What’s the hardest interview you’ve ever done?

One of my hardest interviews ever was with a very high-level South Asian politician. There was some opposition to his administration’s new policy, a lot of protests, and I wanted to draw him on that. I also knew that his government had been working behind the scenes to get dissenters on message. However, he just wanted to use the interview to put out information on the policy, and he kept sidestepping my questions about the discontent. He is a very skilled politician, very articulate, Harvard-educated, and he knew what he wanted to say. I re-framed the question a few times and he kept re-focussing the attention to the detail of the policy. After you ask a question a few times, you have to accept that they’re not going to answer you. There are examples of journalists asking the same question over again. Personally, I find it a bit bullying.

As a journalist, do you find there’s a duty to balance out the need to keep pressing for answers with other requirements of the interview – for example, to keep a good rapport going and get other potentially useful information?

I would press for answers if I felt the interviewee was being evasive in a way that was deeply unethical. In the example I just gave, I could understand the politician’s reasons for being evasive in this situation. Some journalists think they have to ‘catch out’ interviewees for the sake of it, and not on the basis of whether it adds meaning to the story. For me, preserving relationships is really important because you never know when you may need something from them in future, and you should also respect the boundaries they set.

You have to know when to push something and when to back away and prioritise the relationship. For example, many years ago, I was working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and was chasing Benazir Bhutto for an interview, when she was re-launching her political career after many years in exile. I spent a lot of time on the phone with one of her advisers who kept saying, “She’s not ready to do interviews.” My response, instead of pushing it, was to say, “That’s fine. Let’s chat. Tell me the latest about what’s going on in Pakistan.” I built the relationship with him, and I actually got him to speak on air a couple of times. And by the time Benazir Bhutto was ready to speak, [this advisor] and I had a relationship. He knew my motivations and approach. So he could then say to her, “Speak to this woman, she’s OK.” So, it was quite bizarre, I was about to present a news bulletin, and someone called out to me in the studio and said, “You’ve got a phone call” and it was Benazir Bhutto on the end of the line. That was very gratifying because I had been chasing that interview for quite a few months and she was continually in the news at that point.

So it can pay off when you have respect for politicians’ agendas, moods and timelines, and then you’re in a better position than if you’re pushy or aggressive. I’ve actually seen journalists from some less ethically inclined media outlets threaten people, or blackmail them into giving an interview. That’s the wrong approach because it doesn’t get you what you want. What you want is a good meaningful interaction in the interview and the potential for an ongoing relationship with your interviewee, and that’s not going to happen if you bully them.

Are there any types of interviews that are generally always difficult?

The interviews I find the hardest are more generally with those people who don’t have an understanding of what you’re trying to get, or people who fear the media because they’ve been burnt or they hear that journalists are difficult. Also people who have fragile egos, which happens a lot in the arts and fashion worlds. In fact, the hardest part can be landing the interview, often harder than the interview itself. For example, I was commissioned to do a story on a Bollywood celebrity hairdresser who’d signed up an acid burns victim to front her salon’s latest ad campaign, which I thought was an amazing thing to do. She agreed to do the interview but over six weeks of chasing her, she wouldn’t commit to a date and eventually she slammed the phone down on me, questioning my motivations and suggesting I was a greedy person who wanted to get mileage out of the work of other people.

What interview tips can you offer to journalists who are starting out?

No matter who your interviewees are, and even if you don’t agree with their political leanings, treat them with respect as you’ll always get more out of the interview that way. In some ways interviews can be a bit of a power struggle. It can be easy to feel over-awed by highly credentialled or powerful people. It’s important to remember that you have something they want: access to an audience.

Be prepared but don’t be over-prepared, otherwise you might become overly concerned with micro-issues that might not have wider relevance and will leave you with less room to tell the main story.

Aim for a conversation. While there are certain things you want them to say, you don’t want to limit them because who knows what they might say that will be of interest to you?

