Celebrity Smackdown: Couric versus Washington

It's an overly dramatic post title, I know; I'm just trying to be a little playful to take the edge off of my anger at Katie Couric.

I mentioned yesterday that Denzel Washington waited to direct Fences until he was emotionally ready to do a good job with it. I found that while trying to find out how he chooses which films to direct.

I never actually found an explanation. I did see that for at least one of the films, he took the acting role to help it get made. I heard him talking about his coaching background and helping others. A lot of warmth and good intentions came through. It is not surprising that he funded Chadwick Boseman and other Howard students for a summer program at Oxford. That would be helping growth along, and it would be right up his alley.

In April Katie Couric was being interviewed on the Everything Iconic podcast and mentioned an awkward interview with Denzel Washington from 2004. I was interested in this because I had been looking at Washington as a director, but also because I had recently been doing some interviews and thinking about that process more, and also because a few months before that Adam Driver had walked out of an NPR interview because they played one of his clips and he had expressed discomfort with that prior to the interview.

With Driver, it is possible to simultaneously think that is a weird quirk and that he sounds like a bit of a prima donna, but still believe that NPR was wrong to disregard a previously set boundary.

For the small group of interviews that I did on this blog - which I loved - I was not receiving any pay nor paying the subject; anyone participating was only doing it for fun. It would have been gross to try and do some "gotcha" questions or to try and put down my subjects in any way. There was still a lot of thought that needed to go into thinking about good topics where they could give interesting answers. What is the clearest phrasing so they don't think you are asking about something completely different? Is there a word you can use that will jog more memories?

There are circumstances where being more aggressive makes sense. David Frost's interview of Richard Nixon comes to mind, but more recently Gayle King's interview with R. Kelly.  There is some skill needed for drawing them out without alienating them and losing the potential reveals. Doing that requires some understanding and finesse, as well as some courage and commitment. 

That is not what happened with Katie Couric.

The irony is that in that same 2020 interview she is talking about making interview subjects comfortable. Talking about Washington could have been a good example of how she screwed up and now knows better, except she still doesn't.

If I recall, Couric did not specify which section of the interview made her feel uncomfortable, but it seems pretty clear where it was. It looks like she was trying to get him to admit that actors don't know enough to talk about politics.

Washington deflected three times, that he is not a Hollywood person or one of "those people" or an "actor" as a category, but that he is a person. That should have been fine; you can talk to a person. Couric felt "gone after" and "shaken" and "jumped all over". So much so that she still needed to cry about it sixteen years later.

I saw the clip; she was not jumped all over. She was barely bumped. 

I see it playing out on two levels. On the first, she is trying to lead him to a certain response, where Washington would admit that he was not the best person for political commentary, but he was not going to address that without getting rid of the dehumanization. Frankly, I think that should have been a fairly easy redirect. What do you as a person believe about speaking out politically? Does your job give you a bigger platform and how do you try to use that? Do you feel qualified to speak out politically?

There's plenty to build on there: What's your political philosophy? What news sources do you like? What impact would you like to have on the world?

The other thing going on was racism, where it is always easy to see a Black man as threatening and to feel he owes you more deference.

In that way, Couric's being shaken is in line with Darren Wilson saying Michael Brown looked like a demon, or leash law violator Amy Cooper saying bird watcher Christian Cooper was threatening her life. Washington was unlikely to be killed for offending Couric, but it's dangerous, as well as a failure of Couric as an interviewer and as a person. 

If anything I guess the good part is that it seemed to fail, and most people could clearly see that Washington did not do anything offensive or aggressive, but it is weird to me that as I try and find the clips of the 2004 interview that were available just five months ago, I can't find them now. I see plenty of reaction videos to the podcast, but they only quote the podcast.

Maybe on one level Couric won after all.