The Media Interview

The website Media Matters says CNN “deceptively cropped” the June 29th Face the Nation interview with retired General Wesley Clark during a report on its American Morning show June 30th. Here’s the Media Matters transcript of the CNN video clip:

CLARK [video clip]: That large squadron in the Air — in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. … I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Media Matters then rightly points out that this clip removes the context of that final statement of Clark’s - the one which has drawn a lot of criticism. When you view the entire transcript, you can see that Clark was using the words of Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer:

CLARK: That large squadron in the Air — in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, “I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it” –

SCHIEFFER: Well –

CLARK: — “publicly?” He hasn’t made those calls, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: Well — well, General, maybe he –

CLARK: So –

SCHIEFFER: Could I just interrupt you? If –

CLARK: Sure.

SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean –

CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

[Media Matters transcript, with the BOLD showing the part that CNN left out]

I completely agree with Media Matters that this edit changes the context considerably, but what I have some trouble with is the notion that CNN “deceptively cropped” the video.

From what I’ve seen of newsrooms, it is far more likely that the editors and reporters didn’t even understand the importance of the context and that their sole purpose for the edit was to keep the clip short and dramatic. I’m willing to bet this had more to do with sloppiness and ignorance than it did with deception… little comfort, I know, but I think it’s important to understand the true causes of these serious issues.

A comment by one of presidential candidate John McCain’s advisors, quoted in a Fortune magazine article, has created quite a stir and raises an interesting issue about the transparency of media interviews.

Here’s part of the LA Times story on the comments by Charlie Black:

Then, the longtime political pro got a bit too honest. Asked about the political impact of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Black replied: “Certainly it would be a big advantage to him.”

Black may be correct, but he’s not supposed to be quite so blunt in coldly calculating the upside for McCain of harm coming to Americans. Others — unconnected with the campaign — could offer such an assessment, but he should have dodged the question.

He knows it, and The Times’ Maeve Reston reports that outside a McCain fundraiser today in Fresno, Black said: “I deeply regret the comments — they were inappropriate. I recognize that John McCain has devoted his entire adult life to protecting his country and placing its security before every other consideration.”

McCain, for his part, did what he’s supposed to do — stressing his lifelong commitment to protecting America and flat out disputing Black’s premise. “It’s not true,” he said when asked in Fresno about his aide’s remark.

Black’s regret at his comments suggests that this was indeed a major slip of the tongue during an interview - there’s no claim that he was taken out of context or anything like that.

For the record, here’s the quote in the context of the Fortune article:

On national security McCain wins. We saw how that might play out early in the campaign, when one good scare, one timely reminder of the chaos lurking in the world, probably saved McCain in New Hampshire, a state he had to win to save his candidacy - this according to McCain’s chief strategist, Charlie Black. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an “unfortunate event,” says Black. “But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us.” As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. “Certainly it would be a big advantage to him,” says Black.

While it seems that the reporter has been accurate in framing this quote - Black has had ample opportunity to challenge the accuracy - it would be fascinating to read the transcript of that portion of the interview.

It’s a good example of how we trust journalists (mainstream or otherwise) to boil down all of their information into a story which still accurately captures meaning. Sadly, that trust is lacking among the general public - journalists are often well down in the poll results of people we trust - and I think one way they can regain that is to use the freedom of the internet to back up their stories with transparency (printing transcripts, for example). Which is not to say that this is an easy thing to do; how would you like people questioning your work based on the misjudgments or outright lies of others in your industry?

As for Black, I like the LA Times comment: “he should have dodged the question.”

Freelance writer Hrag Vartanian blogs about being misquoted:

I was interviewed by Steve Malanga for a recent profile of Bushwick, Brooklyn for City Journal and found this paragraph that proved to me (yet again) that you should always be cautious about giving interviews, even to nice guys–which Steve obviously is:

Some early arrivals claim that landlords hoodwinked them into thinking that they were moving to an already gentrifying Williamsburg. “I was looking for a place I could afford to live in on my own,” remembers freelance writer Hrag Vartanian, “and the price was right here, though the place still had an edge to it. Our super was an ex-con who would regale us with stories of the local drug trade that used to be here. I quickly figured out this wasn’t really Williamsburg.”

There are a couple of factual errors in this short paragraph (go figure), so I wrote the author to let him know and he did respond rather nicely but I wanted to set the record straight.

1. I never thought I was moving to Williamsburg but East Williamsburg, very different places.
2. Also, I liked Bushwick for its edge, not in spite of it.

Doesn’t take much to dramatically change the story. Getting the area name wrong is just sloppiness, but misconstruing Vartanian’s attitude is a trickier issue. At least what’s quoted here might possibly be mistaken for being in the “hoodwinked and disappointed camp,” but presumably there was more dialogue with Vartanian which revealed his intent.

However, simple interviewing techniques, like asking questions which repeat what you THINK is the subject’s meaning or just asking to clarify the meaning, can prevent such misinterpretations.

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 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.

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

Ben Silverman, a former journalist who writes a column for PR Fuel, tells this story of a reporter getting things wrong - then offers ten tips to try and minimize such problems:

I was two beers into my weekend last Friday when a reporter from the West Coast called to confirm something with me. I had spoken to her a few days earlier for about twenty minutes, talking about a subject I knew pretty darn well.

