Asking probing questions five days a week about the events filling the news of the day would likely be a fairly demanding job for anyone. But that’s not how Paikin feels.
“I never think of the job as being particularly stressful, I think it’s a very enjoyable job. You don’t always get a direct answer to a direct question and that’s fine, so you go at it again. Sometimes I think I’ve had to ask a question four times in a row before saying ‘OK, you’re not going to answer it and that’s the way it goes.’ But I never think of it as stressful.”
He said there are questions he wouldn’t ask of a guest on his show. “I come from the school where, unlike in the U.S., there are certain aspects of people’s private life that I think is nobody else’s business and I’m sure if I had the premier or prime minister of something, I would not be asking either one of them about private details about their private life. That’s nobody’s business but their own.
“I think that most other channels on television want to book the most extreme voices they can in order to promote the food fight because theoretically, that’s more entertaining and gets more viewers. I take the opposite approach, which is, there are 200 channels on TV where you can get that already, you don’t need us to do that.”
Paikin’s interest in politics started when he was a youngster. It was through his parents that he “learned from an early age that to have an active interest in these things was important, and I think that stuck with me.”
“I don’t have a particularly partisan interest in politics, but I am interested in the issues they deal with, how they make decisions, what drives them, what the pitfalls are in their lives, how we can make them do a better job for us—these are all questions that concern me. I’ve written a couple of books about them, and we’ve talked with them most nights of the week on The Agenda.”
“I always think that my job is twofold: ask the questions that people want to know, and ask the questions that people need to know. I feel I am their advocate in that studio. I’m their representative so I try very much to be in touch with what I think those two drivers are.”
He has adopted the John Sawatsky approach to interviewing. Sawatsky is an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who has written about and teaches how to properly conduct an interview.
“I’m a huge fan of his approach which is to ask short, lean, neutral, open-ended questions. Ask one question at a time, listen to the answer. It’s amazing how many people ask questions and then don’t listen to the answer and just move on. ... I have seen it many times myself where if you go too hard, or too impolitely, or too rudely with too many trigger words, or too much hyperbole in an interview, the subject will either shut down, or not give you a good answer, or get defensive, or it just doesn’t work as well as it should. So I try to take that approach and hopefully most of the time it works.”
He said he doesn’t feel badly about seeing people squirm when he asks a tough question because he doesn’t think he asks unfair questions. He wouldn’t feel comfortable asking people “extremely personal questions or extremely hurtful questions” which he said he doesn’t do.
Uncovering “the truth” is not Paikin’s goal when conducting an interviewing. “I think it sounds presumptuous to say we are going to find ‘the truth.’ The issues that we deal with on our program are so layered and varied, and we come at things from so many different points of view, there’s no such thing as ‘the truth’ or the objective truth.
“There are many truths. To suggest that you are going to be able to, through some process of uncovering or discovery, come at ‘the truth’ even though we have more time than almost any other show on television, even in 40 minutes or an hour, you’re not going to get ‘the truth.’ You’re going to get towards it, but I’m not sure we can ever really get it. But we try.”
Some might see the veteran interviewer as a news junkie, but world events are not the only occupiers of his attention. He is a long-time supporter of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team and plays hockey every week.
“As a kid, at the breakfast table, while my brother and I were eating our breakfast, our mother used to read us the dispatches from the Globe and Mail of last night’s Leafs’ game, or something like that. So we got into hockey at a very young age. We went to our first Leaf’s game, I think, when I was 6 and he was 4, and we’ve been avid fans ever since.”
He points to his wrist and says, “Leaf’s watch, Leaf’s jacket. Went to the Sens (Ottawa Senators) game last night and wore a Leaf’s shirt.”
Of his job, Paikin said, “I love it—it’s the best job I’ve ever had. My so-called career has been to get into a canoe, and without a paddle, just let it take me where it takes me, and that’s really how it’s worked out.”
