Interviewers like to act as if they are being objective. By considering two opposing standpoints, they give the impression that they are addressing an issue from all sides. In reality though, they themselves have selected just two standpoints from a whole range of possible options and stubbornly stick to them. What they like most is to invite two speakers with diametrically opposed opinions. And if there are more than two interviewees, they arrange them in two opposing groups.

Limiting the number of standpoints to two suggests a linear world with two extremes linked by a straight line. If ever an interviewee dares to present some other point of view, he is immediately silenced, interrupted or presented with a new question. The sense that the whole issue is being addressed nonetheless emerges as the interviewees’ statements are each precisely situated on the connecting axis. Each time a statement of one interviewee comes anywhere near the standpoint of the other, the interviewer makes every effort to locate the division. Where does one standpoint end and the opposing one begin? The interviewer is a tightrope walker, going back and forth between the extremes, all the while waving the illusion around that he has everything under control.

Sure, there are interviewees who refuse to give a direct answer, who are unnecessarily long-winded, use subterfuges or fail to consider the consequences of their own points of view. Then of course there is good reason to silence them. Yet, what bothers me is that all too often, efforts to address the complexity of an issue meet the same fate. It is not unusual that interviewees who approach an issue from a new angle are treated like unruly children or that their words are simply viewed as an elaboration on their essential standpoint. Interviewers will do anything to keep up the -sacred dichotomy of opposing views. People who know a lot about a subject and are invited to come and speak on radio or television programs can relate how they have been discarded straight away when they suggest a new perspective. “Thank you very much for your time but this is too complicated for our audience; we’ll have to find another speaker.”

Clever interviewees make sure that they follow the rule of the dichotomy, when they are called for an interview. In the course of the interview itself, they bamboozle the interviewer by presenting their essentially different perspective on the issue as merely a slight modification of the standpoint they are expected to express. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: in most media, there is no space for complexity.

The reign of the dichotomy in the media is well illustrated by the following excerpt from the current affairs television program NOVA on 13 December 2004. Presenter Jeroen Pauw is interviewing Gabriel van den Brink, a cultural sociologist, on the need to modernize Islam in the Netherlands.

JP: We had people like Jos Brink (a popular Dutch entertainer) to promote the integration of homosexuals in Christianity. Is a Muslim Jos Brink going to have to come forward?
GvdB: It is not Christianity that we should thank for the acceptance of homosexuals but the emancipation movements of the 1960s. Christians were pretty slow to go along with it and not without opposition.
JP: But you do think the Muslims in our country ought to accept homosexuality?
GvdB: Yes. But the fact that they have such a hard time with it has less to do with religion than culture. Many of the Muslims who are first-generation immigrants here come from the countryside, the Maghreb, Anatolia, and in every peasant society people have trouble in accepting homosexuality, that was also the case here in the past…

Here the interviewer interrupts the interviewee. He could have let him finish his thought or asked him questions that might have shed light on the relation between people’s cultural background and their views. There is for example the striking fact that peasants all over the world, no matter how inventive they may be in economic affairs and regardless of their particular faith, tend to frown upon homosexuality. This could have prompted viewers to reconsider the relation between religion and culture or give them an idea of how complex cultures are and how they can change. Instead, the interviewer silenced the interviewee with a snigger: So it is a kind of general backwardness?
When the interviewee fails to object immediately, the interviewer pours it on even thicker. He introduces a new question about brides from the country of origin by saying: Because they are more apt to walk twenty yards behind you…?
The division the interviewer wants to feed to his viewers remains unharmed: we are modern, they are primitive.

It is this divisive style of interviewing that stimulates people to think in terms of black and white, who is on top and who is on the bottom, us and them, if you’re not with us you’re against us. Complexities and subtleties are dismissed as aberrations from the truth: we live in a divided society. In the process, radio and television audiences are spoon fed with a simplistic worldview, which reinforces the sense that there is nothing they can do to avoid this division. In this way the media contribute to an inflammable atmosphere. As the Dutch professor of media Cees Hamelink noted, the media can and should be held at least in part responsible for the divisive effects of their reporting.