How much can you believe when you interview vicious criminals on the air?

These have, apparently, been anxious times in solitary confinement for rapist and killer Paul Bernardo. He's told his lawyer that he desperately wants to inform the country about how dangerous his former wife is, and to do that he wants media access. As it turns out, the corrections service denied his request, so don't expect to be seeing, for the second time this summer, a murderer holding court on the airwaves.

Because the CBC was said to be the Bernardo team's network of choice for such an interview, I spent time trying to get my head around how I'd feel asking questions -- if, in fact, it came to that. Informally, I started canvassing people outside the business with two simple questions: 1) Paul Bernardo wants to be interviewed; should we do it? 2) If we do it, will you watch?

I talked to a few dozen individuals -- gas station attendants, municipal workers, store clerks, bankers, a consultant, even a pollster (he didn't hang up on me and did answer my questions, as did everyone else, so my response rate, unlike that for most pollsters these days, was excellent). The answers I got were remarkably similar -- everyone said "no" to question No. 1, quickly and firmly, with almost all adding that it would be irresponsible to give a vicious criminal a prime-time platform.

You probably know what's coming next. When it got to question No. 2, at least three-quarters of the people, with some initial hesitation and then a bit of sheepishness, answered "yes." And that's the conundrum, isn't it? If my informal survey has any relationship to reality, people don't want Bernardo to be on the air, but if he were, many would watch.

How do you, how should you, weigh an interview's potential news value, if any, against the prurient interest the content of that conversation may have? Or, in this case, would it be sensationalism over substance? What would Bernardo have to say that might have news value? His concerns about the recently released Karla Homolka may be interesting to some, but he's expressed them in the past. Do Canadians want to learn details of his life inside the walls of Kingston Penitentiary? Perhaps. And then there's the "remorse" issue -- but could anything Bernardo might say on that be believed?

All this has made me think of a somewhat similar situation we found ourselves in late last year. After successfully challenging a decision that had prevented us from interviewing a detained Algerian whom CSIS suspects of al-Qaeda ties, I found myself sitting in an Ottawa jail directly across from the man in question -- Mohamed Harkat. There are clear issues about Harkat's past that he doesn't dispute, but after almost two years in detention, no charges had been laid. A rarely used security certificate allows Canada to keep him locked up until deportation is arranged. I was fairly aggressive during the half-hour interview, but didn't really learn anything new. How did viewers react? Many of the comments we got were negative -- not toward Harkat, but toward me for my line of questioning. I suspect that if we ever do make that trip to Kingston for another jailhouse interview, no one will have that complaint.

Peter Mansbridge is Chief Correspondent of CBC Television News and Anchor of The National.

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