"Live interviews, like live press conferences," says Mike Wallace, "are the easiest thing for a politician to control." The live interview, meanwhile, has become the dominant form of discourse in the media.

Live is nothing new, of course. It was the norm for interviews in the 1950s, on shows like Nightbeat with Mike Wallace. The Today show began using satellites to do live interviews at news events in the mid-1970s. But it became omnipresent in the 1980s, as the spread portable electronic newsgathering equipment allowed local and national anchors to interview people from anywhere. Ted Koppel began using the live interview format on Nightline in 1980. Soon, interviews began popping up in the middle of the evening news shows and every local outlet in the country began going live to the fire or the fallen tree, and to a live interview with the fire- fighter, witness, or police officer on the scene. Yet even with subjects at the highest level, the form has profound limitations.

"Mr. Vice President, thank you for being with us tonight," Dan Rather began on that January night in 1988. "Donald Gregg still serves as your trusted adviser. He was deeply involved in running arms to the Contras and he didn't inform you. When President Reagan's trusted adviser Admiral Poindexter failed to inform him, the president fired him. Why is Mr. Gregg still inside the White House, still a trusted adviser?"

Rather's attempt to tangle with George Bush live on the CBS Evening News tested and exposed more clearly than any previous interview the constraints of live interviewing in the modern era. He had a simple aim: to pin down Bush on how much the then vice president knew about the Iran-Contra affair. And Rather used nine of his twenty-two minutes of the newscast to try, extraordinarily long by TV standards. Bush countered by repeatedly questioning the questions, accusing Rather of ambushing him, and finally attacking Rather for once walking off the set. The incident helped reinvigorate Bush's campaign, and may have damaged Rather. As a newsgathering event, it was a failure.

Rather was operating on the outmoded assumption that the live TV interview can be a real interview, a process by which a reporter can truly explore his subject to gather information. Nowadays, most live interviews, instead, are a kind of ceremonial ritual that only resemble the real thing, with strict boundaries beyond which the journalist cannot trespass, inadequate time to go beyond the carefully prepared, and a tacit conspiracy between interviewer and interviewee that this be good TV. "My husband calls live interviews performance masquerading as conversation," says ABC's Diane Sawyer, whose husband is the film director Mike Nichols.

Indeed, on network television, where the level of production quality tends to be higher, most interviews are preceded by lengthy "pre-interviews," in which producers find out what the interviewee will say and outline what he will be asked. Such predigestion is considered essential if the interview is to pass as adequate television. This process of "casting" interviews, often in search of conflict or other television values, takes place even on such hallowed-ground as PBS's NewsHour.

The mythology of television as a kind of psychic "X-ray" whose "piercing stare" would expose the liars and charlatans and drive them from public life, the kind of imagery that inspired the CBS unblinking-eye logo, has long faded away. Live may provide a sense of spontaneity, but not the electricity of revelation.

Perhaps that is why two of the most successful live interview programs on television today are those hosted by Charlie Rose and Larry King. Neither asks tough questions. Rather, they elicit something else from their subjects, interesting chat perhaps, or a sense of what someone is like, "the cut of a person's gib," as ABC's Jeff Greenfield once put it. Rose, however, is particularly good at gently guiding an interviewee back to a certain point by rephrasing the point as Rose understood it. "Are you saying..." or "Do you mean to say ..." Rose asks, over and over, as with his November 3 interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. "I'm trying to make sure we understand what the book is about ... are you saying that genes determine, intelligence?"

Even Ted Koppel, perhaps the strongest interviewer in a hard-news setting, acknowledges that there are strict limits on what the live interviewer can accomplish, although he thinks there are ways to operate within them. Koppel says that in any TV interview, there is a natural affinity between the viewer and the interviewer. "The most fundamental rule is to keep the viewer identifying with you," he says, by knowing what the viewer might be thinking and moving along those lines. "You can lose that identification easily by losing control of the interview, or by being too aggressive or rude, or by not asking the right type of questions."

To maintain this subtle relationship, Koppel thinks it is important to let the person being interviewed have his or her say on the first question or two. Then at a certain point, if a person is going on too long or avoiding the question, and everyone at home gets it," the interviewer has license from the viewer to become more aggressive. In Koppel's mind, it is as if an alarm has gone off, and the viewer is saying, "Ted, get in there."

If the subject continues to be evasive, however, "the best you can do is leave the audience with the impression that this person just doesn't want to answer the question." You can ask a question two or three times, "to sort of under- score it, underline it," Koppel says, but imagining that you can wring the truth of out of somebody is unrealistic.

Quality live interviewing, Koppel says, requires two elements that most such interviews lack: adequate time and an ability on the part of the interviewer to edit the interview in his or her mind as it is occurring. "The essence of journalism is editing," he says. "And editing while you are on the air is extremely tough. It means sifting out the extraneous from the relevant, the new from the old" - in your head, while listening to the person talking, and thinking of the next question.

The taped interview, of course, offers the opportunity to edit in comparative leisure. But the competition between the media, along with the growing sophistication of those who are interviewed, has markedly changed how these taped television interviews are conducted and altered what ends up on the air.

By the mid-1980s, Mike Wallace says, the confrontational style for which he made his name on 60 Minute's no longer proved useful. "It used to work for me years ago because it was unexpected. We did get some truth-telling." But once the 60 Minutes reputation became better known, he says, "it wore off."

Also, he says, many of those interviewed these days, even private citizens without media experience, have lawyers handling contracts and TV consultants coaching them on what questions will be asked. Wallace says that Don Tyson, the chicken producer for Arkansas, was fully prepared that way. Tonya Harding had a group of lawyers to handle her case and another set of lawyers to handle her negotiations with the media.

The techniques that movie studios developed playing hardball in selling their movie starts for interviews to the network morning shows in the 1980s, playing shows off against each other, have been picked up by people involved in news stories. Lawyers for Michael Fay, the American youth caned in Singapore, played the different magazine shows successfully enough to secure promises of forty minutes across two nights on NBC Dateline. In the case of one network, whose name I have agreed to withhold as a condition of learning this information, a prominent person involved in a recent crime case even secured the right to approve the script of the interview about her to ensure that the tone was positive.

"All of these people have representation," says one network senior producer. "These are not so much interviews any more as deals."

Even a large percentage of the softer feature interviews done these days are a form of deal making, keyed to a celebrity's newest book or movie or album. Consider PrimeTime Live's profile interview recently with comedian Tim Allen, or Dateline's with Dolly Parton or Audrey Meadows - all celebrities with books just out.

When such celebrities or heavyweight authors are hot, their agents are in a position to exert some leverage over the shape of the interview. "I would never ask that [an interview) not be aggressive. What. I'd do is ask what the tone of the interview is likely to be. That's different," says Cathy Saypol, who runs her own public relations firm and has represented books from Oliver North's Under Fire to Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's Strange Justice, about Clarence Thomas. "I might say, 'Is the interview going to be aggressive? Is it going to be a puff piece? Is it going to get into this or that?' They might say, 'Our guy really wants to get into this, or, 'Oh, no, our audience is interested in softer material,' or whatever. Then, you have the option to appear or not to appear."

Saypol says she might request that an interview run a certain length, that certain areas of inquiry be off limits, that certain areas of inquiry be included in an interview, and so forth. "We can ask, we can suggest, we can do all of that. The final word is in the hands of the journalists," she says. "You try to get the best possible coverage for your client."