The Media Interview

U.S. Senator Trent Lott gives a very clear example of the “Sorry, but the answer will have to wait until I make my point first” technique for handling live interviews:

BLITZER: I know you have concerns about this troop increase going forward in Iraq. But I just want you to spell out what your concerns are.

LOTT: The vote this afternoon in the Senate is just a procedural vote that will set up a process that determines how we go forward and have a full debate on this issue. And hopefully we’ll have a series of votes, three or four votes, on different options, because different senators have different ideas about how we should go into the future.

Here’s my concern.

First of all, these are non-binding resolutions so they don’t mean anything. When we get through, we will not have bound anybody to do anything.

From The Situation Room on CNN, February 5, 2007

I was just listening to the radio, and the host begins the interview by asking what the author thinks about the issue raised in an interview just before the news break. Time for some quick bridging!!

In this case, at least, there was some connection between the two interviews - one was about parenting and the other was about a possible tax on junk food - and the author did a great job of commenting briefly on the tax, then moving towards the themes in her book. Still, it can be a bit of a shock to be asked about something she had absolutely no preparation for. Since it seemed to be a hot topic with listeners, and there were more media stops that day, she at least had a heads up on it now!

Whether it’s a previous interview or simply a story of the day, hosts will sometimes try to connect everything on their show by one or two themes, so it’s helpful if you’re able to listen to the show before you’re on (or watch in the green room, etc.) or at least have listened to a newscast, read a paper, or browsed a news site earlier in the day. This is short-term interview preparation!

And hosts, please try to make reasonable connections!

Someone recently emailed to ask if I was related to Roy Plomley, the creator of the long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs (his name is often misspelled as Plumley, hence the question). Here’s my answer:

I am not related to Roy Plomley.

Speaking of Roy Plomley, his radio program Desert Island Discs can be used as a variant of the elevator pitch. For those unfamiliar with the program, a guest is asked what music they would want to have with them on a desert island if they were only allowed to bring 8 cds, records, etc. It can be useful to approach media interviews in a similar way: if I’m allowed to make only three points in this interview, what would they be?

How’s that for subtle bridging from the question asked to the answer you want to give?

I’m not sure how straight many of the answers were 20 years ago - questions were just avoided with less pinache perhaps - but this journalist makes a good point about the effects of media training on political interviews:

…twenty years ago you could interview people and ask them straight questions and have a reasonable chance that you were going to get a straight answer. Now you’re very, very lucky if you interview … in fact you will never interview anybody who has been in public life for any length of time who hasn’t done that first basic media training course in which they’re taught this one rule: don’t answer the question that you’re asked; answer the question that you want to answer [what’s often referred to as ‘bridging’]. And so our job has evolved from just asking questions and asking tough questions and you know, keeping on bashing away asking more tough questions; to very much trying to get through a series of stonewalling answers, in which a politician answers the question that he or she wants to answer, and you try to get them to answer the question that you want them to answer. And that can become like a fencing match. Sometimes the interviewer wins and sometimes the interviewer loses, but if you can get the tone right in an interview like that, and if you can penetrate that brick wall, then that’s the best that we can hope to do at the moment, I think.

- Mark Colvin, presenter for ‘PM’, ABC News and Current Affairs
on “The Art of the Interview”, Sunday November 13, 2004
a radio discussion panel which was part of the Cultures of Journalism series from Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National