The Media Interview

As I started to watch yesterday’s much talked about interview with Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters on CBC Radio out of Toronto, I thought we were in for another Sigur Ros or Joaquin Phoenix stunt, when the interviewee simply clams up. Then, as host Jian Ghomeshi asked about Billy Bob’s musical influences growing up, [...]

If you have to cough or sneeze in the middle of an answer, or a loud truck rolls by in mid-sentence, it’s important that you be able to start again so that they have a complete sentence to edit. You also need to make it sound like you’re doing it for the first time. Pittsburgh [...]

PR blogger Gerry McCusker makes the point on PR Disasters that companies (or anyone) should treat interview requests from bloggers like they would a request from mainstream journalists – what is the blogger’s point view, what is their purpose, will the interview be posted, how will it be posted? The example he gives of a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

During a meeting with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader’s editorial board on May 23, 2008, which was streamed live over the internet, Hillary Clinton mentioned the assassination of Robert Kennedy in a passing comment about nomination campaigns historically lasting into June. That mention became the centre of a firestorm. Here’s the headline from the newspaper that [...]

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 [...]

That is, if there’s a recorder on. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper learned this the hard way recently, when a 2005 encounter with a journalist came back to haunt him. Tom Zytaruk was working on a biography about MP Chuck Cadman who had recently passed away, when he heard that Harper – at that time, [...]

Larry King gave a good demonstration last night of what not to do as a guest. He was on Anderson Cooper 360, being interviewed by John King about Dr. Jan Adams walking off the Larry King Live show. Larry King was constantly looking away from his interviewer and at the camera. Breaking eye contact in [...]

Detroit Lions wide receiver Roy Williams was out delivering pizzas for an afternoon recently – all because of a media interview. Back on September 24th, during his weekly chat on WDFN radio, Williams said he never tips the people who deliver pizza. Doh! Despite trying to clarify himself on a later broadcast, the outrage poured [...]