Gideon Yago

Gideon Yago, a 26 year-old Columbia graduate, got his start on MTV as a contestant on a failed game show called Idiot Savant. Since then, he has gone on to cover two elections and a war and interviewed John Kerry, President Bush, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and Ambassador Paul Bremer, who he surprised by asking "Is there an acceptable body count?” For the last few years, he has been MTV’s secret weapon, an unlikely war correspondent, and a journalist who smuggles political analysis into the regular MTV diet of reality programming, snarky jokes, and even the occasional music video. Since beginning his tenure at MTV, in addition to covering a whole bunch of rock ‘n’ roll music, he has dealt with outsourcing, the tsunami, AIDS, hate crime, and the 2004 election. Though Yago thinks of himself merely as “a midwife of news,” he does have several fan sites gossiping about him on the internet and he was selected as one of the “25 Hottest Stars Under 25” by Teen People magazine. 

Q: So how did you end up on MTV in the first place?

A: I was 21 and I thought I was signing up for a game show since back in 1996, I had been on an MTV game show and won a backpack and some free stuff. I decided to go after seeing a sign that said “are you interested in politics and MTV? Inquire within.” It ended up being an auditioning process for Choose or Loose. They wanted to give kids video cameras so they could tell their stories during the election. So they gave me a video camera and they said, ok, go. And basically a week or two after Thanksgiving I went from my last final to the MTV office to pick up some equipment and the next day I was in New Hampshire. I had a lot of AP credits and basically all I had to do was turn in my history senior thesis and go.

Q: Of all of the MTV News Correspondents, you seem to do the most political coverage. How did you end up in that role?

A: I started in this team of six and I only thought I would be working at MTV for a year. But after the election of 2000 I started to do some writing for MTV and I was off camera for the year. At that point I think that social issues and political issues didn’t have as big of a place at the table at MTV. I thought I was gonna get canned that year even from the writing desk because the music I was into and the issues I was interested in were hard to really hard to get in the news cycle. But then they wanted to cover more of that stuff, and suddenly they were like oh we have this guy and he’s young and this is what he wants to do. I’m kind of the only one here who was willing to go sleep in the desert when the wars were going on. I was really in the right place at the right time as the channel started to take steps to have more substantive content.

Q: Your work after September 11 th and your work in the Middle East sort of seemed like your coming out party as a political journalist. You did two Diary Specials, one in Kuwait and one in Iraq, how did those happen?

A: Well, everyone was kind of caught off guard on September 11 th at MTV as we figured out how to deal with it. At first we did little daily packages and showed a lot of music videos. But then we started to do more coverage on it because nobody in the media was addressing these issues to our audience and we wanted them to understand all of the characters who were coming up in the news. We ended up going to Kuwait to shoot three short pieces and we ended up shooting so much that it became a full show.

Q: During your time in Iraq, what surprised you? Any stereotypes that were proved or disproved?

A: A lot of the kids going into it didn’t sign up because of 9/11. It wasn’t the sort of red white and blue patriotism stuff that was being played out in the national news media. I mostly met a bunch of kids from the lower income bracket who were taking a job to either pay for school or finance their families or get themselves out of their towns and work but they never expected to fight in a large scale conflict. There was this incredible sense of innocence –that you realize that you were going to get thousands of new vets, that you were going to get this generation of new veterans 18, 19, 20 year olds, all these boys you see coming home now and at that time I was 23 so I was the same age as a lot of these guys. And that is what we had on air.

Q: Did you ever have any interest in being embedded?

A: No, not really. We went through the embed training process because you had to if you wanted to go but we didn’t want them to stick us on some cheerleading position on an aircraft carrier – that wasn’t what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to be too dependent on the military for supplying us with everything; we didn’t want to put ourselves in a position where we could be backed into a corner.

Q: In addition to coverage of the war, MTV really threw itself into covering the 2004 Presidential election – something which you were really involved in. In the aftermath of the election, were you disappointed or surprised at how the youth vote played out?

