Without the Drudge Report, the online news aggregation site, it’s possible that no one ever would have heard the name Monica Lewinsky. Arguably the most consequential story of the 1990s might never have been told.It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
Many years ago, I escorted a client, let’s call her Ms. Goble, to a local television station. The station asked her to come in for an interview on a controversial education issue, and we expected she would face some fairly difficult, hostile questions. I had prepared her well in terms of what she needed to convey both verbally and nonverbally. She had lots of stories about the kids her organization had helped. Her messages were well tested and finely honed.
What I hadn’t prepared her for quite so well was the chaos she encountered or the mechanics of the interview itself. Television studios are crazy places. People are running everywhere. Phones are ringing. Bright, hot lights go on and off. In this particular case, the station set up Ms. Goble for a live-remote (the kind of interview we discussed briefly in Chapter 6). Even though she was in the studio, she wasn’t going to speak to the reporter face-to-face. She would be talking into a camera while listening to the reporter’s questions through what’s called an IFB (for “interruptible feedback”) stuck in her ear. They set her up in the newsroom, so people were working behind her and in front of her. Ms. Goble was a fairly seasoned media performer, but she had never faced this particular setup, and it rattled her a little.
In the end, she did just fine. She knocked every question out of the park and sent all the right nonverbal signals. We were both very pleased with her performance. But as we left the station, I promised myself that I would never fail a client that way again. In this chapter, we’re going to conduct some basic media training. Breaking through and winning people over in tough situations is hard enough. When you’re also facing a camera or a recorder or even a print reporter with a pencil and steno book, the strategies, skills, and techniques you need to use with people when they’re angry, worried, and suspicious of everything you say become even more important.
I opened this book with an account of how the media handled presidential affairs that occurred 35 years apart. In the early 1960s, they didn’t cover President Kennedy’s indiscretions at all. In the late 1990s, they couldn’t stop covering President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
That’s just one facet of a media revolution that began in the late 1960s, one that has accelerated significantly in the twenty-first century. It’s a completely different business today, and anyone who conducts interviews—whether in normal or tough situations—has had to adjust to an environment that’s faster, rougher, and more intense than ever. Volumes have been written about this ongoing revolution, but let me highlight some of the changes that have most significantly affected how my firm and our clients interact with the media from a practical standpoint.
In 1980, CNN introduced the 24-hour news cycle. Before CNN, people generally had to wait until the evening news to hear about stories that had happened during the day, and they had to wait for the morning news shows and newspapers to learn about news that broke overnight. (If it was a really significant story, however, the broadcast networks would interrupt their regular programming with special reports.) CNN made the news available around the clock for the first time, as long as you had access to a television and cable services.
In the twenty-first century, the Internet, smartphones, tablet computers, Twitter, and other technologies and platforms have made news ubiquitous and instantaneous. For our clients, the consequence is that anything that happens anywhere can draw them into a media interview with very little notice. As I’m writing this chapter, Hurricane Isaac just struck the Gulf Coast. Within hours, authorities warned that a dam in Mississippi was in danger of giving way, and the state ordered 50,000 people to evacuate. My firm had a brand-new client at the time, and they started receiving calls from the media within minutes of the announcement. But we hadn’t been working with them long enough to prepare them properly to do interviews, and while they talked to a couple of reporters, we weren’t able to take full advantage of a big opportunity for them to tell their story and convey their messages. Round-the-clock and omnipresent media place a huge premium on planning and preparation. The days when people and companies had hours to react to a breaking story are long gone. Now it’s more like minutes.
Gannett changed the way newspapers report the news when it launched USA Today in 1982. The paper presented information in easily digestible bites with shorter stories, bullet points, graphics, and color. Television news has followed suit. Broadcast stories feature lots of graphics that change constantly, which drives me crazy but appeals to the MTV and future generation.
