Category: Media Mastery Tips

Noteworthy & Quoteworthy
Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne on his company’s possible partnership with (and rescue of) troubled U.S. automaker Chrysler: “We’re not doing this because we’re good Samaritans.”

Little Samaritans: Will the Mighty Chrysler 300...


... Morph into the Tiny Fiat 500?

And why is the smaller car's name 200 more than the bigger car?

An FBI investigator discussing why it is difficult to catch serial killers working as long-distance truck drivers: “You’ve got a mobile crime scene. You can pick up a girl on the East Coast, kill her two states away and then dump her three states after that.”

Tad Smith, CEO of Reed Business, parent company of the show business bible, Variety, on Peter Bart, who was eased out of the editor’s job he’s held for 20 years and now will contribute columns and blogs to the paper: “He will serve as Variety’s ambassador to the world and will surely alienate a portion of it in his continued witty and insightful writing.” (Incidentally, the Los Angeles Times reports that Bart writes those blogs on a typewriter and reads his e-mail messages after they’ve been printed out on paper.)

Foot in Mouth Quotes & Soundbites
After Richard Poplawski, 22, was arrested for killing three Pittsburgh police officers last week, a friend of his told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "He wasn't a racist. He was a cool person. He thought he was losing some of his rights. He said he'd be ready if there's ever an invasion of the United States and that he had stockpiled food and guns." Besides giving a whole new definition to the term “cool person,” the friend, who is African-American, was unaware that Poplawski frequently posted hate-filled racist rants on white supremacist web sites.

The Fundamentals IV.
Crafting Your Agenda -- Part Two: Grabbers
By George Merlis

Last week I wrote about formulating an agenda for an interview or news conference. I suggested that the best approach was to go into one of these sessions with a limited agenda of four, perhaps five major message points. Today, let’s focus on making those points quoteworthy.

When I conducted interviews as a print reporter and, later, as a television news producer, I mentally categorized answers into one of three categories:

Can’t use that.
Could use that.
Gotta use that.

In an interview, your mandate is to express your message points in “gotta use that language;” phrases that make the reporter think: “I couldn’t say that better myself.” You want to be directly quoted on your agenda points because, even with the best of intentions, a reporter filters what you say when she paraphrases you. Also, giving reporters good quotes makes their job a lot easier and makes you a much more attractive interview subject.

To that end, it’s important to liven up your message points with what I call Grabbers. A Grabber is a word device that turns a “can’t use that” or “could use that” response into a “gotta use that” answer.

There are five basic categories of Grabbers:
Word pictures.
Startling facts or statistics or “st” words.
Famous quotations or paraphrases of famous quotations.,
Analogies -- either metaphors or similes.
Comparisons.

Let’s look at examples of each:

Word pictures: A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service on the condition of Bernard Madoff’s government-seized $2.2 million yacht: “This boat was extremely well kept, extremely clean. It looked like somebody took a bottle of 409 and scrubbed it every day.” Another word picture: North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue on South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s refusal to take federal stimulus funds: “As bad a driver as I am, I’ll drive a truck down there to pick up his share. I know how to put those dollars to good use.”

Startling statistics or “st” words: Judge Emmett G. Sullivan, commenting on prosecution misconduct in the Sen. Ted Stephens corruption trial: “This is the worst mishandling or misconduct that I’ve seen in my 25 years on the bench.” Using an “st”-ending word -- first, last, biggest, smallest, best, worst -- tells the media that what you are saying is news.

