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The philosopher George Santayana is widely credited with the phrase, “Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” What he actually wrote was “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Perhaps history teachers and historians massaged the quote to enhance their discipline. In any case, in either formulation it is a recommendation for avoiding past mistakes.


Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine. When was the last time you saw a philosopher on the cover of ANY magazine?

The admirable crisis response and crisis communications by Johnson & Johnson’s in the 1982 Tylenol scare is studied in journalism, public relations and business courses. In that classic case, J & J recalled 31 million bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol after seven deaths in the Chicago area were linked to the drug. It turned out the deaths were part of a murder or extortion scheme and were in no way J & J’s responsibility. Someone stole packages of the drug from shelves in Chicago area supermarkets and drugstores, adulterated the tablets with cyanide and then replaced the bottles on the shelves. Despite an intensive federal and local investigation no one has ever been charged with the murders. A man named James W. Lewis was convicted of extortion when he demanded $1 million from J & J to stop the killings.

Johnson & Johnson won high praise for its swift action -- which cost it well in excess of $100 million, which was real money in 1982. At the time, the Washington Post wrote, “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster.” J & J won further widespread praise for being open and honest with the public as well as a place in crisis response textbooks.


A Johnson & Johnson news conference during the 1982 Tylenol crisis. The company won near-universal praise for its cooperative attitude toward authorities, customers and the media.


Fast forwarding to our own time, the New York Times ran a lengthy story on its business pages on August 21 headlined “In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do.” The story told of the public relations pratfalls taken over the last several months by BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs. Clearly the top brass of these companies had a Ferris Beuller day off when crisis communications was taught during their MBA programs, so they missed the lesson about Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 Tylenol response.

The Times might have added another corporate public relations pratfaller to that story: Johnson & Johnson. Apparently, the current top brass of J & J joined the BP, Toyota and Goldman execs-to-be and played hooky when the Tylenol case was taught. How do we know this? By J & J’s sluggish response to current crises. (Yes, crises; plural!) This year, after 20 months of consumer complaints, J & J recalled batches of Benadryl, Motrin, Rolaids, Simply Sleep, St. Joseph Aspirin and, ironically, Tylenol because of a sickening smell suspected to be caused by contamination with a chemical bearing the tongue-tripping name 2,3,6-tribromoanisole.

But wait, there’s more. J & J has multiple state attorneys general probing a series of other recalls of over-the-counter medications, the most serious being the firm’s reluctant April recall of 136 million bottles of liquid children’s medicines which had overly-high dosages of the active ingredient as well as contamination from metal particles.

The Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson is William Weldon, who may have missed the Tylenol class when they taught it at his alma mater, Quinnipiac University, but apparently made it to the class on executive compensation. J & J pays him $25.6 million a year, triple the average CEO compensation for big U.S. firms. Mr. Weldon appears to have been in class when cost-cutting was taught; he has slashed Johnson & Johnson’s work force by 9,000 employees.

After a pounding in the media and the threat of multiple investigations, J & J announced a restructuring of its manufacturing procedures and the creation of a new executive position charged with product quality. This begs two questions which were answered in no media account I read:

1. Was no one in charge of product quality at Johnson & Johnson before this?
2. If someone was in charge, was he among the 9,000 people who were laid off?

Which begs a third question: Why didn't the media ask the first two questions?

If nothing else, the Johnson & Johnson response gives this new twist to George Santayana’s observation: “Those who cannot remember the glorious past are condemned to fail to repeat it.”

***

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]]> Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:37:32 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=37#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=37 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=36
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.

***

For more on Experience Media Consulting's services, click here.

To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.
]]> Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:28:39 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=36#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=36 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=35
On June 4, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of allied forces in Europe, gave the go-ahead for the largest military operation in history, the June 6 amphibious assault by 170,000 men at arms against the German-held beaches of Normandy.

D-Day was a high-stakes, high-risk massive military operation and there were no guarantees it would succeed. So the day before the assault Ike prepared a crisis communications plan in case of failure. Here it is, in its entirety:



On that single piece of paper (which he misdated July 5 instead of June 5), Ike used a mere 66 words to set the responsibility and integrity bar high for all authority figures who would follow him: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.  My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available.  The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do.  If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” Ike then folded the piece of paper, put it in his pocket and waited to see if it would be needed.


June 5 -- the afternoon before D-Day. Ike chats with members of the 101st Airborne who will parachute behind German lines in a few hours. In his jacket pocket, neatly folded, is his note taking responsibility for failure should the mission end in disaster.

Ike’s lessons -- prepare a crisis communications plan and accept responsibility for your actions -- appear to have been lost in the mists of history. Today the typical response to crises is blame-shifting, finger-pointing and responsibility-shirking.