A: If there was hype around that, and I think there was, then I think I was partly responsible for it because of all the time I spent talking about it on the air. I mean it just felt like there was something going on. Compared to 2000 you just saw so many more young people at rallies and participating in things whether they were 527s or 501©3s or campaigns themselves. You could go to any college bar and the level of discourse would be so much more informed about the candidates than it was in 2000, It wasn’t just Bush sucks or Gore sucks. Now you had people debating deficit spending. And me, I thought that was an indicator that there was going to be a large, large turnout and there was but because it was large overall it’s like the youth vote kind of ended up lacking in the impact it could have had. And I don’t care how much they’re going to try to spin that in the next 4 years. You really have to call a spade a spade. Young people blew it. They could have been a decisive bloc.

Q: So many young folk are getting their news from cable channels – from you or from The Daily Show. Why do you think kids are increasingly disinterested in mainstream news?

A: I think the problem is ageism. I mean if you look at reality television and the rise of reality TV in the past few years, the only thing I take away from it is that people just want to see themselves or reflections of themselves on television. Conventional news rarely covers stories from the view of a twenty-something or a teenager. I was just watching Katie Couric’s sex special and I just read that “I am Charlotte Simmons,” that Tom Wolfe book and they both came across as so out of touch with the lives of that young audience. Conventional media rarely has respect for how tough it is to grow up – kids aren’t all violent thugs and they aren’t dumb. We try to put a human, recognizable face on the news, we want to make the story seem like it is a part of your life because there are people like you living it.

Q: Are you ever frustrated because there are complexities you want to cover in your programming that you can’t because of your audience and your network?

A: I know that the programming is sometimes cheesy and it is about as subtle as a pick axe in the eye. I know the constraints of the medium that I work with and at the end of the day it’s my job to get people to watch. I like the challenge of trying to bring something with heart and head to my audience that is simple and effective – it doesn’t always have to be complex, spinning off into some deconstructionist rabbit hole.  

Q: What were you like in high school and college? Were you always political?

A: Well, my dad is a neo-con. And my mom’s from Germany. I was a complete loser in high school, I was on yearbook and not very good at sports. My big thing was I did a zine and I worked at a record store and I tried my darndest to hook up with cute girls that never seemed to work out. I had a skateboard and a video camera and I would shoot my friends trying to jump and fall on their ass. I spent a lot of time on my own, going to shows in the city, seeing bands like Sonic Youth with this little fake ID I did on Photoshop and printed out at Kinko’s.

I didn’t do much in college. I always thought campus activism was the place for really frustrated people just looking to get laid. I thought student council was for assholes and for me my engagement with politics was just being a news junkie. But all good angry young men you want to be sanctimonious about something and all you need to do is look at the world around you and it will give you that feeling of justifiable rage. It also came from being a history student, from comparing documents to myth, and trying to find complexities. And luckily for me, I had a lot of great friends in college who were much more informed about these political issues than I was and I could ask them questions and get brilliant answers. I guess I am still trying to figure out how to affect change for the positive, because what good is your life if all you’re going to do is consume and shit and piss and use things up and throw them out?

Q: Where do you want to go after MTV?

A: I have no idea. This is…I would hope this is just chapter one but if I fall off the face of the earth after this and no one ever hears from me again I wouldn’t be surprised. This place eats its young and there’s not a lot of people who come out alive. I like to think there’s a VJ (inaudible) somewhere where I could chop lines with Duff and Jesse Camp and talk about the good old days. We’ll see what happens. I’d like to think I have a brain in my head and teeth and claws to kind of make good for myself and the world somehow.

Q: You probably have your hands full trying to cover pop culture and politics, what reading do you start your day with?

A: I just try to bathe in as much culture as I can possibly consume. I usually have the TV and two computers running all day. I read all the basics: BBC, New York Times, Google News, Drudge Report, and then a bunch of gossip sites for the music industry, blogs like Newsnshit.com, and then a lot of research on Lexis Nexis.

Q: What were last 5 songs you played on your iPod?

A: You Be Lucky Free by Bright Eyes, My Little Suede Shoes by the Charlie Parker Sextet, Sin City by the Flying Burrito Brothers, Every Day I Die by Gary Newman and the Tubeway Army and Country Trash by Johnny Cash.

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