“Meet the Press” is the longest-running television show in America. It’s also one of the most influential. Moderator Kristen Welker interviews presidents, world leaders and politicians every Sunday to get to the heart of the biggest headlines of the week. It’s a job she doesn’t take lightly.
“So much work goes into every single question, every single interview,” Welker said. “All of that takes time, all of that takes effort, and all of that teamwork requires an immense amount of work on the part of each and every person who works at ‘Meet the Press.’”
NBCU Academy shadowed the “Meet the Press” team for a week as a dozen producers researched guests, wrote hundreds of pages of notes and prepared Welker for the week’s program.
Watch our mini-documentary on “Meet the Press” above and read more from our interviews with the team below.
What is ‘Meet the Press’?
David P. Gelles, executive producer: “Meet the Press” started out as a weekly press conference, where there were four journalists questioning different newsmakers. Now, we have some of the biggest players — every person who’s occupied the Oval Office since JFK — and world leaders. We try to be on the front lines of what’s happening in terms of the most important stories in our world right now and give people perspective on that.
Kristen Welker: The purpose of the weekly politics talk show is to take a thorough and critical look back at the past week to help Americans digest everything that they’ve just seen and to look forward to the week ahead. Our role as journalists is always to make sure that we are holding elected officials to account for their words and for their actions and that we are informing and educating the American public. We make sure that our show and our content are accessible, whether people are political junkies or they are tuning in for the very first time.
Gelles: We try to think about everything in terms of the big picture: “What will people think about this moment in history, 10 years from now, a hundred years from now?” I try to apply that vision to the show.
What’s the role of a producer on ‘Meet the Press’?
Welker: Once we have our guests booked, we assign producers to each guest, and then we start to work as a team on each segment — to go through the questions, to go through the research, to make sure that every single question is supported by facts, by strong editorial, to make sure we are accurate.
Elias Miller, producer: The producers are the point people on a specific guest. You need to be the expert on this guest, come up with drafts, follow your outline through to the end, anticipate what they said and what are the most interesting points to bring to them.
Caitlin Hartman, producer: One of the biggest things, and most important things, is just to be a reader and follow the news closely. We are just constantly digesting everything that’s happening in the world around us, especially with such a busy news environment. There’s always going to be more to read, more experts to talk to.
Gelles: We’ll look at every social media tweet from a lot of these guests, and then we start building our questions around that.
How does Kristen Welker prepare for these interviews?
Welker: Our preparation is incredibly detailed, so that we can anticipate what our various interview subjects are going to say. Part of our job is to read interviews — not just from the past month, not just from the past year, but going back years — so that we have a real sense of how this politician has evolved over time. Sometimes there are some really important accountability moments that come from that.
This is a very Tim Russert tactic — to go back in time to find something that the politician you’re interviewing has said maybe five years ago, to remind them of that, to see if they still stand by that. Evolution is a part of being a human being. It’s a part of being a politician, and sometimes it elicits very interesting information about a politician and their political views.
Abby Godard, producer: For example, this week I am working on an interview with Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Right now, I’m just drilling down our questions and shortening our research. It’s about 82 pages. That’s down from over 100 pages that we’ve collected over the course of this week — just previous statements that he’s had different policy positions. We even have one of his books from 10 years ago.
What’s your best advice for journalists?
Gelles: Journalism is a communications job, and to be a great communicator, you need to be a really good critical thinker, and you need to be a really good writer. It’s thinking, “What are the unanswered questions?”
Lots of folks can tell you a story, but can you tell a story in a compelling way? That’s where becoming a really good writer and communicator comes through. Conveying complicated information and making it digestible is actually a really difficult thing.
