The Media Interview

Sometimes you just have to wonder where an interviewer’s mind is…
I’m watching a morning show and they are interviewing [homeless] survivors of a wave of tornadoes that hit Arkansas. Apparently one of these tornadoes hit before the sirens could go off…
Interviewer: So tell me, there were no warning sirens for this one. How does that [...]

English football manager Avram Grant gave a bizarre press conference after his Chelsea team’s win over Everton on April 17 - so bizarre that The Independent ran an almost complete transcript. I say ‘almost’ because it doesn’t give a full sense of the pauses and silences. Anyway, here’s part of the one-word wonder [...]

Heard a great story the other day while waiting in the green room at a TV station. Author Sue Johnson (Hold Me Tight) was saying how she once had a 5 minute TV appearance reduced to only 3 minutes because they couldn’t get a tiger off the set from the previous interview.

The plastic surgeon who operated on Kanye West’s mother the day before she died, walked off CNN’s “Larry King Live” during an interview tonight.
Larry King opened the hour by saying that it wasn’t clear if Dr. Jan Adams would appear as promised. King said that West’s family had formally asked Adams not to go [...]

Answer: carry on as if they did and have your own people pose questions to you.
That’s what FEMA did back on October 23rd. Having informed the media of a briefing on the California wildfires 15 minutes before it was to start, it’s not surprising that no one turned up.
A couple of reporters listened [...]

I’ve never been a huge fan of talk shows (or any show) that has a street-level window for a backdrop. Inevitably, something distracting is happening on the street… like the other morning in Ottawa, Canada:
Morning Show Mooning Revisited - Watch more free videos
Thanks - I think - to Keith Olbermann on Countdown for tipping [...]

Detroit Lions wide receiver Roy Williams was out delivering pizzas for an afternoon recently - all because of a media interview.
Back on September 24th, during his weekly chat on WDFN radio, Williams said he never tips the people who deliver pizza. Doh! Despite trying to clarify himself on a later broadcast, the outrage [...]

And we thought the idea of airing an interview with OJ Simpson about hypothetical murder was bad. German TV network has just aired the first TV interview with a convicted cannibal. All we can hope for is extremely low ratings.

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. [...]

The way NPR’s Bryant Park Project tells it, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros was at fault for what it calls “possibly the worst interview in the history of electronic media”.
Seriously.
It was that bad.
We’re not sure if they were tired, or if it was a language thing, or what… but wow.
Whereas most shows would just bury [...]