“OK, so, I just want to make sure I got this right. You worked with John Doe [not his real name] and did business with him?” the reporter asked.

“No,” I said, “we were in the same business at the same time and crossed paths every so often. I had no relationship with him though and he probably has no recollection of me.”

“Great, gotcha,” the reporter said.

Gotcha indeed, because when the story was published, it sounded as if I was the guy’s best friend.

The error I committed occurred during our original phone call. I spoke too fast, went off on tangents, and I did not qualify some of my remarks. In the end, the reporter burned me, but I lit the fuse.

Silverman’s ten tips on what interviewees can do to try and prevent errors in stories make a very useful read - here’s one you don’t hear that often:

7. Confirm What the Reporter Is Saying

My biggest fear is that a reporter will give me bad information. It has happened before - resulting in me looking like a dunce. If a reporter calls you and runs some information by you, make sure that you can confirm it. Obviously some stories will be about speculation. If that’s the case, there’s nothing wrong with offering an opinion. However, if a reporter calls and says, “The President called you a skunk,” make sure that he really did.

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…

Angelina Jolie is being called a hypocrite by some media (for instance, here, here, and here) after she imposed strict limits on interviews during the June 13th premiere of A Mighty Heart, in which she plays the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Roger Friedman of Fox News blasted Jolie for what he called her attempt to “censor all her interviews” by forcing journalists to sign a contract, saying it was ironic that the movie’s premiere was in aid of Reporters Without Borders - a group which tries to protect the freedom of the press:

Reporters from most major media outlets balked Wednesday when they were presented with an agreement drawn up by Jolie’s Hollywood lawyer Robert Offer. The contract closely dictated the terms of all interviews.

Reporters were asked to agree to “not ask Ms. Jolie any questions regarding her personal relationships. In the event Interviewer does ask Ms. Jolie any questions regarding her personal relationships, Ms. Jolie will have the right to immediately terminate the interview and leave.”

The agreement also required that “the interview may only be used to promote the Picture. In no event may Interviewer or Media Outlet be entitled to run all or any portion of the interview in connection with any other story. … The interview will not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning, or derogatory to Ms. Jolie.”

If that wasn’t enough, Jolie also requires that if any of these things happen, “the tape of the interview will not be released to Interviewer.” Such a violation, the signatory thus agrees, would “cause Jolie irreparable harm” and make it possible for her to sue the interviewer and seek a restraining order.

I am told that USA Today and the Associated Press were among those that canceled interviews, and eventually Jolie scotched all print interviews when she heard the reaction.

“I wouldn’t sign it,” a reporter for a major outlet said. “Who does she think she is?”

A call to Offer was apparently one that could be refused. He didn’t return calls. An associate, Lindsay Strasberg, said, before hanging up: “You’re a reporter? I can’t talk to reporters. Goodbye.”

So much for reporters without borders.

I think it’s wrong to equate someone’s attempt to control the content of an interview through contractual means with the use of governmental power to suppress information, but that aside, this case raises important issues about the relationship of interviewer and interviewee.

Journalists sometimes are asked not to ask things and interviewees sometimes walk out of interviews when questioned about things they don’t like - there’s nothing new here, but the signing of a contract (I would love to see a copy of that!) starts to move things from the hands of media trainers and publicists into the realm of lawyers. Are people in the public eye becoming so afraid of what will happen to their words after an interview that they’re trying to legally lock down the interview content as much as possible beforehand?

It’s easy to say the interviewee should just give a ‘no comment’ to questions they don’t like, but from their standpoint, wouldn’t it be nice to make it clear beforehand what questions you won’t answer so that you don’t have to go through the same ‘no comment’ for fifty different reporters? Even so, do you need a contract with threats of penalties to make such things clear?

Interestingly, Jolie later said on The Daily Show that the contract was “excessive” and she would not have authorized it had she seen it beforehand - it was her people trying to protect her:

Based on this Washington Times article about the testimony of James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you’d think Hansen should be the Guiness Book of Records’s “most interviewed person”:

A NASA scientist who said the Bush administration muzzled him because of his belief in global warming yesterday acknowledged to Congress that he’d done more than 1,400 on-the-job interviews [emphasis mine] in recent years.

In fact, it was hard to miss people talking about such a stunning number of media interviews, because the article was quoted over and over by bloggers, until it was simply being repeated as fact without any citation at all, as in this example from The Oxford Medievalist:

Hansen acknowledged yesterday to Congress that he’d done more than 1,400 job-related interviews in recent years.

Trouble is, if you read further down the Washington Times article, you’ll discover the actual source of the writer’s statement:

“We have over 1,400 opportunities that you’ve [Hansen] availed yourself to, and yet you call it, you know, being stifled,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican.

Granted, “opportunities” is a bit vague, but unless you can clarify what Issa was saying, you shouldn’t assume the “opportunities” were interviews.

Trouble is, this AP story did manage to clarify what Issa meant by “opportunities”:

[Issa] said a Google search had shown Hansen cited on more than 1,400 occasions over a year in interviews and appearances.

Ohhhh, citations stemming from interviews and public appearances, not individual interviews. How hard was that to get right?