Dana Wolfe on Winning an Emmy and Learning to Always Strive for the Best

When Dana Wolfe left Nightline in 2001, she was in a pretty good place professionally. During her 12-year tenure as a producer under Ted Koppel, she’d already racked up five Emmys and interviewed everyone from Henry Kissinger to Salman Rushdie.

“After Nightline, I took literally two months off, thinking I was going to take a year off,” she recalled. “I had two young children; I thought I should drive in the carpool, plant my own garden and put photos in albums.”

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But after a stint as an independent media consultant, Wolfe unknowingly got recommended to run the stateside version of The Rosenkranz Foundation’s popular Intelligence Squared live debate program, and found herself thrown right back into the fiery newsroom environment, albeit in a different setting.

How did your experience as a producer for Nightline prepare you for producing debates?
I was highly influenced by Ted Koppel, who always tried to make Nightline a forum for civil discourse. I remember working, way back when at the Madrid Summit, where I used to see the Israelis and the Palestinians talking to one another, and that was never done publicly until then. At Nightline, I was always involved with all of the big town meetings around the world — that usually involves bringing two sides of a topic together to try to come away with some common balance. This idea of distinctive division and a passion for story telling is something that seems to be a thread throughout my career.

When you work for the best, you strive for the best. Ted was such a good listener. I’ve learned that the better the listener you are, the better the product you’ll end up with. My first day on the job at Nightline I interviewed someone and I got off the phone, wrote up my notes and I didn’t understand what the person had said to me. I spoke to the senior producer at the time and he said, ‘If you don’t understand them, and you want to put them on the air, how is the audience going to understand them?’ That was a big takeaway for me. It sounds kind of small, but if somebody cannot articulate their views in a way that you understand them, the rest of the public is not going to be able to either.

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a minute. The Web is full of debaters (or what many might call haters) who like nothing more than adding snark or picking apart someone else‘s article. How are the Intelligence Squared debates different and why are they necessary?
Today’s media are full of one-sided debates and partisan rants and name calling and punditry. We try to avoid all of that, both with our format and by bringing intelligence to both sides of these issues so the audience can make up their own minds. We have a vote at the top of our evening asking, for example, ‘How do you feel about this proposition?’ Then the audience sits for a live, hour-and-45-minute debate and they hear both sides of the discussion. They hear one side pick apart the other’s side, but in a very thoughtful way that isn’t sound bites. After the debate, when people vote again, there’s proof that Intelligence Squared brings a compelling argument to change people’s minds. We ask them to put their feelings aside and tell us how they think these debaters did with their content and their presentation. Many times, people vote against their instincts just by being able to listen and say, ‘I may not agree with it, but the other side did a better job of presenting their argument.’ That’s where we can add something to all the different media platforms.

How do you generate the questions the moderator will ask, and what can writers take away from that in terms of the interviews they conduct?
I’ve been fortunate to work with very smart people, and two of those very smart people in journalism, who don’t need questions written for them, are Ted Koppel and [Intelligence Squared moderator] John Donvan. They do their homework. Our director of research pulls together all of the current research on any topic and what the specific debaters have to say about their topic — we look at YouTube videos, we read their books, their articles, we see where they’ve been quoted — and we provide all of that to our moderator. We arm Donvan with the best research, but it’s up to him to be able to take that research and make it understandable on stage. If the debaters get caught up in technicalities, he’s there to bring it back to help [the audience] understand. If they say something factually incorrect, it’s up to him to say, ‘Well, that wasn’t really the case and let me tell you why.’ Having a strong moderator, someone who can digest the information, someone who does their homework and listens is key.

What makes for a successful debate?
We deal with power players who may be resistant to talking about important issues. It takes a lot on my part to get some of these people on stage, but it takes a lot of guts on their part to agree to it. People debate with us, because they recognize that there is an opposing view and they want to explain to their opponent why their point of view may be right, but the best debaters have always been the ones that listen to the other side. They don’t have to agree in the end, and the audience can take away what they would like, but if they’re listening to one another, then I’ve done my job.

I would also add that when Donvan realizes that somebody, a former politician for example, is resorting to their three talking points over and over again, that’s when he’s at his best. He pulls them out of that and pushes them to go beyond the barrier they’re used to. That always makes for great moments in an evening. That’s also what differentiates Intelligence Squared from some of the banter program one-on-one discussions that are in the public domain.

The New York Times has called Intelligence Squared “a salon for movers and shakers, writers and thinkers.” What can writers take away from these debates?
I think the point that Robert Rosenkranz wanted to make with bringing Intelligence Squared to the U.S. was to show that, in this day and age of a very divisive media, each side has a respectable point of view, and they can be on a stage together in a public domain without shouting at each other. Intelligent discussion can lead people to thinking differently on critical issues of the day. Our debates are not going to make news every time, but they show that there’s a level of discussion on hot-button issues of the day that individuals are willing to have on a stage even if they personally dislike one another. If a writer can pick up on some of those nuances, then they can take away something. It may not be for an immediate story but for a future story, and they can relate back to it when the hard news part of it comes.

Wolfe’s Tips for Crafting Stories with a Compelling Argument:
1. Make it interesting. “We do this in our debates at the top of the show. Our moderator, John Donvan, describes something unusual or interesting that isn’t common knowledge about each of the debaters, that ties into the topic we’re debating.”

2. Research your topic in foreign outlets. “Reading articles from other countries in other languages helps you understand both sides of an issue. That’s the way people come to new ideas or change the way they think.”

3. Give the back story. “Don’t assume your reader knows everything about the topic you’re writing about. Give them as much info as you think they’d need to understand the full story, warts and all.”

Maria Carter is a freelance writer in Atlanta.