Czarniak's questions couldn't beat the band

Good for Lindsay Czarniak. Good for the Channel 4 sports anchor for walking up to Redskins owner Daniel Snyder last Tuesday at an event in Clinton and asking him to appear on camera for a few questions after he had addressed a crowd celebrating the dedication of a new team-sponsored football field in Prince George's County.

To his credit, Snyder agreed, breaking his regular season of silence to tell frustrated Redskins followers that he was "disappointed and embarrassed" about the team's dismal season-long performance. To his discredit, Snyder never directly answered one of her initial questions about taking play-calling duties away from Coach Jim Zorn and then abruptly ended the session.

Over the past week, Czarniak has taken some heat over a line of questioning that appeared in a transcript of Snyder's remarks posted on the team's Web site the next day. They were not exactly hard-hitting queries, but Czarniak said in an interview this week that she was just about to start whizzing fastballs toward the team owner when a funny thing happened on the way to getting to her best stuff.

"That's when the band started playing," she said. "It was like a bad movie."

But first, let's set the scene.

Czarniak, one of two local television reporters who attended the event (Channel 7's Alex Parker was the other), said she approached Snyder just after his scheduled remarks to the crowd.

"I asked him if I could grab a few questions with him," she recalled. "He said, 'No problem, just let me go shake a few hands.' "

Czarniak and her crew, along with Associated Press reporter Joseph White, the only print reporter at the event other than a few student reporters from a local high school, then set up in a school parking lot and waited for Snyder. He eventually showed up and stepped in front of the camera.

Anyone who has ever dealt with Snyder knows full well that asking him a hardball question right out of the gate is not exactly the wisest journalistic strategy. Czarniak knows it better than most.

"If you ask him something he doesn't like," Czarniak said, "he'll walk away after the first question."

So she took a gentler approach at the start, hoping to segue into tougher questions.

"In the beginning, I wanted to find out how he was reacting to all this stuff," Czarniak said of her first question. "Then I got to the play-calling, and I think he started realizing what was coming. He didn't bristle, but he didn't really answer it. And that's when the band came by."