The Media Interview

Fascinating issue brewing in Hamilton, Ontario, where a recording and transcript of an “off the record” media interview with the city’s mayor have been released to some media outlets. In that interview with Hamilton Spectator columnist Andrew Dreschel, Mayor Fred Eisenberger apparently reveals some sensitive information from an in-camera council meeting. Dreschel won’t confirm or deny what was said, sticking by the “off the record” nature of the conversation.

It turns out that the mayor’s communications director kept recordings of all media interviews, including this one. Dreschel too kept his own recording of the session. The city councillor who released the recording and transcript won’t say who gave them to him. Speculation on that point is being fueled by the fact that the city is currently being sued by the mayor’s former communications director, apparently for unfair dismissal.

The mayor was quick to admit that he had in fact revealed sensitive information during the “off the record” interview and has called for a police investigation, saying the recording of the interview was stolen.

Ahh, such promise for freedom of the press during the 2008 Olympics in this headline from the Guardian:

Beijing promises open media environment for Olympics

Then we find out that it means this:

“BOCOG will apply a zero refusal policy for interview requests, which means that all requests for interviews will be replied to,” the China Daily quoted Liu Qi, president of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, as saying. [my emphasis]

If replying to all interview requests is the criterion, then every government, every corporation, every celebrity has a “zero refusal policy,” except when they’re mean and don’t return your calls…

For its part, the International Olympic Committee has made it clear they’re demanding freedom of the press (at least on the grounds of the games):

Athletes will be allowed to speak freely in on-site media interviews after their competitions, even on the grounds of Olympic venues, where the Olympic Charter bans political protests.

(from a Washington Post article about IOC President Jacques Rogge and freedom of speech, April 11, 2008)

We’ll find out soon how far that promise will carry.

I have to empathize a little with Mercades Nichols, the 17 year old Florida girl who is one of several defendants in the case of a videotaped beating that got major play on YouTube and the media in general. Nichols tried to get bail restrictions eased last week, in part to allow her to speak with the media about the case. Her request was denied.

It’s easy to say that Nichols and her companions made this whole travesty “public” by posting the video on YouTube, but it would be nice to think that all the experts, lawyers, and media people could approach things a little bit differently than immature 17 year olds. Not that there’s anything new about “trial by the court of public opinion” it’s just that the proliferation of new media outlets and social media is making those “trials” more public, more influential, and, often, more ghoulish.

You know things are bad, however, when it’s Nichols’s own lawyer who’s pushing for her ability to talk to the media:

…during Tuesday’s hearing, [James] Holz argued before the judge that Nichols should be allowed to speak for herself.

“Right now, the victim and other people are openly speaking to media whenever they want,” Holz said.

“The Sheriff’s Department weekly is on television speaking about this case. It just seems to me that everybody is speaking about the case - except the person alleged,” he said. He said Nichols wants her voice to be heard.

“She has basically been demonized within the media,” he said.

[From a Lakeland Ledger article]

Holz is worried, of course, that the media attention will make a fair trial difficult, and that’s one of the downsides of turning testimony into sound bites and opinions into testimony. But you’d think he’d be more worried about the damage Nichol could do to her own case by speaking out in the media. Lawyers are the ones who are supposed to make you whisper the answer in their ears before allowing you to respond to any question at all. I guess that 10 minutes on Larry King is more important now.

Instead of letting Nichols speak to the media, perhaps the public needs to stop watching the shows that sensationalize real cases. But apparently all the fictionalized sensationalism of crime books, shows, and movies isn’t enough to satisfy…

A week or so ago I mentioned the controversy over statements made by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a taped encounter with journalist Tom Zytaruk in 2005 in the driveway of MP Chuck Cadman’s widow’s home. The statements allegedly showed Harper acknowledging that payments had been offered to Cadman when he was alive in an effort to get the independent MP to switch over to Harper’s Conservatives.

