The Media Interview

The Today Show’s Matt Lauer, talking with Larry King about the most fascinating person he’s ever interviewed:
LAUER: You know I’m one of these people who tends to think that the ordinary people are more fascinating than the celebrities and even the politicians. Celebrities and politicians are practiced, you know. I mean they’ve been asked these [...]

It’s easy for journalists to get caught up in the quest for more information and to lose sight of what people might be going through during a crisis. But a Virginia Tech student made it clear where his priorities lay, as he spoke with Larry King last night about the campus shootings:
VOLTMER: Yes, we [...]

I was just about to write a piece about some horrific interview techniques I saw on Fox News’s new early morning show Red Eye, when I find out the Chicago Tribune is suing Fox for an alleged trademark violation of the name Red Eye. So now there are at least two good reasons for [...]

Heard this on CBC Radio’s The Current, yesterday, and it’s a good example of why people can be suspicious of being interviewed by the media. Peggy Thomas was on a committee of the Ontario Library Association which approved a book that several school boards later banned:
I got a phone call from a reporter… and [...]

Check out this detailed account on the Huffington Post of how the message of a media interview can get misrepresented in the editing process and perhaps more importantly how the misrepresentation certainly seems deliberate.
According to business psychologist and author Debra Condren, she was approached by a producer from ABC’s Nightline, who was looking for [...]

A far worse sin than not having read a guest’s book, is to try and dip into it quickly and pretend you’ve read it, as this anecdote from Gail Williams illustrates, during an email forum featuring radio host Angie Coiro on The Well, July 2006:
I [once] asked a question of an author… based on randomly [...]

Love this story about Ernest Hemingway being interviewed by George Plimpton, as told by Philip Gourevitch, the current editor of the Paris Review, who was interviewed on Powells.com by Dave Weich.
Gourevitch: A few days ago I was in L.A., and I was talking about the book [The Paris Review Interviews, Vol I] with Stephen Gaghan, [...]

On January 5, a dinner was held in honour of Max Mayfield who retired as director of the National Hurricane Center. The Palm Beach Post reports that in his thank you speech, Mayfield
recounted his worst-ever media interview, in which a fill-in CNN anchor noted the radar loop behind him and asked, “Is that a [...]

You often hear Zen Buddhists say that the answer is in the question. And sometimes you’ll hear interviewers taking this quite literally, as in this example from Australian breakfast show host Alan Jones during a 2004 interview with treasurer Peter Costello:
Treasurer do you ever shake your head during campaigns like this and wonder what [...]

Came across this great anecdote in an article on interview techniques by Deborah Potter, Executive Director of NewsLab. It’s a perfect example of how narrow, closed questions can keep you from getting the information you need.
Robert Siegel, who works for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., tells the story of an interview he did [...]