The Media Interview

Jason McIntyre co-creator, writer, and editor, of the blog The Big Lead interviewed on Sports Media Guide:

Q. Do you do your interviews by e-mail or phone?

A. Kornheiser was over the phone – he doesn’t do e-mail. I prefer e-mail. I started doing it by e-mail because I was anonymous at the time and didn’t feel like I could call a major journalist like TJ Simer. Why would he take the time to talk to an anonymous blogger. I started out by e-mailing eight or ten questions.

People are more comfortable with e-mail because they know they won’t be misquoted. They can be far more eloquent explaining themselves in e-mail. Some people aren’t wordy but they might be wordsmiths on e-mail. I much prefer doing e-mail interviews. That was a sticking point with Richard Dietch (SI). He said no.

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.

76 year-old country music star George Jones in an interview with the Wichita Falls Times Record News:

Q: You don’t grant many interviews. Why not?

A: I don’t do as many interviews as I used to because, frankly, what else is there to know about me?

Barbara Walters was on CBC’s The Hour recently to talk about her new book Audition, and host George Stroumboulopoulos asked her:

Stroumboulopoulos: Who would you like to be your last interview?

Walters: (long pause) Osama bin Laden… [banter] …I have said that I don’t want to get any more big “gets,” but if Osama bin Laden called, I’d pack.

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.

Comedy writer Mike Snider has a great list of RADARs that people possess. It’s a take off on the notion of Gay-Dar, the ability immediately to know if someone is gay or straight. The list is hilarious, but this one jumped out to someone obsessed with media interviews:

ReallyFarDar - ability of spokespeople for NASA and JPL giving media interviews to sense which folksy metaphors or slang terms for large astronomical distances will resonate with particular audiences.

The mother of a reality TV show winner in Britain has admitted to wrongly claiming income support and council tax benefits. Former pop star and TV presenter Kerry Katona was a season winner on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! - a kind of Survivor for the famous. According to the Press Association, her mother, 48 year-old Susan Katona

…failed to notify the benefits office of a change of circumstances between July 2006 and March 2007.

It was alleged the overpayment was made because Katona failed to declare her income from media interviews about her daughter…

Don’t know why she didn’t try the obvious defence strategy: the media don’t pay for interviews. Do they?

BTW, does it seem odd that the mother of a celebrity was on income support in the first place?

Barbara Walters on one of the main reasons she stopped doing the TV newsmagazine 20/20 back in 2004:

…it seemed that every celebrity, every murderer…had a lawyer or a press agent all interviewing the interviewer to determine where they could get the most airings for their clients, what kind of questions would be asked, and how much promotion and advertising would be guaranteed. The interviewer had to audition to land the interview.

From her memoir Audition, p.561.

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)?