My 15 Minutes Phone Interview with Awa

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Thu, 26 Sep 2013 - 02:21 GMT

BY

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 - 02:21 GMT

A bad telephone line, a frantic campaign tour in Upper Egypt and a rushed candidate abruptly ending the interview without so much as a chance for me to say thanks and goodbye do not make for a good interview.
By Nadine El Sayed
It's hard to reach a presidential candidate for an interview, and it's even harder to do so when they're busy touring the country only a few weeks before the elections. For over a month our team had been trying to reach Islamist candidateMohammed Selim El Awa  — in vain. Luckily, one night our colleague's fiancé found him staying at his hotel in Minya and sprung into action. My managing editor called me asking if I could do a quick interview with El Awa, at this point I was assigned other candidates and was busy  looking up different press clippings, platforms and histories of my candidate — not to mention trying to dig dirt on them to ask the right questions. I  had no clue what I could possibly ask to corner El Awa, and knew very little about his platform, so sitting at my laptop with dozens of papers scattered on the dinner table with tons of background information on other candidates, I frantically searched the web for an emergency SparkNotes entry on the candidate. We are required to record our interviews, so when doing a telephone interview we have to plug in a phone tab to connect it to our recorders, which means we need to use landlines for phone interviews. I couldn't dial mobiles or governorates from my landline, so I had to bear the embarrassment of asking a presidential candidate to kindly call me as I couldn't call him. So I gave our colleague's fiancé my number at around 9pm and El Awa told him he would call  me in half an hour. Comes midnight, and I am still waiting by the phone racing to pick up whenever it rings so that he doesn't have my nephew picking up and making small talk with him. He never called. I was told he would call me in the morning at 10. I stay up researching and researching and at 10 sharp I am sitting by the telephone waiting for the long-awaited call. The telephone finally rings and I manage to get to it before my nephew does and it is my colleague's fiancé on the line telling me El Awa is running late and will call me shortly. An hour and a half later he finally does — only to tell me he has run late and has to rush out for a conference and asked me to call him at 3 pm — of course at this point I couldn't tell him I can't make mobile calls from my landline and just suck it up and thank him. At 3 pm I call El Awa from my mobile phone and his assistant picks up and tells me he is at a funeral and I should call back later. So I do, and I finally get the candidate. But because he was racing about in Minya getting from one conference to the other, and because I had my speaker phone turned on to be able to record the interview from my mobile, we spent half of the 15 minutes repeating questions. I asked him about four or five questions, to which he gave me very rushed, very brief and very vague answers. And about 13 minutes later, he tells me he's running out of time, the phone line is bad and he has to go, and hangs up — no he never said bye, he never allowed me to thank him even, he just hung up. Naively, or still in shock maybe, I call back thinking the line was cut off and I have to at least apologize for it and thank him for the interview. I never did get that second call. Sure, I understand candidates are busy and it was nice enough from him to set up an interview with us on such a short notice, but I was expecting 30 seconds more to say bye and thank you, should be quick enough, shouldn't it? I ended up with a very brief, very vague and overall very rushed set of answers to make into a proper interviewthat the readers might actually get anything out of, I can honestly say it took much more time to try and clarify the answers than it did to do the actual interview. I can also safely say it was by far one of the worst interviews — and answers — I ever had. Now given the 15 minutes interview was too short, too disrupted to make a judgement on the man, I can only say that El Awa was short of courteous. Sure, he didn't exactly sound like the scary Islamist I had expected, but he didn't seem remotely bothered with the interview, he didn't try and put in any effort with the answers and seemed to rehash an agenda he had prepared — not to mention hung up on me, which doesn't exactly scream friendly candidate who respects the media. 

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