Posted: 2009 March 27, Friday 16:55
President Obama’s March 24 News Conference
A number of clients have asked me what I thought of President Obama’s performance in his March 24 prime time news conference. I thought it would be productive to grade the president against the lessons I teach in media training sessions.
Let’s start with the most basic elements: two of our five commandments of interviews:
Commandment One: Thou Shalt Be Prepared. I advocate going into an interview or news conference with an agenda made up of four or five message points. Additionally, I advocate scanning news sources so you know what’s going on in your world; so there can be no surprise questions and no deer-in-the-headlight moments. Clearly the president was prepared on the latter score: no question left him fumbling for facts or at a loss for an answer. His answers often contained substantive statistics or other facts, so he never played Bambi to the media’s onrushing SUV. Insofar as agenda is concerned, from watching the news conference and reading the transcript, I identified a four point agenda: three points on the economy and/or his budget, one point on a very specific close-to-home foreign policy matter. His primary agenda points were:
1. His proposed budget is part of the economic recovery because, he says, it involves substantial investments in energy, health care and education that will pay dividends by growing the economy.
2. The economic problems are deep and broad and will take patience and persistence to overcome.
3. It is important to focus on the bigger economic picture and enact regulations that will prevent future meltdowns, rather than focus on the outrage of the day (that particular day the outrage was AIG retention bonuses).
4. Mexican drug cartel violence is a threat in the United States and his administration was concerned and would take appropriate action. (This last agenda point diverted from his economic message, but I am certain it was an agenda point because the president specifically called on the Univision correspondent, knowing that her most likely question would concern the Mexican drug wars.)
Insofar as obeying that first commandment, Mr. Obama scores an A.
Commandment Two: Thou Shalt Know To Whom Thou Art Speaking. I teach the concept that you are not talking TO the reporter, but THROUGH the reporter, to their readers, viewers and listeners. President Obama refused to play the inside the beltway game with the correspondents, and he used their questions to directly address the concerns of his ultimate audience, the American people. An example: “The alternative [to this budget] is to stand pat and to simply say we are just going to not invest in health care, we're not going to take on energy... we will not improve our schools, and we'll allow China or India or other countries to lap our young people in terms of their performance; we will settle on lower growth rates; and we will continue to contract, both as an economy and our ability to provide a better life for our kids. That I don't think is the better option.”
On knowing to whom he was talking, Mr. Obama scores another A.
A noncommandment mandate: Keep it Short and Simple. For the short part I teach the 30/10/3 rule -- the ideal soundbite is no more than 30 words long, takes no more than 10 seconds to speak and is composed of no more than 3 sentences. For the simple part I advocate using the national grade level which is, alas, tenth grade. This does not mean the entire answer is 30 words long, but the pull quote, the soundbite part is no longer than that. How did Mr. Obama do? His answers were on the wordy side and even some of his soundbites exceeded 30 words.
Mr. Obama gets a C for the short part.
But he was outstanding on the simple. I put the entire news conference through Microsoft Word’s readability tool and it came in between ninth and tenth grade level for comprehension (see screen shot below.)
So the president gets an A here.
Use of grabbers. Grabbers are word pictures, analogies, startling statistics or anecdotes that make a message point compelling to reporters. The president unleashed a few very good grabbers: “It took many years and many failures to lead us here, and it will take many months and many different solutions to lead us out. There are no quick fixes, and there are no silver bullets.” And, “This is a big ocean liner -- it's not a speedboat -- it doesn't turn around immediately.” Another memorable grabber, delivered in answer to pestering by CNN’s Ed Henry who twice asked a question about the AIG bonuses despite the fact that Mr. Obama had already dealt with the matter in his opening remarks and had addressed it directly in answer to an earlier question: “I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” However, it appeared to me that there were many more opportunities for additional compelling grabbers that the president did not use.
Grabber grade: B.
Choice of words. In response to a number of questions about his budget and projected deficits, President Obama used the word “invest.” In fact, he said “invest,” “investing,” and “investment” 18 times in his news conference. The word has a strong positive connotation -- as opposed to the more negative word, “spend.” Use of “invest” and its variations went a long way toward buttressing his first agenda point: that his budget is part of his economic recovery plan. The president top grade for substituting his positive words for the reporters’ and critics’ negative words.
Word choice grade: A
Bridging. I teach a technique called bridging. When you get a question that’s off your agenda, you give it a short form answer and then build a bridge to what you really want to talk about. The mandate is to avoid segue whiplash -- moving so far off the original question that it is obvious to the listener what you are doing. The president used this technique twice. The first time he was answering Ann Compton’s question about race which was, in essence, are you acting as a black president and are you seen by other leaders as a black man? The president answered: “I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we're going to fix the economy. And that's -- affects black, brown and white. And, you know, obviously at the inauguration I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country. But that lasted about a day -- (laughter) -- and, you know, right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is: Are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe. And that's what I've been spending my time thinking about.”
That’s an A bridge.
But his other bridge was from a question about the difficulties negotiating peace in the Middle East after the election of a hawkish Israeli government. Here he used the question go get back to the U.S. economy. First he spoke at some length about being persistent in keeping at negotiations and then he mentioned the process that led to peace in Northern Ireland (relevant because the U.S. negotiator in that stalemate was George Mitchell, his envoy to the Middle East), and then he went on to bridge: “And what that tells me is that if you stick to it, if you are persistent, then -- then these problems can be dealt with. That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come, as long as I'm in this office. I'm a big believer in persistence. I think that when it comes to domestic affairs, if we keep on working at it, if we acknowledge that we make mistakes sometimes and that we don't always have the right answer and we're inheriting very knotty problems, that we can pass health care, we can find better solutions to our energy challenges, we can teach our children more effectively, we can deal with a very real budget crisis -- that is not fully dealt with in my budget at this point, but makes progress.” And THAT is segue whiplash would earn a C.
Overall bridging grade: B.
President Obama’s final grade for the news conference: A-.
-- George Merlis