Because of USA Today, the stories our clients tell and the messages they deliver in print have to be shorter and simpler, too. Remember what we discussed in Chapter 2: shoot for words and concepts that an eighth-or ninth-grader can understand. Indeed, USA Today influenced this book and how it presents information about winning people over. Since my goal for the book was to make it a simple, practical, and easily digestible resource, I’ve included plenty of bulleted lists, figures, and tables. I would have published it in color, but my publisher said no.
USA Today also contributed to another trend involving the use of ordinary people, rather than experts and officials, in stories. This is another consequence of the broader decline in how much we trust and believe people in positions of authority. Studies have shown we trust “people like us” more than any other source, so that’s what the media give us.
In our media training, we often show two video clips. The first is an ABC News story from 1970, when President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, a landmark piece of environmental legislation. The entire story takes place in the White House. President Nixon is the only one given a sound bite, and it lasts for more than 30 seconds. Twenty years later, President George H. W. Bush signed into law a series of important amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act. The second clip shows an NBC report on the legislation. President Bush is nowhere to be seen. The entire piece is about how the law will affect real people out in the real world. Only two people have sound bites, both “average Americans” who like the new law because it will help people who suffer from asthma and cut back on the number of fish killed as a result of acid rain. Their sound bites last about five seconds each. That’s not much time to tell a story or even to convey a message—not to mention to win people over—especially when you’re competing against Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan. It’s just another reason, by the way, for why compelling stories are important. That’s what today’s media are looking for.
In 1985, a company called Capital Cities Communications purchased ABC, and General Electric bought NBC. For the first time, formerly independent news operations became divisions within larger corporations. Those corporations focused more intently on the bottom line and demanded ever-greater profits. That’s when information and entertainment began to fuse into “infotainment.” During another round of consolidation in the mid-1990s, the Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities/ABC, and Westinghouse bought CBS (and then morphed into a big entertainment company called Viacom). Today, or at least as I’m writing this, three of the four major U.S. networks are owned by larger entertainment companies: Disney (ABC), NBCUniversal (NBC), and Fox (News Corporation). The fourth, CBS, became an independent news organization in 2011.
Combined with the advent of cable and other competing outlets, these consolidations drove the competition for ratings to new heights. Fareed Zakaria, a journalist who works for Time magazine and CNN, once described the news business in the new millennium this way: “I don’t believe that television networks necessarily have a liberal bias or a conservative bias. What they all have is an ‘eyeball’ bias. They’ll do whatever they need to do to make sure you don’t change the channel.”
This competition places a lot of value on personality. It also means that to tell our stories and convey our messages, we have to compete for media attention against everything from war and the economy to Tom Cruise and Dancing with the Stars—subjects that on the surface may seem to be much more compelling for viewers and readers, and therefore more attractive to the media.
In 1987, CNN launched Newsource, a satellite-based communications service that allows television stations to upload and download video from and to virtually anywhere in the world. When news happens anywhere, the television stations in your hometown can air video almost immediately. After creating the 24-hour news cycle, CNN stretched it globally.
For our clients with global interests, or interests here at home that may be affected by what happens in other countries, that means being ready to address problems that may occur anywhere on the planet. The competition to get the story first is red-hot, and reporters need expert, compelling—not to mention trustworthy and credible—sources almost immediately when news breaks. If you hope to be part of a story, or if you need to respond to a crisis, time is of the essence. Again, that requires planning and preparation. Rather than hours or even days, you may have only minutes to engage.
Finally, in the single most disruptive change to the media landscape during the past 50 years, the general public gained access to the Internet in 1991. The World Wide Web has remade completely the way news is gathered, reported, and consumed. According to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, more than half of all Americans now get at least some of their news online.
While this topic warrants an entirely separate book, let me make a few points that will help to put the Internet’s impact on the media in perspective:
Without the Drudge Report, the online news aggregation site, it’s possible that no one ever would have heard the name Monica Lewinsky. Arguably the most consequential story of the 1990s might never have been told.
