During the time that we had to scour the town and campus of Exeter to find people who were willing to answer our questions, I noticed many interesting things. First of all, there are two types of people. The first type are the people who don’t really care about what you are saying, and share the bare minimum before politely excusing themselves from the conversation. The second type are the people who seem even more enthusiastic than the interviewers. For example, while surveying people in the sporting good store, my group came up to one of the co-owners. He listened to our questions, and gave us extremely detailed answers. After we asked him all the questions, he turned around and asked us about our opinion on these issues. I found this extremely interesting because he became the interviewer and we became the interviewees, and it was a very different experience.
Many times there is a stereotype about the media. Although there is an idea that the media are “evil”, others still believe that they are just telling the truth. For example, one of our questions was, “Do you think that the media [are] affecting climate change news by twisting the facts, or are they just putting out the raw facts?” The response we got was very balanced. Half the people said that the media were just doing their job and putting out the facts as they were. However, the other half said that the media were twisting the facts, just so that the people would be happy with what the media company was saying, and maybe earn the company more money. It was extremely fascinating to see how controversial the topic of just the media’s affect on climate change was, not even the bigger subjects like climate change itself. In conclusion, I think that the experience I had interviewing these people was great, because it allowed me to have a firsthand experience being a reporter on the front lines of an issue.