Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Interviewing the Dalai Lama

The Weekend Herald “Canvas” supplement (21 July) had a report by Camilla Long on an interview she was granted with the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala. Camilla Long usually writes for the Sunday Times in the UK. But she fits seamlessly into the NZ Herald’s preferred template for interviewers of great and complex people – that is to say, trite, silly and shallow. Unfortunately, and as un-PC as it may be to identify the fact, these interviewers tend to be of the feminine persuasion. Iain Dale, someone I don’t know, posted this blog under the heading, “The menace that is Camilla Long”:
Could someone explain to me why the Sunday Times employs Camilla Long as an interviewer? Can anyone explain to me why she won interviewer of the year at the British Press Awards? A month ago she interviewed Nigel Farage and started the interview by poking fun at the fact that having had cancer he has only one testicle. Yeah, really funny that, Camilla. Wonder if you'd poke fun at a woman who had lost a breast. Thought not. It was a truly terrible interview, mainly because she had broken the interviewers' code by going into the interview with her mind made up. She was determined to write a hatchet job on Farage and succeeded. Then last week she devoted a whole column to how she failed in her quest to interview Gloria de Piero. Gloria had the good sense to avoid her. This week Long did another hatchet job on Tory candidate Joanne Cash. The moral of this story is this. If any politician gets a call from Camilla Long in the next couple of weeks, asking for an interview, they should tell her to sling her hook. The woman is a menace. Her interviewing style is appalling, she knows bugger all about politics and is determined to be negative.
Someone called Michelle Hewitson is accorded by the Herald a weekly page. This seems to me extraordinarily generous, since there are far better journalists who clearly have to bargain for space. Hewitson interviews prominent personages here and there, each week. But in fact she normally interviews herself in their presence, and that is different. I am not interested in Michelle Hewitson’s feelings and reactions to Winston Peters or Sonny Bill Williams. I may, perhaps, be interested in the interviewees’ thoughts about various matters. But that depends on the interviewer’s ability and willingness to subordinate herself and her own ego to the reader’s need for facts, perspective and wisdom. But the fact is at present, although the Herald does have a few expert and lucid writers, they also employ some truly embarrassing substitutes for journalists. These people reflect one culture that still apparently buys the Herald, the “Me” generation, those ruled by hormones and feelings. These readers require their feelings and needs to be replicated and affirmed in others, especially in the great and newsworthy. So now we come to Camilla Long and her encounter with the Dalai Lama. She missed every signal he gave of deeper and better issues. She was clearly mystified by his laughter, and could depict it only as some kind of clowning. She mentioned his appearance on Master Chef, an experience he manifestly loathed, as would others of us – and she missed the point about that by a mile. Nowhere does she engage seriously with Buddhism or with the agony of Tibet. She doesn’t even realise what obviously happened – that the Dalai Lama had felt obliged to give a bit of time to this British journalist and was kind to her shallowness, as of course he would be. He didn’t gain anything from her because there was nothing to gain, and she gained nothing from him because she was too dim and shallow to see any need, and her own egoism was completely in the way.