We expect the protagonist to be crushed by this paragon of American-macho imperviousness, but in an improbable but comic reversal, instead of interviewing his subject, the interviewer holds captive the man and his wife with a meandering, maudlin — and wholly invented — personal story: "It wasn't untrue, exactly, even though it hadn't happened".
And in February, an American executive with the New Israel Fund, a liberal group, was detained and interrogated at the Tel Aviv airport by an interviewer holding a document that said "BDS". The fund does not support the movement.
At least some of the captured Americans were shown on a broadcast by the Arab TV network Al Jazeera, in which an off-camera Iraqi interviewer, holding an Iraqi TV microphone, asked each soldier's name and hometown.
It is possible that an interviewer's estimate of a respondent's skin color is influenced by the interviewer's perceptions of the respondent's political views – if, for example, the interviewer holds a stereotype that Obama supporters are dark-skinned.
Nevertheless, the interviewer holds the final capacity to determine which issues are relevant or not.
To avoid the influence of power relations on disclosure, the interviewers held no structural position in relation to interviewees, and in addition, the recordings and transcripts were kept confidential and anonymised, so that those with authority over participants had no access to the data set.
The IDIs were one-on-one interviews held in local language (Swahili) between a trained interviewer and study participant.
Information on household and socioeconomic characteristics was obtained through personal interviews held with the mothers, by trained Arabic-speakers interviewers.
Commanding audiences of millions on the radio and television every day, political interviewers hold a uniquely powerful position with far-reaching influence.