You may remember that in 2002, Mississippi’s Republican senator Trent Lott made some insensitive racial remarks at a 100th birthday party for his South Carolina colleague and fellow Republican, Strom Thurmond. The remarks generated one small traditional story by ABC News reporter Ed O’Keefe in early December, and then nothing. But several prominent bloggers kept the story alive online, and they pounded away relentlessly at the traditional media for not making a bigger deal out of what they considered to be a major story. The embers they nurtured eventually engulfed Lott in a major media firestorm, and on December 20, just a little more than two weeks after he made the remarks, Lott resigned as Senate Majority Leader. This represented the first time that the blogosphere, or non-traditional media, drove coverage of such an important story. It has happened many times since (see Figure 8.1 for another example).
Newspapers are migrating online. I still read the newspaper that arrives on my doorstep each morning, in part because my father was in the newspaper business his whole career, and I’m not a big fan of change. But I’m one of a dwindling number of print subscribers. By the time I pull the bag off the paper and snap open the front page, the news it contains is at least 12 hours old. If I want the latest information, I go online. Not long ago, we counseled clients that one advantage to print interviews was longer lead time and more room to tell their stories. That’s not so much the case anymore, as print reporters vie with their broadcast competitors to be first. Lesley Stahl, the veteran CBS correspondent, has bemoaned this trend, arguing that the pressure to say something—anything!—is so great that reporters increasingly share information that they haven’t fully vetted. When Stahl appeared on a History Channel documentary on journalism that aired in 2000, she said:
“This 24-hour business puts so much pressure on journalists . . . it’s frightening, because when you’re out there as a reporter and [producers] are pressuring you to just fill three minutes or five minutes, you’ll start putting on rumors. You’re desperate.”
It’s often little more than rumor and innuendo. That cuts both ways for our clients. Online outlets provide more opportunities to tell stories and convey messages, but they contribute to the trend toward ever-narrowing bands of audiences. They also get things wrong more often, because they usually operate without the editors and fact-checkers that traditional news outlets employ. And if you don’t have an immediate comment, they’ll go with the story anyway, using someone else’s stories and messages.
Armed with smartphones, we’re all journalists now. Almost everything of significance, and plenty of stuff that isn’t, is recorded by someone. As I write this chapter, England’s Prince Harry is the subject of a media firestorm involving what the press is calling “naked cavorting” in a Las Vegas hotel room. Ten years ago, it’s unlikely that anyone would ever have known, because no one at the party would have had a way to document and prove that it happened.
FIGURE 8.1 Tsunami by Way of Cell Phone
The story of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami unfolded not through traditional coverage by mainstream news outlets but in messages from the people directly affected by the disaster. Using their cell phones, they sent texts, e-mails, photos, and video clips to the outside world from remote locations that traditional journalists couldn’t reach. As massive cost cutting, driven by competition, has led to fewer reporters and bureaus, the advent of handheld communications technology has led the mainstream media to rely increasingly on “citizen journalists” to supplement—and, in some cases, drive—their news coverage.
©iStockphoto.com/Mari
I could go on and on, but hopefully this gives you a sense of the atmosphere in which sources operate. It’s impossible to predict where the revolution will take us next. One strong candidate is increasing diffusion through social media. The Pew survey found that while many journalists have taken to social-media platforms to gather and report news, only 9 percent of Americans use them to find and absorb it. Other studies suggest that while this number may be low, it’s growing quickly.
Twitter especially has had a big effect on how reporters do their jobs. Even elite journalists are now more focused on getting the word out fast, in 140-character packages, than on any real analysis or in-depth reporting. All the credit goes to whoever tweets first, whether it’s news of Osama bin Laden’s death, Mitt Romney’s vice presidential nominee, or Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest. It creates even more pressure for speed over thoughtfulness or thoroughness. You may have a shot at influencing a story right now, but the chance may be gone forever in only a few hours. And you’d better boil your comment down to something very short and fast—as well as entertaining and compelling.
