Diane Sawyer revealed the biggest challenges of interviewing President Obama prior to her exclusive interview with him last Thursday.
She was with ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper backstage at an Obama speech in Nevada, where the president stopped on a three-day tour of five states. Tapper asked Sawyer, who estimates that she has interviewed Obama between half a dozen and a dozen times, to name the toughest part of the task.
Sawyer said that it was the time constraint, and contradicted the notion that their conversations were a free-flowing exchange of ideas. She said, "No, it's very short and you've gotta decide what to get to and you're in the middle of it and thinking, 'Gonna go to that.'"
Tapper agreed that time was a challenge, especially if Obama started to get deep into policy issues. He also said that maintaining a balanced tone was another. "You don't wanna be too tough but you don't wanna be too soft," he said.
But he said that he found the biggest challenge of interviewing Obama was his tendency to leave "Easter eggs of news" buried "in a melange of rhetoric."
"He hides how he really feels in paragraphs," Tapper said.
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