On Point with Maira!

Watching Face the Nation with a host like Bob Schieffer, on CBS, is everyone’s fantasy Sunday morning. No really, he is the Sunday morning news God! He does epic interviews.

“What is your approach to doing an interview,” Steve Scully of C-SPAN asked Scheiffer in an interview for Distance Learning.

“To get news,” Schieffer replied. “That’s the point of Sunday morning broadcasts.”

Schieffer joined participating students of George Mason University, Denver University, and the Schieffer School of Journalism from Texas Christian University, as well as Steve Scully, the political editor for the C-SPAN networks.

The distance learning course produced by C-SPAN, provides these students an opportunity to interview guests via video conference.  The course airs on C-SPAN3 on Fridays at 5 p.m. and also streams online (http://www.cspan.org/distance_learning/).

We all know that technology has changed the way journalism works. When Scully asked Schieffer’s opinion on the technological evolution of journalism, he said that “the internet has changed everything about the way journalism works.” Schieffer has been on the journalism scene for decades now, which gave him the opportunity to experience and transition through different phases of technology.

Schieffer advised young journalists to ask obvious questions. “Young journalists are afraid to ask obvious questions, so that they don’t sound dumb,” he said. “Never be afraid.” He says that the best follow up question you can ask in an interview is “what do you mean by that?” This gets the interviewee talking about things and gets them to go in detail to answer the question, on their own. A great technique!

During the question answer session with students, Ben Libby, a communications major at GMU, asked Schieffer if the younger generation is drawn more towards contemporary newscasters such as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and as a result less informed?

To this Schieffer replied that Stewart and Colbert are to television what editorial cartoonists are to a newspaper. He believes that using these shows as a supplementary source is alright. However, one shouldn’t say that they are totally informed if the only source of their news is the editorial page.

No matter what the era is, the sole purpose of journalism is to provide honest news. Nevertheless, its upto the readers whether they want to be misinformed or well informed.