The first question from the press pool to President Donald Trump and NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte was a great one: “What was the tipping point for you in making this decision, was it a conversation with President Putin, was it a piece of intelligence?”
Trump and Rutte on Monday morning were describing the new arms deal between the United States and NATO that will supply Ukraine with weapons to fight the ongoing Russian invasion.
Trump was just about to answer that question when the reporter, Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News, tacked on a second question: “And why are you giving them 50 more days?” she said, referring to the secondary tariffs that Trump is threatening as a punishment if Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t broker a peace within 50 days.
They are both good questions. But when reporters ask two questions at the same time, they weaken their chances of getting either of them answered. It gives the respondent the opportunity to choose either or neither question.
Now Trump is a master at not answering direct questions that are tossed to him from reporters and interviewers. So there’s no guarantee that even if Heinrich had asked the questions one at a time, that he would have answered them.
Trump started to answer her first question.
“I think the…” he started to say, and then, as the second question caught up to him, he switched gears, “Well, I think it’s a very short period of time. I think, don’t forget, I’ve just really been involved in this for not very long and it wasn’t (an) initial focus. Again, this is a Biden war. This is a Democrat war, not a Republican or Trump war. This is a war that would have never happened. It shouldn’t have happened.”
Reporters often get wordy or sloppy when asking questions in a press conference or press pool. It’s a high pressure scenario and very hard to prepare for. So the questions are often spontaneous.
But the best questions are simple and straightforward, and asked one at a time. Many of us learned these lessons from John Sawatsky, a Canadian journalist who for years coached the talent at ESPN. I took a workshop from him in the 1990s.
Over and over Sawatsky taught journalists to ask open-ended questions, meaning they can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” He taught them to listen and ask follow-up questions, like, “Can you say a bit more about that?” or, “Why is that?”
And he taught reporters to never, ever ask two questions at once.
It’s easy to understand why reporters use the double-barreled question in a live press conference. If they get a chance to pitch a question to the president, they want it to count. By asking two questions they are hedging their bets, hoping that at least one of them will get answered.
But with Trump, the most revealing information often comes from a simple and direct question. That’s why we’ve learned so much in the moment before he hops on or off a helicopter. At those times, with the noise and the rush of the moment, reporters have to ask simple questions to be heard and understood.
Journalists who master Sawatsky’s advice on the fundamentals of asking solid questions will get better answers. So here’s the highlights:
- Ask short, open-ended questions that cannot be answered with a “yes” or a “no;”
- Listen and ask simple follow up questions;
- Be comfortable with silence (this is almost impossible in a press conference, but if the speaker pauses to search for words or figure out what to say, it’s almost always advantageous to wait and see what happens;)
- Always ask one question at a time.
