Here is a lesson in how not to conduct an interview:
Jon Hendren – also known by his Twitter handle @fart – was invited on American talk show HLN, to discuss Edward Snowden joining Twitter.
The interview starts pretty standardly; Hendren’s a Snowden supporter, and calls him “a hero doing what any one of us should have done in that situation.”
“Some people don’t think he’s a hero,” HLN anchor Yasmin Vossoughian replies, choosing a John Oliver segment to make her point that data + leaking = bad. “Could he have hurt someone?”
Now, it’s at this point that Hendren takes the absolute piss. He stops making any reference to Edward Snowden whatsoever, and starts defending Edward Scissorhands.
“Well, you know, to say that he couldn’t harm somebody with what he did – he could, absolutely he could,” he says. “But to cast him out, to make him invalid in society simply because he has scissors for hands – I mean, that’s strange. People didn’t get scared until he started sculpting shrubs into dinosaur shapes and whatnot.”
“Now, Snowden’s living in Russia,” says Vossoughian, the Snowden-Scissorhands switcheroo bypassing her completely. “Some people say it’s hypocritical that Snowden has asylum in Russia. Russia has a lot of human rights violations.”
“Casting him out is completely wrong,” says @fart. “We’re treating him like an animal, somebody who should be quarantined and put away. Just because he was created on top of a mountain by Vincent Price, and incomplete, with scissors for hands and no heart… Edward Scissorhands is a complete hero to me.”
“But what about the choice he made to live in a country like Russia?” asks Vossoughian, who is STILL NOT GETTING IT.
“I mean, where else is he going to go, you know?” replies Hendren. “We cast him out. We got scared when he poked a hole in a waterbed with his scissor fingers, and that was unreasonable of us.”
“Well, Jon, I appreciate you giving us your opinion,” says Vossoughian, despite not hearing a word of it.
Watch the entire segment here:
FYI:
Hendren rounded off the class A trolling with this doozy.
in all sincerity i really did believe we were talking about Edward Scissorhands
— jon hendren (@fart) September 30, 2015
Interview technique 101: active listening. Vossoughian, please enrol at the Leigh Sales School for People Who Can’t Interview Good asap.
Image: HLN.