Fast forward three years and yesterday the Conservatives filed court papers to prohibit further use of the tape on the grounds that it has been tampered with. Citing two audio experts, the party claimed in the news conference that edits had been made to the tape recording by Zytaruk. Two common themes ran through the media reports I saw about the news conference:

1. The Conservatives only said that the tape had been altered, but did not say whether or not Harper’s comments were misreprented or changed because of the alleged editing.

2. Zytaruk denied having tampered with the tape.

However, when I read the Globe and Mail’s article, it seems there was more to this than we were hearing from other media:

…Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for the Prime Minister, said in a later e-mail that the edits changed the meaning of Mr. Harper’s comments, and that one of them inserted a question to misrepresent his answer.

Mr. Soudas said that change “creates a question that was never asked” about an allegation that his party had offered a $1-million life insurance policy to terminally ill Mr. Cadman, an Independent, and that Mr. Harper replied, “I don’t know the details …”

“When the PM says he does not know the details, he is not answering a question about the insurance policy for [Mr. Cadman’s wife],” Mr. Soudas said in the e-mail.

and regarding journalist Tom Zytaruk, the situation was not so clear cut as a simple denial of tampering:

The man who made the recording, B.C. journalist and author Tom Zytaruk, Wednesday denied altering the tapes, calling the Conservatives’ allegation a “desperate statement.”

However, he said that he had stopped his tape recorder momentarily when he thought Mr. Harper had finished speaking. When Mr. Harper turned back, Mr. Zytaruk resumed taping. He insisted that neither he nor Mr. Harper said anything during the interruption.

“We’re talking milliseconds here,” Mr. Zytaruk told The Globe and Mail in Vancouver.

Both of these revelations substantially change the story - alleging misrepresentation is more important than alleging editing, and Zytaruk’s admission that the tape was stopped is one plausible explanation for what the experts are calling “edits”. Good on the Globe and Mail for going deeper on this story.

From a PR management standpoint, do you think the Conservatives should have pursued this? Because it’s given the tape additional legs in the media. Or should they have let slightly-awake tapes lie (no pun intended)?

I saw an accomplished scuba diver being interviewed the other day and one of the opening questions was: how many dives have you done over the years? She hesitated for some time and then began saying how she hadn’t kept accurate logs, etc.

If you find yourself being asked for numbers or statistics - consider the context. If a business reporter is asking for productivity statistics and you don’t have them at your fingertips, you don’t want to give approximations or anything that might be misleading. Simply say that you don’t know and offer to get those figures as soon as possible.

In the case of the diver, the details aren’t important. We just want to know a rough number of dives - has it been hundreds, thousands? Having complete logs may be important for you as a scuba diver, but your audience doesn’t demand that kind of accuracy.

And since someone asked about it once, have an answer about total dives ready for your next interview.

Hopefully after winning a contest worth $15,000 you wouldn’t have anything bad to say about your Sponsor in media interviews, but just to be safe…

Winner must comply with all Contest rules as published. Winner agrees to conduct any and all media interviews related to the Contest, if requested, and not to disparage Sponsor during any such interviews.

Found this excerpt from a Conde Naste contest, which you can enter here.

Having just written about the growth of TV cameras in radio studios and the need to watch what you say during commercials breaks, comes this story from KESQ TV:

The male escort responsible for the downfall of Christian evangelist leader Ted Haggard is now alleging that embattled Senator Larry Craig also came to see him.

While promoting his new book during a radio interview with KNWQ-AM in Palm Springs Wednesday night, Mike Jones hesitated from making the allegation on the air.

Management for the radio station says Jones told them he would reveal something about Idaho Senator Larry Craig on the “Bulldog Bill Feingold Show.”

While he hesitated doing so on the air, a NewsChannel 3 camera was rolling when he made the accusation during a commercial break. [my emphasis]

Of course one always has to ask if the interviewee is deliberately playing to the TV camera or if they truly forgot it was rolling.

I’ve posted before about the fact that publishing things on a blog is akin to having an interview published in a magazine or aired on radio or TV - be prepared to have yourself quoted by others.

