Posted: 2009 October 19, Monday 23:27
By George Merlis
I am suffering an embarrassment of riches insofar as teachable moments are concerned. They come from some of the tawdriest stories in recent days: the “balloon boy” hoax, the David Letterman extortion case and the CNN ambush of philandering Nevada Sen. John Ensign.
Up, up and away... my beautiful hoax
Let’s start with the balloon boy. Media training lesson one: dress appropriately. One thing I tell clients is that they should dress according to their position and the situation. Thus, a suit and tie doesn’t cut it when you’re standing in a rain forest announcing a new species you’ve discovered any more than a bush jacket makes the grade for a presidential news conference. Obviously, Sheriff Jim Alderden of Colorado’s Larimer County got the memo a little late. When he first decided the story of the missing-but-not-endangered balloon boy, Falcon Heene, was a hoax, the sheriff wore a happy-go-lucky denim shirt emblazoned with the American flag (by the way, a violation of the U.S. flag code’s injunction that “the flag should never be used as wearing apparel”). You can see the sheriff's sartorial error here. But the next day, the lawman wised up and was dressed in the appropriate navy blue uniform with more stars on his collar than General Stanley McChrystal.
Dressed appropriately.
Deflated: Balloon, Hoax, "Reality" Show Dreams
Sheriff Alderden realized the kid-in-the-balloon was a hoax after the kid-on-TV spilled the beans. The media-hungry Heene family went on CNN’s Larry King Live where the insufficiently-coached six-year-old told Wolf Blitzer, who was sitting in for King, "You guys said we did this for the show." Astoundingly, Blitzer failed to follow up. Check out the clip of this stupendous journalistic lapse here.
Blitzer failed to follow up on Falcon's sensational disclosure.
Teachable moment two: Don’t lie to the media. It turns out that the good sheriff is a body language reader. He says that at the same time he was telling the media that it wasn’t a hoax, a reading of Richard Heene’s body language had convinced investigators that it WAS a hoax and they were just misleading Heene by misleading the media. In other words, before little Falcon let the world in on the hoax, the sheriff knew, but wasn’t letting on because it would have spoiled his investigation. Well, whether the sheriff knew or not, he lied to the media. If he knew, he lied about not knowing. If he didn’t know, he lied about knowing. Normally that would have put his credibility deeper than the hulk of the Titanic, but he was saved from that fate by Richard Heene, whose credibility had sunk so low it blocked the sheriff's path to the bottom.
Falcon and dad. Did a mutation deprive the child of Ricard Heene's mendacity gene?
Richard Heene -- who is unlikely to be nominated Father of the Year anytime soon -- supplied another teachable moment: Don’t promise the media what you can’t deliver and if you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing. Heene grandly told the encampment of media outside his house he would be making a major announcement even as the hoax was crumbling about his feet. Then he reneged, collected questions from reporters in a cardboard box and ingnored them.
Of course, the best teachable point is: Lay off the hoaxes. Especially those that put the lives of first responders and the welfare of your own children at risk. Had one of those pursuit aircraft crashed, had a police car gone off the road, had a transplant organ been fatally delayed by the shut-down of Denver’s airport, this would have been a deadly hoax. Similarly, sticking a six-year-old in an attic for hours on end (even if you’ve supplied him with snacks and toys) qualifies in most parenting books as abusive treatment.
(But what can one expect of a parent who thrusts his kids into the stressful world of a “reality” show like “Wife Swap?” If you’ll indulge a personal opinion way off the media training beat, I can tell you with certainty, based on my years as a television producer, that there is no way you can get compelling television from kids in a “reality” show situation without seriously stressing them. The fact that young Falcon puked live on the Today Show was, I felt, a likely reaction to the unreasonable pressure placed on the poor kid. Any parent who subjects a child to those reality show ordeals is an unfit parent. And any television production company producing that kind of exploitive swill with kids ought to be indicted for child endangerment. But I digress.)