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Aarti Betigeri is a journalist based in New Delhi who works in print, radio, online and video. Before moving to India from Australia in 2009, she spent many years as a television presenter, journalist and producer with Australia’s two public broadcasters, ABC and SBS. She now reports for outlets such as Monocle magazine and its online radio arm, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, The National, Time.com and Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Take a look at other posts in our hardest interviews series such as talking to child soldiers in Liberia or this interviewer who fought to keep his disgust under control while interviewing a former East German secret police officer.

Emblem of the GDR’s Stasi secret service (photo: flickr/elmada)

Journalists talk to a wide range of people, sometimes even those whose actions we find morally reprehensible. But it’s crucial to stay professional during an interview—even with someone you might consider a monster. As part of our series on hardest interviews, onMedia’s Kyle James remembers his struggle to keep personal feelings from derailing a talk with a former official of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. 

Talking with people with unsavory pasts is never easy, but a part of a reporter’s job. Here in Cambodia, where I’m based, reporters researching the country’s traumatic past often find themselves face-to-face with former Khmer Rouge soldiers or officers. And given the scale of the 1975-1979 genocide, it’s very likely that these same reporters lost close family relatives to members of that regime. In many parts of the world—Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Balkans, the list is long—journalists sit down with perpetrators of atrocities or their apologists. They are part of the story.

Such conversations are never easy, but it’s important to remain professional, stay neutral and not let your emotions get away with you. Our job as reporters is to get the story. Losing our temper in the middle of an interview could well prevent us from reaching that goal.

That doesn’t mean you don’t ask hard questions. As objective journalists, we let the story do the talking. Indeed, the cold facts can be more damning than our own heated reaction to them.

Stasi officer

Several years ago, while working on a story for DW about the notorious state security service of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), I scored a coup. I convinced a former high-ranking Stasi officer to meet for an interview.

His point of view would give the story another dimension, since I was also talking to people who had been persecuted by the once-sprawling surveillance agency. I had heard that the former officer, Wolfgang Schmidt, was unrepentant about the Stasi’s actions. I wanted to find out how someone whose employer – and by extension, himself – had intruded upon and ruined the personal and professional lives of so many, could justify his actions.

GDR memorabilia (photo: flickr/PercyGermany)

How do you live with yourself once the organization to which you’ve devoted your life has been so thoroughly discredited? Indeed, according to famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.”

While this incident might not be the equivalent of interviewing former Khmer Rouge executioners, I found myself getting fidgety in the elevator up to Schmidt’s apartment in eastern Berlin. My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that I had just taken a tour at the Hohenschönhausen prison, where the Stasi once locked up and interrogated people it saw as threats to its socialist system. Talking to former prisoners and hearing their stories, I had a distinctly bad taste in my mouth when it came to the Stasi. By the time I reached his floor, I was almost angry with the man, who I’d never met, but whom I suspected had a moral compass completely at odds with my own.

Once inside his flat, it was obvious that not only could Schmidt live easily with his past, he was quite proud of it. He worked for the secret service from 1957 until its dissolution in 1990 and his walls were crowded with paraphernalia from both the agency and the former German Democratic Republic.

Stay cool and collected

As we sat down to talk, it became apparent that he had no regrets, no remorse and little understanding of the disdain and hostility former GDR citizens felt toward him and his cohorts. Indeed, he felt he was a victim, not victimizer, and complained about how it had been so difficult for former Stasi employees to find good work after the Berlin Wall had fallen. (You can hear the full story below. The section with Wolfgang Schmidt starts at 7:24.)

I felt something close to disgust as he made these, to my mind, ridiculous logical contortions. And there were more than a few times where I was tempted to say something along the lines of: “You simply cannot be serious. The Stasi were the bad guys, not the citizens you spied on and locked up!”

Of course, I didn’t.

Had I succumbed to the temptation, sure, I might have felt a fleeting moment of satisfaction, but the interview would have probably stopped right there. He would have either asked me to leave or completely shut down.

