The Media Interview

There’s no way that I can sit here and be a normal human being, because being interviewed is one of the most abnormal things that you can do to somebody else. It’s two steps removed from the Inquisition. – Frank Zappa in a 1983 TV interview with Britain’s Channel 4, posted on YouTube

Sometimes a surprise media interview isn’t a welcome thing: In a small, windowless conference room in downtown Mountain View later the same day, [Roger] Lee [of venture capital firm Battery Ventures] does his best to introduce a six-month-old startup to a Mercury News reporter. But the company’s 25-year-old founder, whose mirrored sunglasses sit perched atop [...]

In this clip from a 1983 TV interview, musician Frank Zappa places media interviews just slightly above the Inquisition, but also makes an interesting point that he “accommodates” each interviewer by being the Frank Zappa that suits the interviewer’s level of questioning. Thanks to Todd And for finding this clip and posting it on his [...]

Here’s a cautionary tale about being misrepresented through the editing of an interview. It concerns a Columbia University professor of the philosophy of physics, David Albert, who agreed to be interviewed for the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? This pseudo-documentary, released in 2004, claims that quantum mechanics proves, among other things, that reality [...]

Washington DC media trainer Lou Hampton recently posted some good tips about preparing for media interviews with investigative reporters in particular: You should assume the reporter has details of your private life as well as your private business dealings. He goes on to talk about the ease with which those details are accessible these days, [...]

Everyone is talking about the judge who wouldn’t stop talking – the unusual, eccentric, unorthodox style of Judge Larry Seidlin during the televised hearings into the custody of Anna Nicole Smith’s body. At one point, Judge Seidlin paused to assess his performance: Ohhhh, I did a lot of talking. You know, the more you talk [...]

A young Chinese woman who’s in the United States on a cultural exchange and performing with the group “Up with People”, received some media coaching the other day and it’s interesting to see the one point she felt worth writing in her online diary: …today we learned a lot about how to be interviewed by [...]

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 [...]

in my personal experience, the few really good interviewers have either breadth of knowledge or depth of insight – Leonard Bernstein quoted on journalist Martin Perlich’s website as part of a review of his book The Art of the Interview.

Came across a new reality TV show in which 12 felons will be put on an island with some bounty hunters. The winning felon gets a $50,000 educational scholarship for their child and $1 million dollars that goes toward their last victim. It’s called Danger Island and here are some of the requirements for felons [...]