"Great questions make great reporting"
About this Quote
“Great questions make great reporting” is a quiet flex from a journalist who built a career on making power talk. Diane Sawyer isn’t praising curiosity in the abstract; she’s naming the unglamorous mechanism behind the glamorous outcome. Reporting, in this frame, isn’t primarily about having the best access or the biggest platform. It’s about steering a conversation so the truth can’t hide behind rehearsed talking points.
The intent is practical: question craft is the reporter’s real equipment. A great question is not just “tough.” It’s specific, disciplined, and structured to reduce escape routes. It anticipates the subject’s incentives to evade, then pins the exchange to verifiable ground: dates, decisions, contradictions, stakes. That’s why the phrase works rhetorically: it compresses an entire ethic of accountability into a single, teachable standard.
The subtext is also a defense of journalism in an era that often confuses performance with inquiry. If the product is “reporting,” the inputs are preparation, listening, and follow-up. Great questions require knowledge; they signal you’ve done the homework. They also require humility: the willingness to let an answer complicate your narrative and to ask the next question anyway.
Contextually, Sawyer’s career spans the shift from appointment-viewing broadcast interviews to a fragmented, social-driven media ecosystem where “gotcha” clips can eclipse substance. Her line argues for a different metric of success: not virality, but clarity. In that sense, it’s less a slogan than a corrective - to audiences who want certainty and to journalists tempted to chase it.
The intent is practical: question craft is the reporter’s real equipment. A great question is not just “tough.” It’s specific, disciplined, and structured to reduce escape routes. It anticipates the subject’s incentives to evade, then pins the exchange to verifiable ground: dates, decisions, contradictions, stakes. That’s why the phrase works rhetorically: it compresses an entire ethic of accountability into a single, teachable standard.
The subtext is also a defense of journalism in an era that often confuses performance with inquiry. If the product is “reporting,” the inputs are preparation, listening, and follow-up. Great questions require knowledge; they signal you’ve done the homework. They also require humility: the willingness to let an answer complicate your narrative and to ask the next question anyway.
Contextually, Sawyer’s career spans the shift from appointment-viewing broadcast interviews to a fragmented, social-driven media ecosystem where “gotcha” clips can eclipse substance. Her line argues for a different metric of success: not virality, but clarity. In that sense, it’s less a slogan than a corrective - to audiences who want certainty and to journalists tempted to chase it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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