If you’re like me, you find all of the change in media coverage fascinating, but adapting to these changes is what’s important when it comes to winning people over. The most important rule to keep in mind when you’re about to engage with the media is that everything we’ve discussed to this point still matters, only more so. Your objective remains the same: to establish and maintain trust and credibility. But reaching your objective can be much harder. Because of the global 24-hour news cycle, you may be thrust into a media interview at a moment’s notice with little or no time to prepare.
Also, if you are interviewed, your audience undoubtedly will be much larger than a high school auditorium full of people. If a story appears in a regional newspaper, tens of thousands will read it. If you appear on 60 Minutes (and please don’t unless you spend a lot of time preparing with a consultant like me), millions will see you. Cameras and microphones make most people nervous, and so you have to monitor your nonverbal messages even more closely. Seasoned journalists ask the most difficult questions, and they are increasingly unwilling to accept talking point answers.
Finally, if the media come calling, you are always “on.” It doesn’t matter where you are or whether you see a reporter or camera. You need to act and speak as if a microphone is capturing your every word and a camera is recording your every move. We used to counsel clients not to say anything they wouldn’t want to read in the newspaper the next morning. Now it might be more appropriate to tell them to avoid saying anything they wouldn’t want someone to tweet in the next five minutes.
Not all media interviews are hostile, of course, but you should bring all of your strategies, skills, and techniques to bear every time. They’ll improve your performance, even if the interview is perfectly pleasant and normal. Plus, you never know when an interview will become hostile.
So you don’t get rattled like Ms. Goble, keep these additional tips in mind as well.
Work with your organization’s communications specialists. If you receive a call or an interview request from a reporter, get in touch with your company’s public relations or communications department. Chances are your company’s policy requires it anyway, and professionals can be very helpful. They probably know the reporter, or at least her reputation, and can help figure out what she’s trying to learn and any angle she may have. They can also help to prepare you for an interview, because they’ll remind you of the key messages that your organization will want you to convey, have a good idea of the kinds of questions you can expect, fill you in on any experience with the reporter, and hone the stories you want to tell.
If you don’t work for a large company with a media relations professional, it would be worth the time and money to find a consultant who knows your issues. Engage the consultant for at least a couple of hours, to refresh you on technique and messages.
Many of my firm’s clients initially assume that reporters control everything about an interview, but that’s not true. You do have some say, beginning with the decision whether or not to be interviewed in the first place. We almost always counsel clients to accept, because any interview, even one that may be difficult and hostile, is an opportunity for them to tell their stories and convey their messages.
You should also ask the reporter (or producer) some questions:
Why does the reporter want to interview you?
How is your interview going to be used? On what platforms?
What is the nature of the story?
Is the reporter interviewing anyone else, and who are those people? (This can help reveal the angle the reporter plans to take.)
Can you see the questions in advance?
Will the reporter let you review the story before it’s published or aired?
Not all reporters will answer these questions, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. The answers you do get will help you decide whether or not to do the interview and—assuming you have time—figure out what you need to do to prepare.
If possible, research the reporter, too. A quick Internet search will reveal any previous coverage of the topic you’re being asked to discuss and any angle or bias the reporter may have. This will also help you determine how much the reporter knows about that topic you’re going to discuss. Chances are she’ll know more than the average person but less than you. This will help you predict what questions she’s going to ask.
Even if you’re an expert on the issue, spend some time researching it online and on Twitter. You’ll want to know about any breaking developments or expert commentary the reporter may know about that you don’t.
Finally, remember that you have a goal in any media interview: to break through and win people over. A good way to prepare is to think about the three things you want the people who read, see, or hear the story to remember. Work those into your stories and messages.
Your audience is not the reporter who’s interviewing you. It’s the readers, viewers, or listeners on the other end of the microphone or notebook. The number of people who saw Ms. Goble’s interview was probably in the tens of thousands, but only a relative handful really mattered to her: the parents of schoolchildren who could benefit from the program she ran, and the policymakers, both federal and local, whose support she needed to keep the program going. She tailored her stories and messages for them.
