The Media Interview

A TV interview with New Zealand celebrity Nicky Watson late last year became an instant classic after this part of the encounter was repeated over and over in the MSM and the blogosphere:

Watson: “I must have called [her lost] dog’s name a million times and I hope that when he hears my voice he will come to me.”
Interviewer: “You’re hoarse.”
Watson: “No, my dog.”

Cue the sniggers.

I know I had a good laugh when I first read this, but after seeing the actual segment, I realized that three important things got lost in this transcript:

1) The way the interviewer says “you’re hoarse” does not convey the meaning of “you must be hoarse?” or “you sound hoarse” but rather, the inflection indicates a mere statement with no sympathetic overtone, making it easier to misconstrue the meaning. Add to this the fact that “you’re hoarse” follows right after “he will come to me” and it’s not hard to imagine someone accidently thinking that the interviewer is referring to the “he” and not to “a million times.”

2) In written form, we see “you’re” and we understand the meaning, but the interviewer, like most people, mispronounces the phrase and it sounds more like “your” instead of “you’re.”

3) On the clip of the interview, there sounds to me like an edit before “You’re hoarse,” so we can’t be certain of actual flow of the conversation.

So, don’t believe everything you think you see in a transcript, listen carefully to interviewer’s questions, and don’t agree to interviews when you’ve been up all night looking for your dog.

You can see the full segment here.

Here’s a NZ media personality’s take on how the program handled the segment:

[It's not ok] to waste four minutes of everybody’s lives with a piece of nonsense aimed at mocking a desperate woman who’s lost her dog.