The Media Interview

The worlds of US politics and journalism are still reeling from the sudden death on Friday of Meet the Press host Tim Russert. The 58 year old Washington bureau chief for NBC news had just finished taping The Tim Russert Show for CNBC and was working on voice-overs for Sunday’s Meet the Press when he collapsed and died of a heart attack.

Russert took over the helm of Meet the Press in 1991 and was the longest-serving host of the 60 year old institution. Many people have quoted Russert as saying it wasn’t his show - he was only a custodian of it - but Lawrence K Grossman, the president of NBC news 1984-1988, gave this assessment to the NY Times:

[Tim Russert] saved ‘Meet the Press,’ which had been in big trouble because it was not being watched, it was a half hour, it wasn’t different from the other programs. It had launched the whole Sunday morning information programming but had been very disappointing and nothing seemed to fix it properly until he came along.

I’ve gathered some quotes about Russert’s interview style from the many TV tributes over the weekend.

Betsy Fischer, Executive Producer for Meet the Press, commenting on how Russert’s legal background helped him:

…the way he would structure the questions was very lawyerly. He always knew how a candidate was going to respond - he was prepared enough to know that - and he would sketch it out in his mind: I’m going to ask A, that’ll get us to B, that’ll get us around to C, and then… there’s D. And he knew how to get you into that cycle and he was very skilled at that.

Political strategist James Carville, who prepared many politicians to be on Meet the Press:

… it was a very easy show to prepare for, in the sense you knew he was not going to ask you any questions out of left field, you knew his thing was going to be entitlements, you knew his thing was going to be past statements, you knew… you knew where he was coming from. So, in one sense it was a very hard show, but you could prepare for it, because it was very fair, always very fair.

As one of the other commentators put it, it was your own fault if you messed up on Meet the Press because you didn’t do your homework the way Russert did.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, appearing on Larry King Live, was someone who experienced firsthand Russert’s penchant for finding old quotes and playing them back for guests:

It was such an honor to be on his show and yet it was terrifying, I’ve got to tell you. …we would all get ourselves ready and prepared to be on the show and I ah, heard some of your other guests talking about these quotes that he would put up. I remember the first time it happened to me, I came back to my office and I said ‘You guys are not going to believe this - Tim had me debating with myself.’ [Laughter] You know, how could I have said that? And so, it was really an amazing method of extracting information, but the part about it too, Larry, was that he always let you answer and really be able to explain yourself, even if it sometimes it was difficult.

I haven’t been able to find the quote, but someone else mentioned that Russert was very good at really listening to what a guest had to say - he didn’t just throw out these quotes and then move on, he listened to the response and followed up with relevant questions.

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.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter/anchor Wendy Mesley comparing the styles of some current anchors with legendary CBC Radio interviewer Barbara Frum:

A lot of anchors these days - male and female - think their presentation of the question is more important than the answer. Barbara was really only interested in the answer. She was sort of the queen of the four-second question - ‘No way! Why?’ and ‘Really? Tell me more!’ - rather than pontificating, taking all the air out of an interview.

From a profile of Mesley - She Asks The Tough Questions - in Good Times magazine, April 2008

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 make you feel?

Husband: Like we don’t have a house.

Interviewer: So without a siren, how did you know a tornado was even coming?

Wife: I looked out the window.

Read the full post at Attraversiamo.

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 at work, not helped much by the reporters asking questions that lend themselves to one-word answers:

A deserved win Avram?

Yes

What particularly pleased you about the performance?

I’m pleased.

What in particular pleased you?

After an eight second delay: I don’t know.

Is it a relief to win here?

Yes.

You seem lost for words by the performance. Are you more satisfied with the performance or the victory?

Both.

You seem distracted. Do you have a problem?

No problem.

Is there an issue?

No. I’m ok. I have nothing to say.

Sometime later, the reporters walk right into one of the best cagey responses I’ve seen:

Is it [the one-word answers] a protest against newspapers?

No. Why?

Why else would you come in and refuse to answer our questions?

I answer every question.

For background and some commentary on the press conference, read this Independent article, which also includes a mini-history of recent bizarre press conferences in English football.

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.

