The Media Interview

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 [...]

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 [...]

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter/anchor Wendy Mesley comparing the styles of some current anchors with legendary CBC Radio interviewer Barbara Frum: A lot of anchors these days – male and female – think their presentation of the question is more important than the answer. Barbara was really only interested in the answer. She was sort of [...]

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 [...]

English football manager Avram Grant gave a bizarre press conference after his Chelsea team’s win over Everton on April 17 – so bizarre that The Independent ran an almost complete transcript. I say ‘almost’ because it doesn’t give a full sense of the pauses and silences. Anyway, here’s part of the one-word wonder at work, [...]

Karrine Steffans achieved notoriety with her 2005 book, Confessions of a Video Vixen, a tell-all about her sexual encounters with the rich and famous. One of her lovers had a pet name for her – superhead – and the name stuck. Now she’s out peddling her new book, another tell-all called The Vixen Diaries. What’s [...]

The way NPR’s Bryant Park Project tells it, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros was at fault for what it calls “possibly the worst interview in the history of electronic media”. Seriously. It was that bad. We’re not sure if they were tired, or if it was a language thing, or what… but wow. Whereas most [...]

I was reading Where Do You Stand’s piece on Dick Cheney’s wife promoting her new book on The Daily Show. Justin calls Lynne Cheney’s chat with Jon Stewart “one of the most awkward interviews I’ve ever witnessed”. Even Comedy Central promotes the clip as “an extremely uncomfortable interview.” Now it’s Daily Show guests who often [...]

Love this observation from the Capital Cloak blog: Professional athletes and government intelligence officials have at least one shared characteristic: Both give a lot of media interviews, but despite an abundance of words spoken neither offers anything beyond tired clichés. I often wonder why journalists bother conducting such interviews. Rarely will a professional athlete state [...]

Randy Tinseth, vice president marketing for Boeing Commercial, blogging from the Paris Air Show, came up with a fiendishly-clever plan for scheduling media interviews: I’d also be remiss if I didn’t describe the uniquely-air show phenomenon of trying to conduct a media interview in the afternoon while competing with the roar of jet fighters screaming [...]