Category: Media Mastery Tips

By George Merlis

One gift that distinguishes a great newspaper columnist from the run-of-the-mill rehashers and bloviators featured on most op ed pages is his -- or, increasingly, her -- ability to get outside his own skin (and ego) and pull cogent, funny and insightful observations from others.

Many years ago when I worked as the day city editor on a short-lived New York afternoon daily called the World Journal Tribune, I dealt regularly with one of those great columnists, Jimmy Breslin.


Breslin then.

I worked with Jimmy during his drinking (or, as he would say, drinkin’) days, and he was apt to disappear for long stretches, missing deadlines and winding up in strange places with even stranger yarns to tell. He once took a New York City taxi to Cape Cod. When he got there he couldn’t remember why he went, but it didn’t matter because the story of that trip and the people he met and the quotes he coaxed from them (or invented for them) were worth the aggravation of his missing a couple of columns.


Lopez now.

Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has that same gift and, insofar as I can tell, doesn’t cause his editors grief by disappearing without notice. Lopez ignores the chaff and goes for the wheat. His August 25th column was about the bizarre California gubernatorial race between Meg Whitman, the E-Bay billionaire who forgot to vote for 28 years, and Attorney General Jerry Brown, who forgot there is an election going on so hasn’t yet begun campaigning.

Lopez has assembled a panel of voters and draws from them great quotes. Here are two from that August 25th column:

Randall Gwin, a Newport Beach toy designer, talking about the illegal immigration debate: "Let's discuss the economics instead of participating in the thinly veiled xenophobic rodeo that [the discussion] has become." (Great word picture)

Paul Song, a Santa Monica physician: "Is Jerry Brown even running?” (Key point up front)

And, finally, Lopez quotes Gwin as suggesting, with another great word picture, "instead of having five stupid, disingenuous debates where each candidate blusters and hiccups and panders to some imagined lowest common denominator," Brown and Whitman compete in a reality TV show in which they’d have to convince a voter to vote for them. To which Lopez adds, “I think this could work, particularly if the loser each week has to eat worms, or, even worse, watch their own campaign ads over and over and over.” (Of course, the candidates might elect to skip through their own ads with TiVO, the way the rest of us do.)


You can read the whole column here:

Analogies are effective interview tools. Here’s one from a recent New York Times story about a British plan to decentralize its National Health Scheme. The quote came from David Furness, head of the Social Market Foundation, a U.K. think tank. Furness took exception to the plan’s central thrust, putting general practitioners in charge of care budgets for their patients: “It’s like getting your waiter to manage a restaurant. The government is saying that G.P.’s know what the patient wants, just the way a waiter knows what you want to eat. But a waiter isn’t necessarily any good at ordering stock, managing the premises, talking to the chef — why would they be? They’re waiters.” (Of course, if you were a waiter you might find that analogy more than a little insulting.)

Here’s another nice quote, containing a good word picture. It's from a long New York Times story on the precarious position of Elon Musk, the chief executive of electric car company Tesla Motors. The paper quoted Elon’s brother Kimbal: “I don’t think he has fear. It’s only a risk if you think there’s a chance of failure. In Elon’s mind, I don’t think he thinks there’s a chance of failure. He doesn’t have the failure gene.”

And, finally, here’s an anonymous quote from a political strategist cited in Playboy Magazine: "We're playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage ... intense rage and anxiety.... In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage." Reptilian brain and road rage in the same quote. Not bad.

Worst TV Interview Ever

And, finally, thanks to two friends from JPL for steering me to what has to be the worst TV interview ever. Both sent me this link and I urge you to click on it and be astounded by the interview performance of Chris Young, a candidate for mayor of Providence, RI. That’s Young on the right and, yes, he is READING his answers right on camera! And it gets even worse.


See the whole hilariously painful interview here.

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