In a media training session some years back, Dr. S. Alan Stern -- then the principal investigator of the New Horizons NASA mission to Pluto -- came up with: “New Horizons is the first mission to the last planet.” Two “st” words in a single 10-word sentence. He used that grabber to great effect -- it appeared in dozens of news stories. A few months later a committee of astronomers declared Pluto was not a planet and demoted it to the category of dwarf planet. I sent Dr. Stern an e-mail asking him what he was saying now. He wrote back, “I have not yet begun to fight.” He was quoting John Paul Jones, the father of the American Navy who, invited to surrender his burning ship by his British opponent, issued that defiant reply. (Jones went on to sink the British vessel. The astronomy battle is less conclusive, it rages on with Pluto’s status still being debated and no less a scientific body than the Illinois state legislature declaring Pluto is a planet and proclaiming Friday, March 13, 2009 as "Pluto Day" in the state. Don't they have something better to do with their time -- like impeach a governor?) Anyway Dr. Stern’s use of Admiral Jones’ historic line brings us to our third form of Grabber: Quotations.

Quoteworthy: John Paul Jones



Quotations or paraphrases: Dr. Stern used a direct quote. But a lot of Grabbers are paraphrases of famous quotations. Sadam Hussein’s vainglorious boast that the first Gulf War would be the “mother of all battles,” spawned hundred of “mother of all....” examples. “Mother of all defeats” was one used by many spokesmen within 100 hours of the beginning of the “mother of all battles.” Others I’ve seen include “mother of all legislative fights,” “mother of all boxing matches,” etc. John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ask not....” line from his inaugural address is easily paraphrased to meet any number of situations. Four years ago I read this one from Professor Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii about the proposal to return humans, including scientist-astronauts, to the moon: “Ask not what astrobiology can do for the moon. Ask rather what the moon can do for astrobiology.” Another great quote I’ve seen used directly, not paraphrased, in many situations is President Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here.” And there’s this Albert Einstein quip, which can be applied in many situations: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Analogies (metaphors or similes): The difference between metaphors and similes is the use of the word “like.” “Miller, the champaign of bottled beer” is the grievously inaccurate metaphor. “As bottled beers go, Miller is like champaign,” is the simile for the same delusion. In a recent interview a Japanese geisha used a good simile to express her annoyance at foreign tourists who harass her and fellow Geishas with cameras on Kyoto’s streets: “We are not like a Mickey Mouse in Disneyland.”

No Mickey Mouse In Kyoto



Stephen M. Davis of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance at Yale got off a good metaphor about a new effort some at some firms to embrace the radical idea of tying executive compensation to corporate performance: “These are green shoots, to use a gardening analogy. It remains to be seen whether these are annuals or perennials.”

Inept Simile Of the Year Award:
Brazil's President Sounds Like Open Mike Night at a Comedy Club


Not all analogies work. Brazil’s earthy president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva unleashed this particularly egregious example in an interview about trade talks: “We are moving forward with real seriousness towards finding the possibility, like the G Spot, of an agreement.”

I always advise clients to avoid sexual and scatological analogies; you WILL be quoted, but the Grabber will overwhelm, rather than illuminate, your message point.

Comparisons: Last week I cited a noteworthy comparison from President Obama’s March 24 prime time news conference. Urging patience in the economic crisis, he said of the U.S. economy: “This is a big ocean liner -- it’s not a speedboat -- it doesn’t turn around immediately.” That was a particularly good Grabber because it was both a comparison (speedboat vs ocean liner) and a word picture. As a matter of fact, President Obama liked it so much, he used it again this week. At his town meeting in Turkey a student asked how the president was different from his predecessor, George W. Bush, since American troops were still in Iraq. “Moving the ship of state is a slow process,” Mr. Obama responded. “States are like big tankers. they’re not like speedboats.” Only a slight alteration there: the ship of state morphing from an ocean liner to oil tanker. (Could it be that the closer you are to the Middle East the more oil is on your mind?) I’m sure that, like most good grabbers, this one was crafted well in advance, an arrow placed in the interview quiver that could be fired when the right question came along. (Word picture alert!)

What if the right question doesn’t come along? How do you deploy your agenda if reporters won't ask the questions you want them to ask? Next week, I’ll deal with the art of transitioning from off-base or even hostile questions to your message points. How, in other words, to put the interview train on the track to your destination. (Another word picture alert! Sorry, after 22 years of teaching people how to craft Grabbers, I just can’t help myself.) Next week: building bridges and raising flags.