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Comment by jkldotio | Hacker News Reader

There's an interview with George Bell on TV that's just fascinating from a historical perspective.[1]

It's pretty amazing that the show host had installed an ad blocker plugin for his browser and was asking about the potential impact on revenues. I usually have low expectations when it comes to technology journalists. Here in Australia a one Marc Fennell, who is 28 years old and hosts technology and gaming programming on TV, called Heartbleed a "virus".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7VwynZOZI

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To me, the most interesting thing about that clip has nothing to do with tech, but with journalism - the show host is actually asking him some kind of tough questions and putting him on the spot instead of just giving him a stage to spew his talking points... I kind of remember when journalism worked that way, but it's jarring to see it in the context of modern "talking point regurgitation machine" journalism where the stories are written by corporate press secretaries and copy-pasted into media.

The UK still has a good selection of sharp, merciless interviewers. My favourite is Jeremy Paxman, he's quite a polarising personality but cuts through bs like paper.

I don't understand why interviews (for journalism purposes) are conducted face to face. A written back and forth, such as in a forum or thread, is much more useful at cutting through the BS rather than having to waste time listening to evasive responses. I guess there may be some value in the facial reactions of the subject, but most of the time, if there was a written transcript, I'd have saved a lot of my time and energy.

Interesting point. Although you'd probably get similar evasive responses, the host saying "Now answer more clearly", and a different (but equally evasive) response. They'd have time to concoct a seemingly informative but ultimately useless response.

This happens in a lot of Reddit AMAs...

I absolutely disagree. It is far, far easier to be evasive by text - especially when you have time to compose a reply. Face to face, real time interviews show you when the interviewee doesn't want to answer a question, when they're bluffing, etc.

There might be some people in the world for whom text reveals more of the interviewee's secrets, and other people that pick up more via face to face interviews.

I'm willing to bet that for most people the latter is more intuitive.

Great find. From the host's reference to Excite's debut "a month ago", this must be from May 1996.

There was a window of time where Excite's in-house search results were noticeably the best, even without having the largest index. I think they had done something, with either inlink-anchor-text on inlink-counts, for the first time.

While the In The Plex anecdote makes Excite CEO Bell seem foolish, compared to the CNBC hosts Bell had a brilliant understanding of the opportunity. (And that's not to insult the CNBC hosts, either: they were just channeling the thoughts of their skeptical viewers.)

The host was Mark Haines, a long time host of Squawk Box, a daily morning business program on CNBC following the stock market. He passed away recently. He had a no-nonsense interviewing style that would make many CEOs, used to softball questions, uncomfortable - was fun to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Haines

Not the typical HN material, but Cenk Uygur was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently [1] giving some interesting insight into the dumbing down of TV journalism and the history / decisions behind his online focus with The Young Turks.

1: http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/cenk-uygur

Well if they knew what they were talking about they wouldn't be journalists

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