Journalism 101: Bad questions guarantee bad answers

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The interwebs have been abuzz the last couple of days with video of an exchange between President Barack Obama and CBS reporter Major Garrett. On the left, the response has been glee — praise for the president shutting down a disrespectful questioner; on the right, the exchange is evidence of an imperial president unwilling to answer hard questions.

Ultimately, I don’t see this little exchange being all that important as news — the president was asked a bad question, answered it in a way that deflected the underlying assumptions and the audience is left without anything useful to walk away with.

From a journalistic standpoint, however, I think it is worth discussing. My problem is two-fold. One, Garrett’s question was poorly constructed. It was unnecessarily confrontational, assumed motivation on the part of the president and seemed designed to do nothing more than elicit a piqued response. That is bad journalism.

The goal of all good journalism has to be to get useful and necessary information for the audience. What we needed to know from the president was what exactly the administration was doing to bring home the four Americans held in Iran and why their fate was not a part of the nuclear deal. That was the question that needed to be asked and that was implied by the Garrett query. The problem is that Garrett’s approach allowed the president to turn the question back on Garrett, to make it a question of respect and agenda and not one of information. As I say in the Facebook exchange below, we are talking about Garrett’s question, rather than the issues he was attempting to have the president address. That, to me, is bad journalism.

I’m curious to know what my readers think — especially those in the business or who have been my students.

Send me an e-mail.