Towards the end of the C19th British journalists began to use impertinent & intrusive methods imported from America. They thought that prominent people, those in the public eye whose lives were of great interest to a mass readership, should make themselves willing & available to answer press enquiries. And if they happened to be out of town, why then reporters went importuning their families – even their elderly mothers - instead.
At least, I have come across one small piece of evidence for that assertion.
On 25 February 1874 (not yet Sir) Arthur Sullivan wrote to his mother from Manchester:
Dearest Mum: If you are bothered again by newspaper reporters, just say so far as I am concerned, I know nothing about the proposed knighthood beyond what I have seen in the newspapers. I don’t see why I should be ‘interviewed’ on everything that may be said about me. There is of course no foundation for such a thing & it only grows out of the good-natured fancy of the Hornet.Arthur Sullivan 25 February 1874
To which quote Sullivan’s biographer Arthur Jacobs adds the gloss “‘Interview’ as a verb was in quotation marks as a foreign, ie American, usage.”
The OED confirms that Interview in this sense, namely To have an interview with (a person); spec. on the part of a representative of the press: to talk with or question so as to elicit statements or facts for publication; similarly, to talk with or question (a person) for a programme broadcast on radio or television, did indeed come from America, where it finds the first recorded usage in the New York Nation of 28 January 1866: ‘Interviewing’ is confined to American journalism.
The OED does find much earlier record uses of ‘interview’ as a verb, but only in the senses of To meet together in person (all dating back to 1548) or To catch a glimpse or get a view of (last recorded in 1624).
Not of course that British journalism had no bad habits of its own before it adopted bad ones from America.
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