As an exasperated Casey Stengel asked the bumbling 1962 New York Mets baseball team he managed: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”We should be asking America’s newspaper establishment that question about its bungling play, not in a mere game, but in a fundamental responsibility of journalism: conducting untainted, straightforward interviews. Unfortunately, those running major newspapers and blogs these days have gone all wonky on getting honest, informative responses from public and corporate figures on important who-what-where-when-and-why questions. This is because more and more publications are ceding control of interviews to interviewees, allowing them to rewrite or outright exclude from the story anything they said, even if the response was recorded!