If TV interviews are like a game of paintball, talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel sends that ball in — whap! splatter! — while CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge is still quietly stirring his paint and sending an assistant to Canadian Tire for hollow projectiles.

I am comparing Kimmel’s interview of Rob Ford on Monday night to the notoriously bad Mansbridge effort last fall, just after Toronto City Council stripped Ford of everything but his job title. I didn’t enjoy repeatedly watching these interviews because I don’t enjoy seeing people humiliated, and I don’t mean Kimmel.

Shelley said poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” meaning they had huge unelected power to move the masses. Journalists replaced poets, and now comedians have replaced the journalists. This is not good.

Watching Ford being interviewed by any journalist is a game of Spot the Circus Bear. Who dances awkwardly, can cope with simple instructions and makes a modern audience squirm? It has always been Ford, but in the CBC interview it was Mansbridge. I say this not to be unkind to Mansbridge, who represents a distinguished era in the CBC’s history despite his sideline of giving speeches to tarsands lobby groups, but as a lesson in power and talent.

On-camera news interviewing is a rare skill that requires mental agility and pacing. Unlike investigative interviewing, say for the wondrous Fifth Estate, which has great mass and has to be meticulously edited, news interviews are measured in precious seconds, and a career can be made or broken by a Wendy Mesley (CBC) pause in the right place, a perfectly placed Jackson Proskow (Global) question, a tilt of Lisa LaFlamme’s head (CTV).

I am still chilled by LaFlamme’s interview of John Furlong, the ex-Olympic CEO who has been accused of mistreating native children under his care many years ago, and all she did was repeatedly ask about an inexplicable gap in his resumé.

Furlong has categorically denied the allegations and launched a lawsuit against the journalist who reported them. The journalist has countersued Furlong for defamation. None of the allegations has been proven in court.

What interviewers have now is journalistic gold: Evidence. Kimmel compared 10 photos, five of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti doing something normal like meeting people and drinking pop, and five of Ford doing the same thing, squatting between two semi-nude women in feathers at a parade, frightening a baby, and giving himself a milk moustache in council/eating a fake human arm. Kimmel made Ford stand up and watch a video montage of himself, a mute torture.

Mansbridge’s questions were pillow-like, non-tactile, with little comfort clauses: “Is it all because of personal problems?” “What kind of signal does that send out, do you think?” “Okay, I don’t know that to be a fact, but let’s put that aside.” Three middle-aged men were seated in Ford’s office — Rob, Doug and Peter — and Mansbridge was the Ford brothers’ ottoman.

This works for Mansbridge when he’s interviewing a plane crash survivor — his questioning is a thing of beauty — but what is the journalistic point of respectfully nudging Rob Ford through 18 minutes of petting and weird longueurs? I had to write a column apologizing to Toronto Star readers for my timid handling of Ford before he won election. Why is anyone still holding back?

As NOW magazine journalist Norm Wilner said on Twitter Tuesday morning, “Here’s a counter-argument to Doug Ford’s spin on the L.A. trip: He and his brother are both very, very stupid.” He’s right. They cannot grasp simple concepts. They cannot see themselves.

I can prove it. Doug Ford boasted to Mansbridge, “We haven’t done a sit-down with any other media in the world. We picked Peter Mansbridge from the CBC.”

And Mansbridge didn’t say “Why?”

Kimmel did. After dancing and throwing T-shirts at the audience — I’d call them bear-baiters if it weren’t that in this case the bear wasn’t tied down — Rob Ford sat down beside Kimmel, who eventually said wonderingly, “I’m very happy that you’re here. But why are you here?”

The Fords knew that Mansbridge would give them a soft interview, and they assumed that Kimmel loved them, a triple-decker Rob-Doug-Randy sandwich with a Jimmy in the middle. They were right in the first case and wrong in the second, as you could see from the dawning horror in Rob Ford’s face on a Los Angeles soundstage.

The genius of journalism on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report is that when it offers footage of a politician making a claim, a team of industrious researchers has tracked down older footage of the politician saying precisely the opposite. They produce better journalism than mainstream TV, which rarely does this because it seems like opinionating to let a man hang himself, even with his own rope.

But it’s hugely entertaining to watch. So good mainstream interviewers have to compete, crossing the river by hopping from stone to stone and spinning when they have to. Kimmel has done live comedy for decades; Mansbridge has worked for the CBC for 46 years; Ford has been a politician for most of his working life. They are all grown men.

All the above men assume that they’re adored, and I’m wondering if this is part of the problem. Women tend not to assume they are worshipped, having always had to fight their own corner. But the Fords clearly thought their presence honoured Mansbridge, who did give the impression he was lowering himself into the Ford milieu.

And I swear, Ford, talking about “Jimmy” the way made men talked about “Tony” on The Sopranos, thought Kimmel would indeed be caught dead with him at the Oscars.

I don’t think a woman journalist would have fallen for this. The habit of self-effacement serves an interviewer well.

The great — and allegedly cruel — British print journalist Lynn Barber, who does wonderful interviews, has said she can’t understand the fuss. “Nobody is forced to give an interview; I don’t doorstep anyone or pester them; I put in a request and accept the answer, yes or no.”

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Anyway, Barber is fed up with the attention paid to the interviewer-interviewee relationship, as though it were the main thing. “What about the readers? Surely they matter more? It is betraying them if you omit certain facts, or fudge certain questions, in order to ingratiate yourself with the interviewee.

“And after all, the readers are the only reason you’re there.”

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