Hohenschönhausen Prison (photo: flickr/le.poet)

What I was getting from him was, at least I think, his true feelings about the subject, however delusional they might have been. So I just let him talk. I didn’t exactly smile and nod my head in agreement, but I listened to what he had to say respectfully. I kept my tone level and my facial expression neutral, even when I was listening to a level of twisted rationalization that beggared belief.

I did put harder questions to him, but as neutrally as I could. I asked him if he could understand why so many people were so angry as him and his former colleagues. I asked him if he felt his agency had had the right to intrude in the most private aspects of citizens’ lives. Or locking them up in Hohenschönhausen jail simply for wanting to leave the country? I asked him if he would do anything differently if he could.

My job is to get his perspective, not to be ex post facto judge and jury.

In the end, I felt his own words were enough of an indictment. I just needed to get them on tape. Then I let the listeners decide what they thought of the man.

While it was a fascinating interview, and gave me (and hopefully listeners) insight into how some people can justify almost anything, it was tough going. I was relieved to say good-bye and leave this stuffy memorial to a discredited regime.

I hadn’t thought of Wolfgang Schmidt for years, but then in July 2013 he popped up in the news again. In an interview with the McClatchy news service, Schmidt told a reporter he was amazed at the breadth of the domestic spying service in the US under the NSA. “For us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said.

Author: Kyle James

Liberian child soldiers

General Snow is dancing. Only he can hear the music he is dancing to. For the rest of us it is just the sound of heavy rain dripping on the leaves of the surrounding trees of Clay Junction. General Snow jumps frenetically from one leg to the other, holding his Kalashnikov rifle with both hands over his head.

The scene is bizarre. We – my Liberian colleague and I – are sitting in a taxi on our way to Tubmanburg – the Liberian rebel’s headquarters. We want to interview Sekou Damate Conneh, one of the rebel group leaders. The Liberian Civil War had officially ended for some weeks, but U.N. peacekeeping forces have not yet secured the Liberian hinterland. Outside the city borders of Monrovia, you are travelling on your own risk.

A teenager’s check-point

General Snow’s headquarter is just a little wooden shack at Clay Junction – a shack that looks a little like an abandoned bus stop in the middle of a tropical rainforest. His troops are a gang of maybe a dozen boys roughly between the ages of nine and 15 years old. Some wear a kind of uniform, others just wearing shorts and torn, dirty t-shirts.

General Snow says he’s 23. His advanced age and several years at the frontline make him a general of LURD, the rebel group whose territory we need to cross.  Clay Junction is one of the most important crossroads just 30 miles north of the capital Monrovia. During the seemingly endless war that ex-president Charles Taylor brought to his country, Clay Junction was the scene of many battles.

When he finally spoke to me, General Snow said he was in command of more than one thousand rebel fighters. None of them were probably older than 16. At the time, even in 2003, after the war was officially over, Liberia was notorious for being the scene of one of the cruelest and most brutal armed conflicts in Africa – and of being the homeland of thousands of child soldiers who were subject to abuse and often drugged.

“All journalists are liars!”

Child soldiers in Liberia

General Snow was very clearly one of them. How else could you explain his dancing and behaviour at the check point he and his boys had set up? When we saw this group of teenagers in the pouring rain, I sensed that the next couple of minutes might be a bit complicated.

One of them waved us down to stop the car. My Liberian colleague – she was a reporter for a radio station who got me in touch with the rebel leader – was showing a mix of anger and fright. We had to wait until General Snow decided to finally stop dancing and come to the taxi. Three or four of his boys were guarding us, all of them armed. General Snow’s eyes were unnaturally widened and very red. Whatever kind of drug he was using, it was strong.

Rüdiger at work in Mali

He wasn’t amused when I told him I was a journalist. “All journalists are liars,” he shouted. “They never tell the truth about Liberia!”. Looking at his Kalashnikov, I thought it unwise to tell him what I thought about his remarks.

He didn’t become much happier when I told him I had an appointment with his leader in Tubmanburg. Instead he answered that firstly nobody had given him notice and secondly nobody on earth could ever give him orders to let this or this person passing through his checkpoint.