Consider, too, that each audience has a different level of experience, vocabulary, perceptions, and preconceptions. Ms. Goble knew that the parents in her audience were relatively poor and uneducated but that they were committed to creating a better life for their children. Her stories and messages were simple and spoke to that desire, and they came with a healthy dose of caring and empathy. Also remember the ban on jargon. In an interview, or whatever piece of the interview a reporter decides to use, you’ll have no time to define any jargon you use or a reporter throws at you.
In any situation where you hope to break through and win people over, you need to be concise and repetitive. This advice is even more important in an interview. In most cases, particularly with a broadcast reporter, the whole interview likely will last less than 15 minutes. When the story airs, you’ll be lucky if your sound bite is 15 seconds. The same kind of situation applies to print interviews: you’ll be lucky to get even one quote in the story. Reporters will run through their tape or their notes and most likely use the first compelling quote that fits the story. If that quote doesn’t include one or more of your messages, what was the point of doing the interview in the first place?
Repeating yourself over and over again, with no more than a few different words, will feel a little strange, but remember the preceding tip. The reporter may hear the same thing over and over again, but the people you’re actually trying to reach will only read, hear, or see it once.
In a live interview, you can vary your responses a little, because everything you say will be seen or heard. But make sure each response includes a story or message, because repetition always makes it easier to win people over.
The importance of eye contact with the reporter may be obvious when it comes to television interviews, but for all the reasons we discussed in Chapter 6, it’s important whatever the medium. The only exception is the one Ms. Goble faced when we visited the television studio, what I referred to as a live-remote. When it’s just you and a camera, look straight into the camera. I find that some of my clients actually prefer this setup, because they’re a little uncomfortable maintaining eye contact for so long with an actual person. Others find it a little weird. As with anything, practice and preparation will make your experience much easier and less stressful.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite scenes in the old TV show M*A*S*H. In a room full of reporters, Hawkeye and Trapper agitate a general by asking pointed questions about an incubator shortage. The exasperated general finally yells, “This is a press conference! The last thing I want to do is answer a lot of questions!”
Like any joke, that one has a kernel of truth. It’s one of the messages we drive home to clients we prepare for media interviews. Your job is to win people over by telling compelling stories and delivering powerful messages; the questions a reporter asks you are really just opportunities to do so. Your stories and messages should address the question in some way, but a series of yeses and nos won’t get the job done. The reporter isn’t a teacher testing you; you’re not a student. You’re there to tell the people in your audience what you think they should know about your subject, in your own words, so don’t let the reporter shape the entire conversation. Get your points out early and often, even if that means taking over the conversation with bridges to your messages.
That brings us to my next point . . .
A bridge is a rhetorical tool that uses a question as a springboard, transitioning from the question to your stories and messages. Politicians do this all the time. Watch the next presidential news conference, and count the number of times the president actually answers the questions that reporters ask him. Even when he does, he won’t spend a lot of time on the actual answer. He’ll move quickly to whatever message he wants to convey.
Bridging can be an effective technique in both normal and tough situations, and like all of the skills we’ve covered in this book, it takes practice before you can do it well. It has to be done artfully; if you’re too obvious about it, as many politicians are, you’ll drive down your CODE score. For starters, make sure you know where the bridge is taking you. One of the clips we use in media training shows a Today show interview with a food safety expert from Johns Hopkins University. The program invited him to appear to discuss an outbreak of mad cow disease. Although no one actually contracted the disease, parents all over the country were terrified that their kids might catch it by eating tainted beef at school. The food safety expert intended to calm the parents, but Figure 8.2 tells what happened when he stepped out onto a bridge to nowhere.
