Life > May 1, 2008

By Walker Kalan | Staff writer

Unless you were a total dweeb in high school, you watched MTV (and continue to do so), and your only source of news was the two minute slots at the :50 mark each hour. Gideon Yago was one of MTV’s feature correspondents from 2000-2006 who helped introduce our generation to difficult concepts like “voting” and “contraception.” He has had the privilege of interviewing Presidents Bush and Clinton, Al Gore, John McCain, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela and many more influential figures. I had the privilege of interviewing him after he spoke to a crowd in Carswell Hall about youth voting trends.

WK: So, I did some research on you … you got 33,000 Google hits. I think I got about 52 hits myself, and only about 9 of those were actually me—

Gideon Yago: Is that good? Is 33,000 Google hits good?

WK: I think it’s pretty good. I mean, I only got nine … I searched your name in quotes, so I’m sure if I took the quotes off, you would’ve gotten more hits … So my question is, what are the pros and cons of being in the public eye?

GY: Uh, well the pros are kind of obvious. It makes things a lot easier…

WK: Getting into restaurants…?

GY: Yeah, but not just that. Also, when you pitch an idea to a magazine, to a newspaper, you know, the fact that you’re someone in the public eye, there’s an assumption that there’s gonna be an audience that comes up to follow you … it certainly helped my dating life, which is to say there were women that would not have peed on me if I was on fire in college

(At this point I interrupted Yago to ask him about a rumor that he had dated one of my friend’s sisters a while back. This was followed by about two minutes of off-the-record awkwardness)

WK: So, you’re 30 now … In the latter days of your time at MTV, did you ever get the feeling, like when you go home and you’re at a party, and you look around, and everyone is younger than you?

GY: Things didn’t change that much. The executives just stayed. There were a lot of new staffers that came in that I didn’t really get a chance to know, but the turnover rate…

WK: I mean, the whole youth slant of their programming…

GY: I felt like after 2004 I stayed there a little bit too long. I stayed there two more years because I tried to launch a show in 2005, and people told us it was going to potentially be real, but it didn’t turn out, and I was locked into a two year contract … In 2005 I covered all this very intense stuff. Coming off the election I was burnt out. Then I covered the tsunami in 2005 and spent about a month and a half in Colombia and then Katrina happened. Then I covered the earthquake in Pakistan. My whole year was really defined by devastation and human suffering.

WK: You talked about MTV’s evolution, how they shifted from music videos to The Real World and all the reality shows. Now, you’ve got The Hills, Laguna Beach, My Super Sweet Sixteen, all the Paris Hilton coverage. It seems like they’re pushing the rich white kid thing pretty hard. What are your thoughts on that?

GY: It’s kind of indicative of the tabloidization of everything in America. You know, the most successful magazines in the last few years have been Star, US Weekly, OK! and People … The iconography and those appetites reflect us as a society … I can’t pass condemnation on marketplace dynamics, and I also can’t say its totally bad, because if the person who cures cancer is also a huge American Idol fan, what does one have to do with the other?

WK: What’s the craziest situation you’ve been put in as a journalist? Like, cracked-out Whitney Houston, or anything like that?

GY: There’s been a lot. Everything was just so nuts in Iraq. When we were driving back between Fallujah and Baghdad there was a major tank battle that was going on in front of us. The highway in front of us was barricaded because we thought people were trying to rob us, so we were like, “f*** it, let’s drive down the highway anyway!” And so these tanks are firing over our heads, and we’re like, “OH MY GOD! What if they think we’re a target? What do we do? Do we drive back through to Fallujah in the dark, or do we just wait for this tank battle to blow over and drive back to Baghdad?”

WK: Having spent a good amount of time in Iraq, what would you say is the most under-reported aspect of the whole thing?

GY: The experience of the Iraqis is something we don’t really talk about because the dialogue in this country is very much framed around “Good thing/Bad thing? Right or wrong for America?” … We don’t talk about the fact that there are five million refugees from the Iraq War, that’s double the number of the people that are in the Darfur crisis, and yet Darfur seems to command the national attention—

WK: Darfur still doesn’t get that much attention—

GY: Yeah, it still doesn’t get that much attention … This is going to fall on your generation, how you guys handle it.

WK: How do you feel about Obama?

GY: I think it’s fabulous that you’ve got a candidate that’s found a way to enfranchise so many young voters and who young voters feel is their own. We always felt that was the missing piece in 2004 in terms of making that the election of young voters.

WK: What would you say is the worst piece of advice college age kids are given as they are about to enter the workforce, and what is a helpful piece of advice that is often overlooked?

GY: I’d say it’s not the piece of advice that’s given but the subtle social enforcement around the needs to do certain things. There’s such a value around achievement and conformity in this country.

We’re taught from a very young age that if we take a certain class, it will prepare us for a certain curriculum, to apply to a certain tier of college, and that will set you up to get a certain kind of job, like all of life is a strategic f*****g game.

And what that completely does, is that political/strategic thinking bleeds out the capacity for any randomness, weirdness, joy, pursuit, self-discovery … And I’m not saying the answer is to go do dope on a beach in Indonesia and touch God and come back wearing flip-flops and dreadlocks.

I have a lot of friends who are Israelis, and in Israel, its considered par for the course to spend a year of two traveling the world. And its not like these guys are Uncle Moneybags. They figure it out!

You work some s*** job at some surf town somewhere. Or you ride the cheap train; you don’t get the Prada bag.

The $600 you were going to use to buy the new iPod, you use to buy a Eurail pass instead.

And you live off your own wits, and challenge yourself, and I think that’s the right way to do it.