Interview to calm General Snow

Things became somewhat more complicated when my stringer started to tell him off – not a very wise idea given the fact that he had a weapon and we didn’t. I don’t remember every word of the conversation, what I do remember is that the dispute was somewhat endless, noisy and I was scared things may get out of hand.

The situation was only solved when we gave presents to him and his “men”. Back in Monrovia we had bought all the condoms we could find. My stringer thought that the best gift possible –  she was right. And to show our appreciation to General Snow, despite the fact that he thought all journalists were liars, I promised to interview him on our way back so he would have the opportunity to give his view of things to the world.

He accepted.

We returned to the checkpoint about 5 or so hours later. It was still raining, but Snow wasn’t dancing any more. The drugs seemed to have lost their effect. He sat in the wooden shack, covered with a plastic canvas tarp as water was dripping through the roof of the shack. He demeanour had also changed – more like a very young and very small boy and almost naïve sitting there answering my questions and somewhat suspiciously looking at the microphone.

Of course, his real name wasn’t General Snow. His name was Shaq Kamara. The longer he talked, the less he was an unscrupulous child soldier and the more he was a victim himself of a cruel war. Some of his friends had been arrested by Charles Taylor’s men – because they refused to join his units. Then they were after him. When Taylor’s men couldn’t find him, they raped his sister. That forced him to flee and later join the rebels who wanted to overthrow Charles Taylor.

General Snow, or Shaq, was very quiet, meek and sad then when he told me his story. For me, what had first appeared to be my hardest interview ended up being straightforward – dare I say even easy. I was listening to him speaking to me while he just kept staring at the pouring rain. At the end I had to sort of hold back from hugging him when saying goodbye.  That’s not something you want to do to a General: even when he looks sad and scared and just a small and very thin boy under his navy-color jacket.

I never saw or heard of General Snow again.

Rüdiger Maack is a  former ARD radio correspondent for West Africa and now manages DW Akademie’s projects in Tunisia.

I think the hardest interview I have ever done was with the head of an orphanage in Mali I suspected of being involved in illegal adoptions. The interview was tough because there was so much at stake; this interview had the potential to lift the lid on an investigation I had been working on for many months.

I had been looking into some suspicious adoptions in Mali and had collected a lot of information about a number of different cases, but I didn’t have the knock-out interview or document that showed exactly what had been going on. I suspected something terribly wrong was happening but I didn’t know exactly how it was happening or who was responsible for what. My hope for my interview that day was that the head of the orphanage would crack and reveal all or at least some of the secrets about what had been going on.

During my investigations, I met Hawa among others. Her child had gone missing and she was worried it might have ended up being adopted.

The key to the interview, I thought, was going to be the order of the questions. I had to decide when to ask what and when to reveal what I already knew about the irregularities in the adoption procedure there. I painstakingly prepared the questions and then mentally rehearsed my plan of attack so that I wouldn’t have to look at my notes too much when the time came.

When I arrived at the orphanage Mrs Pona, the head, received me in a very friendly way. I was surprised. She knew I had some questions to ask about her adoption procedures and so I expected her to be more hostile. I imagined that either she thought I was going to be a pushover or she had prepared her own strategy and her big smile was designed to put me off guard.

In any case, I tried to take advantage of the situation and asked to have a look around the orphanage. This let me gather some good background material for the report.

When Mrs Pona finally received me in her office, I accepted the soft drink she offered me and sat smiling pleasantly. “How bizarre is this,” I thought to myself, “A woman I’m about to accuse of selling babies to foreigners is giving me a Coke.”

I started with the most basic questions about her and the orphanage and then slowly moved on to the more difficult points. She denied it all. I tried lots of different approaches and rephrased my questions a number of times, but nothing worked. I can remember the disappointment starting to set in even during the interview as I realised I was not going to get the better of her. Either she had nothing to hide or she was able to hide it very, very well.

