Is this your handwriting?
Were you aware that this was happening?
Confrontation and accountability questions put issues on the table and demand answers for the record. They air a grievance, level an accusation, and reinforce the rules of acceptable behavior. Accountability questions are asked in public or in private, in the glare of the lights or in the shadows of the most intimate relationships. They are necessary, but they can be risky business. The principles of confrontational questioning reflect the realities of this high-voltage exchange. They are best approached when you:
Know your goal. Set it and stick with it. Do you want an acknowledgment, an admission, an expression of regret or remorse, or a confession? Plot your question trajectory with your objective in mind. Anticipate what it will take to get there.
Know your facts. Be sure they are complete and accurate. You need a solid foundation of information if you are going to accuse or confront. This is key to asking the right questions, anticipating the answers, and avoiding embarrassing mistakes.
Frame your questions surgically. Precise answers are elicited with precise questions. Use direct questions. Frame them to support your case. Listen closely and ask again if you don’t get a direct answer.
Care about the question. If you’re going into battle, you should be more than a mercenary. Your passion and your commitment will elevate the intensity and poignancy of the questions you ask. Craft your questions to project moral authority. Take the high road.
Expect a defensive, evasive, or confrontational response. People don’t like to be called on the carpet and may ignore the question, duck the answer, or attack the messenger rather than acknowledge their fault or flaw. Be ready to rumble. Be prepared with a follow-up if this happens.
Succeeding in the high stakes world of confrontational questioning requires engaging all of these principles so that you can be a worthy adversary. You will be tested on several levels.
Care to Listen
Caring about your cause brings commitment. Being knowledgeable conveys authority. Listening closely provides opportunity. If you’re going to stand up to the mayor or to the neighborhood bully, you need the courage of your convictions and the muscle of facts. And you want to use the clock to your advantage.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper is adept at using all of these skills. He is approachable, but he is tough and unflinching when he leans on someone for what they’ve done or said. We met at his home, a renovated old firehouse in lower Manhattan, to talk about these types of questions. Decorated with antiques, collector’s items from his famous Vanderbilt ancestors, and other gems—I especially liked the eight-foot black bear looming over the living room—the house is a mix of old-world royalty and hipster urban retreat. Not far from the commanding portrait of Cooper’s great grandfather, railroad and shipping magnate Commodore Vanderbilt, we settled in for a conversation about how questions, listening, and confrontation connect.
Cooper and I overlapped a bit at CNN. He always impressed me with his intelligence, range and sincerity. His work has taken him from epic disasters around the world and mud hut sanctuaries in Africa’s embattled hellholes to stage-managed presidential debates in America’s heartland and the most glamorous places on the planet. He is empathetic by nature. He told me that he tries to be a “capable recipient” of everything he hears. Respecting silence matters to him. He got involved in mindfulness meditationto become more “present.”
His interest in holding people to account is an acquired skill. “Confrontation doesn’t come naturally,” he acknowledged. But he believes that public officials are seldom held to account in a thoughtful and thorough manner. When he’s got facts that stand in stark contrast to the reality of a situation or what a person has said or done, he feels compelled to challenge openly.
He doesn’t like confrontational interviews driven by opinion or attitude. “I find them circular and ultimately unsatisfying. But an interview where you have facts that oppose and contradict what a person has said, and you are presenting those facts to them, you’re challenging them basically on something they said—those are the interviews I now enjoy and are important,” he told me. “These are the hardest interviews” because they require so much preparation and “you have to be armed with what is true.” Cooper has refined his approach.
“I used to make the mistake of thinking I had to cover everything. I now realize in those interviews, those confrontational interviews, that you focus on one or two points.” He knows the clock is ticking and his adversary is calculating. “The other person often relies on the time constraints and on you ultimately just backing off and moving on. But if you just refuse to move on and are willing to ask the same question over and over again, when they’re not answering, it reveals something else about them.”
Confrontational questioning often requires assertive interruption or repetition in order to make it as difficult as possible for your adversary to change the subject, dodge the question or run out the clock.
Cooper’s defining interview in this respect took place in the midst of disaster after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He had been on-site for a few days, had seen the flooding, and talked to everyone from citizens to first responders and elected officials. On this day, he’d been out with a recovery team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They had gone to a flooded home where the dead were still lying in their living room. The stench, the images, the loss were all fresh in his mind. They collided with images from other places where he’d seen bodies left to rot—Somalia, Rwanda, Sarajevo. But this was America. This was home.
How was this happening?
Who was responsible?
As he went on the air for an interview with Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, Cooper had a hyperaware sense of the sounds around him—flies buzzing and plastic sheets whipping in the wind—the sounds of neglect, incompetence, and prolonged suffering. He got right to it, asking Landrieu:
Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now?
Should they apologize for what is happening now?
Landrieu dodged.
There would be “plenty of time” to discuss the issues of “when and how and what and if …,” she said. Everyone understood the situation was serious. She wanted to thank people—the president, the military, the first responders, leaders who had visited, fellow senators. Maybe Anderson hadn’t heard the news yet, she droned on, but the Senate had passed a supplemental $10 billion emergency relief bill.
After nearly a full minute of this, Cooper jumped in.
“Senator, excuse me for interrupting. For the last four days I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the street. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know I’ve got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset and very angry and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians thanking one another, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now because literally—there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been lying in the streets for forty-eight hours and there are not enough facilities to take her up.” Then he asked: