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.

Larry King gave a good demonstration last night of what not to do as a guest. He was on Anderson Cooper 360, being interviewed by John King about Dr. Jan Adams walking off the Larry King Live show.

Larry King was constantly looking away from his interviewer and at the camera. Breaking eye contact in order to look at the camera creates a bad impression; suddenly you’re no longer in a conversation - you’re playing to the lens and it feels disingenuous. Perhaps King was still in “host mode” and forgot that he’s the interviewee talking with someone in a studio (as opposed to via satellite). Whatever the case, I’m sure he doesn’t like it when his guests do such a thing.

Author Will Weaver on being prepared for unprepared interviewers:

My 2 1/2 minute TV interview was with a woman anchor with big hair and pancake make-up, who scanned my novel’s inside cover during a cut-away to a commercial, then returned, on-air, to brightly to ask me questions about the novel

–but I know the game, and so have my sound bites fairly well in order, things she can grab ahold of and use to sound intelligent…..

In the rush to fill a 24 hour cable news channel, ABC News demonstrates the dangers of throwing interviewers still in their first month of broadcasting school straight onto the air…

Ok, the “first month of broadcasting school” may be a bit unfair to Merry Miller of ABC News Now, but I can certainly say that her bosses need to review their on-air selection process.

Thanks to Eric Deggans and his blog The Feed for tipping me off to this video.

And for interviewees - it’s just another example of the kinds of people you’re going to be interviewed by, and even at the national level - so be prepared to deal with them. Kindly in this case, I think.

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.

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.

Preparing for a live television interview is tough. Even if you’ve had a lot of experience on TV, every situation is different enough - even down to the way you’re seated - that you need to be well prepared to handle what comes at you. Even then, there’s always something more…

The other day a client of mine faced the following:

1. As they were counting down to going live he was told that the 6 minute interview had been cut to 3 minutes.

2. The opening question was about his product when he’d been told minutes before that they didn’t want to “do a commercial” and the focus would be on the social issues surrounding the product.

3. The host began nudging him below the desk trying to get him to look at the desk monitor after telling him earlier not to be distracted by what’s on the desk monitor - someone in the control room had decided to play some clips from the product they didn’t want him to talk much about…

Lesson learned: Live interviews - TV in particular - are highly unpredictable and no matter how well prepared you are, you also need to be prepared for the “unpreparable”. There, you’ve had your daily dose of the paradoxical.

Been a lot of talk about a TV interview with American Idol judge Paula Abdul on January 11. People are saying she was drunk; her spokesperson says she was tired after three straight days of media interviews (see his comments below the video). Whatever the cause of her wild swaying and slurred words, she shouldn’t have done this interview, or her handlers shouldn’t have let her do it. She cancelled all interviews the next day, ostensibly because of a sore throat.

Ironically, during her interview with the Seattle station, the focus of which was claims by Simon Cowell that Seattle had the worst singers he’s ever heard, Abdul responds to the anchors at one point by saying “Any publicity is good publicity; you gotta learn to eat it up and embrace it…” Words she’ll need to live by, now.

Here’s part of a Reuters report on the official response:

Abdul’s spokesman, Jeff Ballard, denied that was under the influence of alcohol or on some kind of medication and said the U.S. performer never drank.

Ballard said the interview was one of the last in a string of question-and-answer sessions she had done over two hours on Thursday ahead of a new season of “American Idol,” debuting next week on the Fox network. “She was exhausted. This was at the end of three days of press (interviews and appearances), and she has had cameras following her around for a reality TV show too,” said Ballard, referring to a new documentary series about the star’s life. “She was sitting in a room with just a camera and a mic on, and the controllers dropped the sound twice, which is why she rolled her eyes.”

Ballard said Abdul, 44, had canceled all media interviews on Friday because she had a sore throat after sitting in the chilly studio on Thursday.

HarperCollins took their time, but have finally fired Judith Regan, the publisher of the cancelled O.J. Simpson book and the interviewer from the cancelled OJ TV interview on Fox. Thanks to The Flack for pointing out the good news.

A friend of mine was given a message at work when he came back from lunch the other day: a newspaper reporter will stop by tommorrow to ask some questions. My friend writes an occasional column in a local paper and has been interviewed a couple of times before, so he didn’t think much of it and since the colleague had confirmed that he’d be available, my friend didn’t call back.

But when he walked in the next day, there was an entire camera crew in the lobby and a reporter shoving a mike in his face. Even though he’d been preparing thoughts for an interview, the presence of the camera and all the people threw him for a loop and he certainly hadn’t dressed for a TV appearance. My friend says he was extremely nervous because it was so unexpected and worries that it will come across poorly. We haven’t seen the finished TV segment yet - fingers crossed!

Now it would be perfectly reasonable in a situation like this to explain the misunderstanding and ask for a bit of time to settle yourself and your thoughts; possibly even change some of your clothing if that’s possible. Depending on the nature of the story and the crew’s schedule, it might even be possible to reschedule, but keep in mind that you’ve indirectly committed to the interview through your colleague.

This is why it’s so important for anyone setting up an interview to make sure you have all the facts straight - it can make a huge difference if you get it wrong.