A Biased Interview

For this week’s blog post I planned to “investigate” the freedom of journalists by conducting an interview with my roommate who writes for a local newspaper. Previous conversations gave me the impression that his articles underly limits, so I came up with some questions:

Q: Are you free to write whatever you want about an event?

A: Yes, I am free to write whatever I want, but in order to write a newspaper article that meets journalistic standards, I should try to write as objective and factual as possible. Exceptions are obviously opinion pieces or reviews, where my personal views are part of the article.

At this point, I decided to break off the interview. I realised something way more interesting. In all my planning I was completely biased, thinking he was not allowed to write freely. Apparently I was wrong. Some of the questions I had come up with beforehand led into that one direction only, for example “How does restriction express itself in your case?” or “Do you ever feel guilty because you could not write your true opinion about something?”. So I did not really want to interview him objectively but rather prove a personal point. This is something I dislike about interviews because it derives interviews of their purpose in most cases but there I was, committing the same crime.

It also leads me back to freedom of writing, yet in another sense. Instead of having someone restricting me, I forced restriction on myself. For me, never having conducted an interview before, this called my attention to something people, me included, often tend to forget: not everything that is written down is true. It is written by humans and humans have a high tendency to make mistakes, lie or just be wrong. Deal with it.

I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that the new The Hotelier album is great but you can form your own opinion about it on their bandcamp page where it is available for download and stream from Friday, May 27th on:

Also, worst or best album cover ever?