The Media Interview

Great bit on interviewers interrupting guests. Don Newman is a well-known Canadian political interviewer and recently on the comedy show The Rick Mercer Report, they did a parody commercial selling a DVD boxed set of Don Newman’s greatest political shutdowns.

Billing itself as “the largest archive of J.K. Rowling interviews on the web” (and when you see it you’ll have no doubt it is), the website Accio Quote! asks fans of the writer to be “canon nifflers” and help find obscure interviews to round out the collection. Any interview nifflers out there? (I am informed [...]

In the final hours of the 2008 presidential election, third-party candidate Ralph Nader held a press conference at which he would only reply to questions with single-word answers. MSNBC.com’s Bob Sullivan reported the encounter at Washington’s National Press Club this way: The stilted question-and-answer session felt at times like a bad game of “Jeopardy.” Reporters [...]

If you like the semi-improv comedy stylings of The Office (British or American versions) or Christopher Guest and company (Waiting for Guffman, etc.), you’ll love this parody interview with an actual Portland, Oregon commissioner by the name of Randy Leonard. How he manages to not to crack a smile during his feigned homophobia toward a [...]

From an interview with author Mike Cox – on the Writers in the Sky blog – who has written extensively about the Texas Rangers law enforcement organization: In a way, I’ve been working toward The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 all my life. I grew up hearing stories about some of the old-time [...]

Sage words from the PR Lawyer Blog: So, I’m sitting here five hours later wondering to myself, “What did I say on that interview earlier today.” My media relations advice is: don’t ever talk to anyone after having Novocaine. Go home. Shut your door. And go to bed!

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 [...]

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 [...]

A TV interview with New Zealand celebrity Nicky Watson late last year became an instant classic after this part of the encounter was repeated over and over in the MSM and the blogosphere: Watson: “I must have called [her lost] dog’s name a million times and I hope that when he hears my voice he [...]

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 [...]