FIGURE 8.2 Stay off Bridges to Nowhere
Bridging can be very effective, but make sure you know where the bridge is taking you. On the Today show, a food safety expert from Johns Hopkins University sought to calm parents’ fears about mad cow disease. Anchor Katie Couric asked him whether the beef in school lunches was safe. He responded, “Yes, I do believe that they’re safe. But let’s put this in perspective. There are 5,000 cases of deaths from food-borne disease every year in the United States.” Although “Let’s put this in perspective” was a good bridge, he fell right off by mentioning the number of deaths—something Couric had never asked about. Rather than reassuring people who were angry and worried, he made the situation worse. Later, Couric repeated the same question. He said, “Yes, I think the beef is perfectly safe. I think the beef is safer than chicken . . . and chicken is safer than vegetables.” Once again, he made parents more worried, not less. ©iStockphoto.com/monkeybusinessimages
©iStockphoto.com/monkeybusinessimages
David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who won me over with a poignant story about his daughter’s illness, is a master at the art of bridging. His favorite bridge is one that can work for anyone. When a reporter asks a question he doesn’t want to answer, he often responds by saying, “Here’s the larger point I think people really care about . . .” He acknowledges the question very briefly but then goes on to tell his story or deliver his message. Here are some other statements that can serve as effective bridges:
To the contrary, I believe the most important point is . . .
I think what people really want to know is . . .
Rather than speculate, let’s focus on what we know to be true.
Let me share with you some of the things that I’m hearing from people I talk to.
Good question, but first I’d like to emphasize . . .
Sometimes a bridge is as simple as denying the premise of a question. But you have to employ a bridge correctly. When Massachusetts senator John Kerry ran for president in 2004, the Democratic candidate was critical of President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq even though he had voted to give Bush the authority to go to war in 2003. As a result, Kerry had a lot of trouble answering the following question: “Why did you vote to give President Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq?” Sometimes he said he thought the president should have the authority, but that he shouldn’t have used it. Other times, he said he would have prosecuted the war more effectively. A separate vote to provide funding for the war led to his now infamous quote, “I actually did vote for [it] before I voted against it.” The question tied him up in knots throughout the election. He never found an effective bridge from that difficult question to a satisfactory response, and some analysts blame his loss at least in part on his inability to come up with a satisfactory answer.
Another Democratic senator who eventually ran for president found the right bridge that year. New York senator Hillary Clinton faced the same dilemma as Kerry. Like him, she had voted to give President Bush authority to go to war with Iraq, but over time she came to oppose the war and, presumably, regretted her vote. Long before she declared her own candidacy in 2008, she appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Not surprisingly, the question came up. Here’s how she handled it:
Stephanopoulos: Senator Clinton, if you knew then what you know now about how President Bush has used that authority [to go to war in Iraq], would you vote to give it to him again?
Clinton: George, we wouldn’t have had a vote.
Clinton basically swiped the question aside and then launched into a stinging critique of the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war (a bridge my firm refers to as a “deflection.”) She would do the same throughout the campaign, and while she ultimately lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Barack Obama (who hadn’t been in the Senate when the war authority vote was taken), she never had the same problem with the issue as Kerry had.
One of our clients, the vice president of corporate communications for a global company, did media interviews almost every day. She took the concept of bridging very seriously. We helped her craft about 25 bridging statements that she would place on her desk any time she spoke to a reporter on the phone. As the interview progressed, she would run down the list to make sure she was bridging to good stories and messages. It’s a good technique. In fact, feel free to use notes generally in interviews, as long as you’re not on camera.
Whether it’s a media interview or a difficult discussion with an employee, it’s easy to become fixated on the really tough questions you’re most worried about answering. It’s important to give some thought to the relatively easy questions, too. These softballs, as we call them, represent terrific opportunities to tell your stories and convey your messages. It’s a shame to waste them.
One of the best-known examples of a wasted opportunity came in 1980, when Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Shortly before officially announcing his decision to run, Senator Kennedy scheduled an interview with CBS correspondent Roger Mudd. The senator expected a lot of difficult questions involving the Chappaquiddick incident, in which a young woman in his car drowned when he drove off a bridge; the assassinations of his two older brothers; and rumors about his drinking and womanizing. For those questions, Senator Kennedy was well prepared. But when Mudd simply asked him, “Senator, why do you want to be president?” he stumbled for an answer. After hemming and hawing for what seemed like an eternity, he finally mumbled something uninspiring about having a “great belief in this country” and then listed a whole series of problems the nation faced, without saying anything about what he might do to solve them. From that point on, Senator Kennedy’s poll numbers began to fall, and he eventually dropped out of the race.
