The Media Interview

I heard a headline on CNN the other day that made me curious. New York Rep. Peter King allegedly said there were too many mosques in the United States, but he claimed he was being taken out of context. The remarks were said to be in an interview with Politico.com, so I immediately brought it up on screen, and bless the internet’s heart if the whole thing wasn’t laid out nicely for me: Politico’s original headline and story, an update about the Representative’s denials, and then a decent length of the actual interview posted on YouTube for everyone to check for themselves. Now that’s transparency.

Have a look for yourself and see what you think. Did Rep. King actually say “there are too many mosques in the United States”? And based on what he actually said, was it reasonable to extract that headline?

Here’s the relevant section transcribed:

Rep. Peter King: If there’s any doubt I want the doubt resolved in favour of us going out and getting the job done. We have, unfortunately, we have a… ah… too many… ah mosques in this country there’s too many people who are… ah.. sympathetic to radical islam. We should be looking at them more carefully, we should be finding out how we can infiltrate. Ah… we should be more much more agressive in law enforcement.

I’ll leave issues of the quality of journalism to others. The issue for this blogger is: what lesson can interviewees learn from what happened here? I think the answer is: be as clear you possibly can with your thoughts. Not that mistakes aren’t going to happen (and then you can only hope the journalist doesn’t run with it out of context), but the better prepared you are, the more rested you are, the more focussed you are during the interview, the less likely it will be that you’ll slip up, even on a word or two.

I have an in-depth analysis of this incident in my latest newsletter. If you don’t have a subscription (it’s free) just fill in the form over on the side.