Now it’s common practice for journalists to write stories quoting someone from a variety of other sources, but the issue is how they do this. For example, I read an article about Pete Townsend and reported disagreements he was having with fellow Who member, Roger Daltrey. The article quoted Townsend in a way that made you think the writer had spoken with the guitarist. There was a brief mention of Townsend’s blog at one point in the article and, when you went there, the quotes were all clearly taken straight from the blog. I think the journalist should have stated that the quotes were from the blog.

At least with a blog or other web-based source, it would be possible to Google for the quote and check its source. But what about non-web material such as press releases not posted on the internet - journalists often quote from these as if they’d talked with the person, yet they don’t qualify it by saying “in a statement” or “in a press release”. Of course, it’s not a lie to say “they said”, because you have their statement in writing, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the source because it can explain the fact that some other line of questioning was not pursued since there was no interview.

Lest you think this is all just semantics, consider the situation of a blogger named Rachel from north London. She has been harassed (as have several other people) by a woman who would not quit, even after being warned several times by police and a conviction. The woman is now going to jail thankfully.

For various legal reasons, Rachel has refused all media interviews on the subject, but at least one journalist has been using material from her blog in a way that makes it look like she granted a media interview. Hence, this copyright notice on her site:

Commercial useage terms: (This applies to a journalist, not the ones linked below, who has been publishing extracts from my blog as if I have given an exclusive interview, when I haven’t.) You need to get permission from me in writing to quote this blog. I’ve explained why I am not doing interviews. I can’t, for solid legal and professional reasons. I have a contractual obligation to my publishers to do interviews relating to the book about PTSD which is out in a few weeks. Some of the interviews have already been written, timings agreed, and it is not fair and it is not professional to mess up other people’s hard work by going off on one and talking about Lowde and cyberstalking, which is nothing to do with the book and the work I do. The timing of this could not have been worse for me, professionally. Please help me out here. Thanks

Nikki Finke posted this on her Deadline Hollywood blog on Thursday:

I just confirmed that Sicko documentary creator Michael Moore was barred from making a scheduled media appearance inside the New York Stock Exchange today. His publicist says it was because he and a group of nurses intended to call for Wall Street investors and Main Street consumers to divest themselves of HMO, health insurance, and drug company stocks. The Oscar-winner and representatives of the California Nurses Association were slated to do a series of interviews with financial media outlets from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon.

Finke went on to say she was

very surprised that the NYSE would interfere like this, especially given that these “on the floor” media interviews are commonplace.

Non-sequitur alert! Allowing some media interviews on your property does not imply that you are going to allow all media interviews. The interference is even less surprising given Moore’s anti-business philosophy. Add to that the fact that he would not have been giving advice to investors (as Moore’s people apparently tried to spin it), but merely staging a protest against a sector of the business community. Nothing surprising anywhere there…

On the other hand, Finke does make a good point: since the media interviews went ahead anyway (outside of the NYSE), the ban just gave Moore more attention.

I just posted about the controversy surrounding the demand by Angelina Jolie’s lawyers that journalists sign a contract outlining the scope and rules of any interview with the star at the premiere of her latest movie A Mighty Heart.

There’s another story here, though, about the way the media works. I cited a number of articles in which Jolie’s actions were condemned and I read through many more. My goal was to find more details of the infamous contract. I haven’t found any so far.

What I did find is that virtually every report simply quoted from or, worse, did a rewrite of a story by Roger Friedman on FoxNews.com. Why didn’t we see any interviews with other journalists (or at least something indicating that other journalists weren’t willing to speak about it)? And why didn’t anyone else use their own quotes from the contract? They simply repeated Friedman’s.

In this day of transparency why is no one confirming the story with their own direct quotes? I assume a lot of people saw this contract and there seem to have been many who didn’t like it so you think they’d be interested in revealing its contents…

Anyone seen a link to copy of the contract or more details about it? I’d love to see it…