Remember Chapter 6’s rules about dress and posture. The same rules apply when it comes to the media, especially in a televised interview, but really in any medium. Don’t wear anything that will distract people from what you’re saying—no gaudy jewelry or short skirts for women, no crazy patterns on ties or shirts for men. Solid colors are best.
One other tip applies to men who appear on television: don’t be afraid to use a little powder or pancake. Television lights can be very hot, which can make you perspire even if you’re not nervous. A little makeup will prevent you from appearing shiny.
Lean forward during the interview to send the signal that you’re eager and engaged, even if you’re sitting on a panel as Dr. Pierce did in Chapter 4.
We all make mistakes once in a while. If you make one in a media interview, feel free to go back and correct it. Reporters don’t want errors in their stories, and unless they’re trying to embarrass you, which usually isn’t the case, even in hostile interviews, they’ll edit or leave out your mistake. This is true even in live television interviews. Better to correct the record when you have the chance.
Also remember the rule about saying, “I don’t know” if you don’t. It’s OK, as long as you don’t do it too often and lose expertise points. Just as you would with any audience, make sure to follow up and provide the reporter with the answer. Finally, avoid using the expression “No comment.” Those words have become a signal to people that you’re covering up something.
We’ve all heard and seen people get caught saying things they never intended anyone to hear, because they didn’t realize the microphone in front of them was live. A former colleague used to tell a great story about a visit that former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry paid to the colleague’s station when he was a television producer. The mayor came in with a couple of aides, and an intern escorted him to the station’s green room, where he waited for the interview to begin. The mayor asked for some water, and when the intern brought it to him, she overheard him saying to one of his aides that he hoped the reporter wouldn’t ask him about a particular issue (which unfortunately is lost to history). The intern gave the mayor his water, left the green room, and ran straight to my former colleague to tell him what she’d heard. Naturally, the reporter asked the mayor a whole series of questions about the issue he had hoped to avoid.
Years later, as Ms. Goble and I drove to that very same station for her interview, I cautioned her, “Assume someone is recording your every word from the moment you get out of my car until the moment you get back in and drive away.” And today, the ubiquitous smartphone means you’re actually still on even when you get in the car and drive away.
The old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is especially true when it comes to the media. Television reporters and producers are always looking for good video; in fact, good video sometimes determines which stories they cover and which ones they don’t. Likewise, print and online reporters want interesting, compelling graphics and photos. If you can enhance the story you’re telling with a good visual or two, take advantage.
My firm once trained a group of NASA scientists and engineers. Several months later, we were very gratified to see one of our trainees interviewed on ABC’s World News about the future of commercial aviation. As she was talking about building planes out of metal that could bend and move to reduce wind resistance and turbulence, she demonstrated the concept by bending a piece of metal and then heating it with a lighter. The metal straightened right back out. The visual enhanced her story tremendously; in fact, it was really cool.
Remember the S = B+ equation: success comes from being positive. Even if you’re heading into a hostile media interview, approach it in a positive, affirmative way. As we discussed in Chapter 2, a defensive posture can be self-fulfilling—and defensiveness will definitely come across during a televised interview.
When we help prepare clients for media interviews, we spend a lot of time in mock scenarios. Clients conduct on-camera interviews and talk to a fake print reporter over the phone. You can do the same. Grab your smartphone and record yourself responding to questions, or, even better, ask a friend or colleague to play reporter for you. Nothing will prepare you better, especially for a television interview, than watching yourself on TV beforehand.
If you practice all these ideas, you’ll be better prepared than Ms. Goble the next time you schedule a media interview. Even so, in any tough situation, including interviews, you may encounter traps that will trip you up and lower your CODE score. In the next chapter, we’ll review the most common traps and how to avoid them—as well as what you can do to escape if you do fall in.