What Oprah will ask the Sussexes - and what I would ask them

Supposedly Oprah's interview with the Sussexes is already recorded, which is too bad, because I have plenty of questions I would have suggested. 

Oprah will no doubt offer her standard questions - Are you living your best life? - plus some setups on the social justice theme she and the Sussexes are so fond of. 

Do you think your negative media coverage in the UK was motivated by racism?  

Tell us about your long-term commitment to environmentalism/Grenfell victims/menstrual health/COVID victims/Black History Month/Mayhew Dogs/Girls in South Africa/SmartWorks fashion/Indigenous Women in Canada. 

Also, I hear you really like Africa and have visited twice. Is that part of your anti-racism initiative, and how will you continue to propel your efforts in Africa while living in a big house in California?

Oprah has her own initiative in Africa, a school for girls near Johannesberg that has been plagued by abuse allegations, so she is comfortable with the idea of assisting Africa and Africans from the comfort of her own homes in California and Hawaii. 

A few abstract questions

I also expect a few big, abstract puffball questions from Oprah. 

What does privacy mean to you? What is the biggest misunderstanding about you? What type of mother do you want to be? What makes you sad? Whom do you trust?

Since Oprah has a rather mixed relationship with her own family - Oprah's mother spent so much money in one of Milwaukee's ritziest boutiques that Oprah actually instructed the proprietor to stop selling to her - we can also expect some sympathy about Meghan's strange family situation.

What I would do

A good interview generally starts on a comforting note. I'm here to hear your side of the story. 

A journalist who has time on her side (not someone interviewing a busy cop on the street, for example), generally wins over the trust of her subject by emphasizing what they agree on and what they have in common. It's wonderful to see you here. I'm so glad you've discovered this lovely area of Santa Monica. It's our little secret, but now you share our secret. 

If the subject is burning to say something, like "We can all live a life of service. Service is universal", it's a good idea to let them say it, because otherwise they won't be able to concentrate on anything else. Let them get it out, nod a lot to show you've listened to them. You can even go so far as to repeat it back to them. So, you feel that everyone can live a life of service. We all can. You're saying that it's universal.  

This makes the subject feel validated and much more comfortable. They've said what they've come here to say. 

At this point, you can start to turn up the temperature.

The difficult questions

Mid-interview is the time for difficult questions. I like to slowly slide into them, building on the rapport that I've built up in the interview so far, sometimes even using the subject's own language. You've said that service is universal, but you didn't want to serve on the Royal Family's terms, did you? Didn't you know what those terms were before you were married? 

You want to ask difficult questions, but not in a harsh manner that will cause your subject to stand up and walk out on you, or your audience to conclude that you are bullying the subject and turn agains you out of sympathy. 

If you have something negative to say, it's always useful to attribute to those thoughts to others, perhaps abstract figures like "some people" or "your critics".

Some people say that you seem to be dominating your husband, that you've taken him away from his friends, his family, his country, and his job - isolated him - and that he looks lost and unhappy. What would you say to those people?

The toughest question

The toughest question represents the high point of the interview, the point at which your subject is hopefully too committed to walk out, and the point at which you can answer the one question everyone really wants to know.

I'd ease into this if I were the one interviewing Meghan.

Privacy is important to you, isn't it? Especially when it concerns the people you love. (Give her a chance to nod or respond here, perhaps use up the paragraphs about privacy she has practiced in advance). 

Was it because of this need for privacy that there were so many unusual aspects to the birth of your first child? You concealed the due date, you concealed the place and time of birth, you kept the attending doctors secret, the name of the godparents are secret, and you were very slow to share images of the child. Why?

At this point, Meghan would probably stumble a bit, perhaps try to repeat her practiced paragraph about privacy, maybe smile and giggle in an attempt to be charming.

I would then go in for the kill.

Is the reason there's so much secrecy because your child was born to a surrogate, and you do not currently have custody of the child?

The long silence 

Not expecting this question, Meg would presumably not know what to say. Biting her lip, perhaps. 

This is when a good journalist uses silence as a tool. 

Just wait and sit until the subject comes up with some answer, any answer.

Back in journalism school, we used to study how Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes did this. The toughest question, silence, tight focus on the subject's face to catch any microexpressions. Blinking, touching nose, looking away.

Meg might say, "We just don't feel the public has a right to this child," but her tone and timbre will be revealing.

Following the tough question

The surest sign of a nonprofessional reporter is someone who doesn't use a juicy answer to a previous question to build the follow-up question. 

(Celebrity non-journalist interviewers are notorious for this: they have prewritten questions 1-5, and darned if prewritten question 4 isn't going to follow prewritten question 3, even if the answer to Question 3 is a murder confession).

In this case, I'd probably say, If the public doesn't have a right to this child, why is he in line for the British throne? Shouldn't you remove him from the line of succession? Part of being a British Royal is being visible to the British public."

"We don't want to make decisions for him," Meg might say. "We don't think it's up to us to renounce his heritage."

But how much British heritage will he have? I would ask.  He lives in the US. How can he possibly understand British culture and British values? How could he ever lead the British people if called upon? He will be, quite frankly, a foreigner.

More silence, until she comes up with some answer, any answer.

Cooling down

After a run of tense questions, it's a good idea to calm down a bit with some nice positive talk that will put your subject at ease. 

Tell me more about Archie. Is he more like you, or more like his father? Is he looking forward to being a big brother? What are your hopes and dreams for your children?

If you have a very long interview, you can go through several rounds of this, tense to relaxed, tense to relaxed. 

But you always want to be able to end on relaxed if you can, so you can at least have the fiction that you and your subject ended as friends. (You never know when you might need that subject's co-operation on something else in the future.)

In this case, Harry will come in for the final half hour, and we'll get a little more social justice chatter plus some softball questions like What do you love about each other?

It'll all be fascinating.