What’s puzzling in all of this is that Steffans claims that she was a different person nine years ago, the time covered by her books. If she’s past all that and admits that much about her lifestyle was negative, why promote it all through the books, and why be surprised when everyone wants to focus on the gory details instead of her “new self”?

Listen to these two interviews in which Steffans tries to live down her Supahead image:

Interview on WJLB Detroit

The Ricky Smiley Morning Show - more from Ricky Smiley here.

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 an interview like that, we’ve decided to actually show it to you. It certainly made us laugh. We hope you’ll enjoy it too.

And to repeat, we love this band. We are going to be the first people to buy their new album “Hvarf / Heima” when it comes out this November. And the concert documentary is beautiful — please go see it if it comes to your town.

Just never invite them on your radio show.

It certainly was awkward - the total number of words spoken wasn’t much more than the 4 musicians in the studio. Watch the video of the interview and see what you think.

While many commenters agreed with the show hosts about the band’s poor performance, others picked up on the fact that the interviewer - Luke Burbank - wasn’t much better:

ease up on the band. the interviewer was terrible. there is no continuity in the questions, and there is little attempt at being personable to the band which creates an awkward atmosphere. how else could you respond?

Sent by ros | 3:16 AM ET | 10-11-2007

Yes, terrible. But I think the main problem was the interviewer who asked questions leading nowhere…

“How dou you create music, do you just sit down and play?” - “……..u, yes”.

“What is Hopelandic, does it mean anything, is it Icelandic?” - “…….u, no, it’s just gibberish”.

And up to three questions at a time:
“Do you do this, or that and then just that?” - “……uuu, B”.

You can’t really look good in an interview like this unless you’re an interview- and conversational whizard

Sent by Hildur | 5:32 AM ET | 10-11-2007

But I’ll leave the last word to this commenter:

hahaha.. have you guys never seen a interview with Sigur R??s before???

This is normal.. this is how they are.. and thats why we love them….

Sent by Vuni | 5:38 AM ET | 10-11-2007

I was reading Where Do You Stand’s piece on Dick Cheney’s wife promoting her new book on The Daily Show. Justin calls Lynne Cheney’s chat with Jon Stewart “one of the most awkward interviews I’ve ever witnessed”. Even Comedy Central promotes the clip as “an extremely uncomfortable interview.”

Now it’s Daily Show guests who often appear a bit awkward, but this time it was Stewart himself who didn’t quite know where to go with things. Part of it I’m sure was that he was trying to restrain himself from asking some truly embarrassing questions. There were enough slightly embarrassing questions, and Lynne Cheney was well prepared for stepping into the lion’s den - unlike Paris Hilton on David Letterman. Cheney threw in some of her own jokes without waiting for Stewart to make them, and she steered things away from potentially sticky points.

This is part two of the interview (part one is here), with some of the more awkward moments - see what you think.

Love this observation from the Capital Cloak blog:

Professional athletes and government intelligence officials have at least one shared characteristic: Both give a lot of media interviews, but despite an abundance of words spoken neither offers anything beyond tired clichés. I often wonder why journalists bother conducting such interviews. Rarely will a professional athlete state anything more substantive than “we just take each game one at a time,” or “we just need to play hard.” Likewise, intelligence officials, by necessity, rarely provide any statements more enlightening than “al-Qaeda wants to kill Americans,” or “It’s not IF we will be hit again, it is WHEN.” Both of those canned intelligence answers are of course true, but journalists hardly needed to interview an intelligence expert to confirm their veracity.

The posting goes on to give some great examples from an interview with National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) chief, Retired Vice Admiral John Scott Redd.

Randy Tinseth, vice president marketing for Boeing Commercial, blogging from the Paris Air Show, came up with a fiendishly-clever plan for scheduling media interviews:

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t describe the uniquely-air show phenomenon of trying to conduct a media interview in the afternoon while competing with the roar of jet fighters screaming overhead. The actual “air show” portion of the air show can be so loud it shakes the chalet and makes conversation nearly impossible. I have an idea, though. Next time, we’ll have to remember to schedule interviews with our not-so-favorite media during the afternoon show times! [my emphasis]