they would really like to see is for cable companies to implement ala carte pricing, so that customers could pick what channels they want to receive and which ones they don’t, as opposed to their current practice of forcing us to subscribe to broad packages. The theat of actual content regulation is simply the cudgel they’re using to motivate the cable companies.
It pains me to admit that I agree with them on this particular issue. While the PTC’s gripe is largely about people who want Fox News and the God Channel also having to get MTV, I find it equally as offensive that if I want to get my Independent Film Channel, the Gameshow Network, and BoobTV, I have to also give some of my money to Pat Robertson.
Of course, this stance completely confused Terry Gross, who couldn’t seem to get past “Well, I thought you wanted to censor cable TV…” Then, when the conversation moved on to the topic of the PTC’s astroturfing campaigns, where Winters was on much shakier ground, the best she could come up with was to say that her show had received astroturf letters, and it sucked. Brilliant!
UPDATE: I have since realized that in any individual interview, Larry King is actually a much more worthless interviewer than Terry Gross. However, given that King can waste weeks on end interviewing every last person who might be tangentially related to the Jon-Benet Ramsey case (or whatever the cable news scandal of the moment might be), his overall score is diluted enough that Terry still holds onto the top spot.