The Media Interview

Karrine Steffans achieved notoriety with her 2005 book, Confessions of a Video Vixen, a tell-all about her sexual encounters with the rich and famous. One of her lovers had a pet name for her - superhead - and the name stuck. Now she’s out peddling her new book, another tell-all called The Vixen Diaries.

What’s puzzling in all of this is that Steffans claims that she was a different person nine years ago, the time covered by her books. If she’s past all that and admits that much about her lifestyle was negative, why promote it all through the books, and why be surprised when everyone wants to focus on the gory details instead of her “new self”?

Listen to these two interviews in which Steffans tries to live down her Supahead image:

Interview on WJLB Detroit

The Ricky Smiley Morning Show - more from Ricky Smiley here.

Having finished a confrontational radio interview, Lowell Massachusetts school committee member, Jackie Doherty attends a breakfast meeting and is introduced to one of the radio station’s owners:

We talked about whether radio had to be nasty to attract listeners. He said you can have “provocative” radio without being overly negative (wouldn’t that be something).

The culture of radio in the United States over the last couple of decades has grown increasingly confrontational. Whether you experience this, of course, depends on how controversial your subject matter is, but I think some radio personalities will look for controversy and confrontation on any subject because they feel that’s what their listeners want. It’s yet another reason for making sure you’re familiar with the style and personality of your host before going into an interview.

You’re a former contestant on American Idol. You’ve just finished having lunch, and as you leave the restaurant, some guy sticks a cellphone or other small camera in your face and starts asking questions about your career. You give a few answers as you try to walk away, including your opinion of Britney Spears’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. Bingo! Now you’re a headline on TMZ.com: “Idol” Loser Sticks Up for Brit.

Quick tip: either take a lawyer with you anywhere in public or don’t say anything other than the name of your next album, the date of your next tour, and how much you appreciate your fans.

Washington DC media trainer Lou Hampton recently posted some good tips about preparing for media interviews with investigative reporters in particular:

You should assume the reporter has details of your private life as well as your private business dealings.

He goes on to talk about the ease with which those details are accessible these days, a point that was driven home to me last night as I watched part of the movie All the President’s Men - we forget how much time and energy it took thirty years ago just to track down a person’s phone number!

Now the internet has made access to “private” records available, easily and often at little cost. (A Wall Street Journal article, quoting Breit, Drescher & Imprevento PC, gave these figures: credit card transactions-$75; full list of assets-$295; list of brokerage accounts-$350.) It has also made public records easier to access. And practice of disaffected insiders to leak confidential memos and emails seems to continue to gain popularity. With these increased sources of information, even the lone freelancer can now become an investigative reporter with clout.

Check out this detailed account on the Huffington Post of how the message of a media interview can get misrepresented in the editing process and perhaps more importantly how the misrepresentation certainly seems deliberate.

According to business psychologist and author Debra Condren, she was approached by a producer from ABC’s Nightline, who was looking for a “different perspective” from that offered in a book called The Power of Nice; how being nice to others can improve your business relationships and your bottom line. Condren, whose book is called amBITCHous, stated over and over that the difference in her perspective is that

we women also need to realize the importance of being nice to ourselves, which means it’s sometimes necessary and okay to confront hostile people in the workplace, but that we can do it with integrity and in a respectful way that doesn’t humiliate the other person.

Condren says the producer seemed to understand this message and on that basis, Condren agreed to do the interview. But when it came time for the shoot, things went downhill:

The interview started late, and went long because Jessica kept asking me the same questions, phrased slightly differently, over and over again: “Is it okay to just be a bitch sometimes if you have to confront people?” “Is it okay to come down hard if someone is attacking you in the workplace?” “Isn’t being nice the last message women need to hear? Haven’t we heard that our whole lives?”

I started to get the distinct sense that they wanted me to assume the nickel-plated bitch mantle.

When the interview ended - four hours later - Condren had stuck to her message about taking care of your interests with integrity and still treating others with respect. However, when the program aired, she realized that sticking to your message is no guarantee that your message will come out clearly.

Deftly paring away the leading set-up questions, and chopping away the beginning parts of my sentences, the clips showed my comments completely out of context, making me sound like a–you guessed it–total bitch advocating chilly tough love in the workplace. They’d cut out every single word I’d repeated endlessly about the importance of honoring ambition with integrity and respect.

And then Condren makes an interesting distinction:

I can’t say I wasn’t quoted correctly. I can say that the way that they took a fraction of my message, cherry picked my quotes, and didn’t even remotely completely include what I actually said utterly misrepresented the heart of my message.

This touches on something I’ve thought a lot about. If your quotes are sliced and diced and woven into a written narrative, it’s easier for the reader to understand that this is the journalist’s account. But when you see the person on camera and hear their exact words; it’s easier to forget this is also a journalist’s account, an edited version of the interview. The individual words undoubtedly are those of the interviewee, but the context, the message, the relationship of the words are virtually under the complete control of the journalist. That’s a lot of power. Use it nicely.

Sometimes there’s good reason to get up and leave an interview. Here’s a detailed account by John Davison, editor for the gaming blog 1UP, about his appearance in 2005 on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Davison claims he was badly misled by the show’s director about the topics to be covered and that in the end it was a show attacking video games as promoting violence - Davison left the set during the first break of the live-to-tape session. I have no knowledge of the show or what Davison is claiming, but it’s an interesting perspective on “abush interviews”.

Bit off topic here, but may I just say that spam blogs are wasting a lot of my time and making some blog search engines almost useless.