One very important lesson I learnt from this interview is that WHEN you schedule this type of interview during an investigation can be very important. A couple of weeks after I did the interview with Mrs Pona, I got given a document relating to the orphanage that significantly bolstered my evidence of wrongdoing there. Perhaps if had had that when I had spoken to Mrs Pona, I might have got her to talk. Of course after my first interview, she never agreed to meet me again.

Martin Vogl regularly trains journalists in North and West Africa for DW Akademie. Until recently he was based in Bamako, Mali, where he worked as a correspondent for various international media.

As we’ve discussed in a previous blog post, so many skills go into making a good interview, especially for broadcast – from research and fact checking to crafting good questions to being a good listener.

But what about patience, empathy or just being human?

DW Akademie trainer and our Africa blog co-editor, Christine Harjes, reflects on the most challenging interview she has conducted: with a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

I knew this would be a difficult encounter even before meeting my interview-partner

When I met Mediatrice, she was 24 years old. But at the age of 9 she lived through the 100 bloody days that saw Hutu-rebels kill nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda.

Mediatrice was the only one from her family who survived the brutal killings. I could tell from talking to her on the phone that she was very shy and I was glad when she agreed meeting me in a café in Rwanda’s capital Kigali to chat a bit and then to take me to her orphanage village up-country to do the interview. I thought this was a good start to make her feel comfortable and during the two-hour-ride to her village we really warmed up, joked and laughed a lot. We never touched the interview-topic though.

Upon our arrival she showed me around the whole village and prepared first coffee, than tea before she went in search for a Coke. She was obviously buying time. I like doing interviews in an environment that’s familiar to the interviewee. In my experience the interviewee opens up more easily and feels more comfortable.

Mediatrice was also keen to find the right spot for our interview. First she sat down, shook her head, got up, went to another room, sat down again, didn’t feel well there and finally took me out the back of her house where we sat down on the grass. Fortunately the rear wall of the house  protected my microphone from the wind and we had a gorgeous view over some of the famous 1000 hills of Mediatrice’s beautiful home country. Still it was impossible to imagine what she had seen and lived through right here.

Beating around the bush

Traumatized: Mediatrice

Attentively, she looked at me. She was ready to answer my questions. Of course I had plenty of questions ready, and started with the easiest.

Mediatrice was a member of an acclaimed theater group that tried to come to terms with the country’s horrible past in its plays. In one of them, Mediatrice played the only genocide survivor of her family. So, I started by asking questions about her role and what it felt like to act in this play. She totally slipped into her role, saying things like: “I’m able to forgive the murderers but I can’t forget.” I was getting nervous because the transition from the play to her real experience seemed to become more and more difficult and she was obviously dreading it. I didn’t know what do to do. At some point I stopped the recording. We had some more tea and relaxed a bit, even joking around.

It’s hard to imagine what crimes happened here

Then, I went straight ahead and attacked the topic. “This play seems to resemble your true life story a lot”, I said. She nodded and quietly said “yes”. “Do you think you could talk about what really happened to you?” I asked her. She was very hesitant and uneasy. That’s why I then changed my strategy and suggested that I don’t ask any questions. I often use silence in interviews to encourage people to talk but I had never done an interview without any questions. My plan was to produce a portrait of Mediatrice and there was no need really to hear questions in the audio. But would it work? She thought about my suggestion for a little bit and finally agreed.

Crouched on the grass, leaning to the raw walls of her house we sat there next to each other, both staring at the mic while she spoke. Telling me how she was hiding in churches, running from the rebels every day, and how she lost her mother in the chaos of constant running and hiding. She talked about girls that were violated with spears, pregnant women that were cut open and their unborn babies killed by the rebels. She spoke with a quiet controlled voice. The pain she felt was audible and visible. She spoke like that for 15 minutes. During the whole time we couldn’t look at each other. “It’s too much. I can’t say anything else,” she finally said and stopped. We were both trying to hide our tears. She was exhausted and busied herself with another pot of tea. Never before or after have I felt an interview-partner opening up like her. And listening back to my material I realized once again what a great present she’d made to me by telling me her unimaginable story.

Author: Christine Harjes