(My friend, David Monroe, has put together a page of videos and stories about the balloon boy incident. You can check it out here: . Among other things, the “Wife Swap” clip shows just how bad an actor Heene is.)
Why is this man smiling?
From a media trainer’s point of view, what teachable moments can we take away from l’Affaire Letterman?
David Letterman, whose stock in trade has been poking fingers in the eyes of the pretentious, poked some fingers in his own eyes. In a scenario that would have been rejected by a movie producer as being totally implausible, a CBS News producer assigned to “48 Hours” allegedly attempted to extort two million dollars from the late night host by threatening to reveal Letterman’s penchant for bedding female employees. Letterman went to the police, a sting operation was mounted, and the news producer was busted.
Letterman told the whole story on the air -- not in an interview, but on his own show. That’s pretty good damage control: in effect, interviewing yourself. Letterman’s first self-interview, on October 1, was such a hit, he did it again on October 5 -- the second time remembering to apologize to his wife, staffers and the world at large for his philandering ways.
Such totally controlled media exposure is a fringe benefit enjoyed by a handful of malefactors -- they can go on their own shows and, in effect, give their answers without the risk of tough follow-up questions like, "Aren't you coercing your female employees?" And "Aren't you guilty of workplace rules violations?" and, "Did you ever pay off sexual partners to avoid harassment suits?" Another example: Rush Limbaugh played from a similar bully pulpit with no risk of a probing reporter’s questions when his addiction to painkillers was revealed.
My media trainer’s take-away from all this: for total media mastery you have to host your own TV or radio show. The rest of us have to learn how to answer real questions.
As long as I’m dealing with the salacious, Senator John Ensign (R. NV) was ambushed the other day by a CNN crew outside his office and clearly demonstrated that he either needs media training or failed to pay attention when he was media trained. Either way, the senator supplied another teachable moment: don’t submit to an ambush interview.
Why are these people smiling? Ensign, his wife, his mistress, her husband.
The background of the ambush is this: Some time back, Ensign admitted to having had an affair with the wife of a senior aide and supposed best friend. The aide quit and Ensign’s parents wrote the cuckolded husband a near six-figure check. (An aside, the senator is 51 years old and his mommy and daddy are still bailing him out?)
Then the New York Times revealed that Ensign lobbied a number of companies to hire the former aide as a lobbyist. There's a trove of irony in lobbying to get someone a job as a lobbyist, but there may be serious legal complications, not to mention the ethical issues at stake. Against this background, CNN's aptly-named Dana Bash and a producer encountered Ensign as he left his office and, following him, peppered him with questions. Which Ensign answered, digging a really deep hole for himself. (See it here.) (By the way, note that the producer, and not the on-camera talent, asked the toughest, most fact-based questions while the "reporter" asked questions not far removed from "how do you feel about that?"
The take-away lesson: When confronted with an ambush, be governed by two don’ts and one do:
Don’t run away. Pictures of a guy running away from a camera crew are pretty incriminating. And funny, too. (Ensign did not run away.)
Don’t answer questions. (Ensign did answer questions.)
Do invite the reporter to call your office and arrange a proper sit-down interview. The more they throw questions at you and demand answers, the more you stand your ground and calmly, politely invite the reporter to call your office and set up a formal interview.
They are unlikely to run the tape of that encounter because it begs the question of why the reporter didn’t call your office and set up a formal interview.
Of course, if you don’t want to give that formal interview, you don’t have to, media outlets don’t have subpoena power. But the reporter can go on the air and say, “We followed up on Mr. Goodhue’s offer to do an interview, but his staff refused to schedule one.” It’s not great but it’s usually a lot less damaging than talking to the media on the fly in an ambush situation. Walking and talking is probably the first bit of multi-tasking we learn as toddlers. It's fine for a three-year-old, but you don't want to be doing it when talking to the media.
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