Which brings us to BP and the Gulf oil spill. Last time, I wrote about the company’s top brass and their unfailing knack for inserting their feet in their mouths almost every time they opened them to speak. This time I’d like to address BP’s crisis communications plan; if there was such a plan. BP seems not to have had a crisis management plan in the first place and you need a crisis management plan before you can create a crisis communications plan. If any company in the oil industry should have had such plans, it is BP.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” author George Santayana wrote in 1905. BP appears to suffer from severe near-term memory loss. Only five years ago an explosion at the company’s Texas City, TX refinery killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more. OSHA fined the company $87 million for failing to correct safety violations which had been called to BP’s attention by government inspectors. Four years ago, BP’s Alaska pipeline sprung a major leak, forcing the shutdown of one of the country’s largest oil fields. A criminal probe of the pipeline disaster resulted in BP paying a $20 million fine for allowing the pipeline to fall into a state of dangerous disrepair.

These incidents had me wondering whether it would not have cost less than the $107 million BP paid in fines to take the safety steps that would have avoided those catastrophes. Also, it made me wonder why a company hit with such fines and bad publicity would be anything but totally assiduous about safety compliance going forward. And why a company with such a history would not have robust crisis management and communications plans on the shelf and ready to deploy in the event of a new disaster.

In addition to a crisis management plan and a crisis communications plan, BP needed spokespersons attuned to the public. Instead it offered the media a CEO who told the Today Show he wanted his life back and a chairman who talked about the “small people” impacted by the spill.



Unempathetic spokesperson: BP's Tony Hayward


In “How to Master the Media” I devote a chapter to crisis communications plans. Here, in outline form is what a spokesperson needs to explain in a crisis:

I. How dangerous is this situation to the public, the economy, the environment.
A. If there is a direct danger, what individual steps should the public take
to mitigate the threat.
B. If there is no direct threat to individuals, how can they help others who may be threatened.
II. What steps are we -- the responsible entity -- taking to mitigate the situation and to see that it never happens again.
A. Does the public play any role in these steps?
III. How will the response allocate mitigation and recovery resources equitably and fairly.
IV. How will the response avoid squandering resources, including recovery personnel, material and funds.

In addition to those three points, there are four steps that go a long way toward making the crisis communications plan work and toward gaining public understanding of the disaster management plan:

I. Early response to the crisis.
II. Frequent, forthright and uncomplicated media accessibility to spokespersons and to mitigation efforts.
III. Consistent candor.
IV. Empathy.

BP's media communications were less-than-forthright and it tried to limit access to cleanup areas, sometimes using a heavy hand to do so. It was less than candid with the media and with Congress and we've already seen how its top people lacked empathy for the tens of thousands impacted by the spill. So the company failed with the last three steps and its evasions, denials, and finger-pointing went a long way toward nullifying the fact that it was on the scene and communicating very soon after the blast, fire and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon and the world record oil spill that followed.

What would the company’s response would have been if someone of General Eisenhower’s integrity had been Supreme Commander of BP? Ike’s D-Day invasion, although one of history’s bloodiest and most violent battles, was a success. The general and his staff had crafted a massive plan, scrupulously oversaw its details, cut no corners, spared no expense and suffered no fools. So had an Eisenhower been at the helm of BP, perhaps there would have been no crisis to respond to. But if there had been, it’s likely that the soundbite we would be discussing would have been, “If any blame or fault attaches, it is mine alone,” and not BP President Tony Hayward’s, “You know, I’d like my life back.”

***

For more on Experience Media Consulting's services, click here.WWW.MasterTheMedia.com

To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.











]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:39:39 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=35#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=35 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=34
We have teachable moments from two current news stories: Gen. McChrystal’s Foot-in-Mouth moments and the unending oil spill in the Gulf Coast.

THE GENERAL SPEAKS -- TOO MUCH

In media training we teach the following: Always treat a microphone as if it is a gun. You treat a gun as if it is always loaded. Similarly, treat a microphone as if it is always on. Never say anything in proximity to a microphone that you don’t want the whole world to hear. And treat a reporter as if he is a microphone. Reporters are always working, always mentally recording, always looking for a story.

Additionally, we teach that there is no such thing as off the record anymore. And there certainly is no such thing as “not-for-attribution,” because it does not take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the source of most quotes.

So here we had the aesthetic General Stanley A. McChrystal and his staff hanging out with a reporter for, of all publications, “Rolling Stone,” and dissing the President, Vice President and everybody else who wasn’t in their immediate circle.

General McChrystal is proud of the fact that he sleeps only four out of every 24 hours and eats only one meal a day. Too bad he didn’t use some of the time he saved not eating and not sleeping to study up on how to behave around the media. But he didn’t, and now he’s been fired.

The take-away from all this: don’t say anything controversial or provocative in front of a reporter -- even in a saloon -- unless you want the whole world to hear or read it.

By the way, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice reads, “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation... shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” (Why the Secretary of Transportation and not the other cabinet posts? The Coast Guard, one of the military services and thus subject to the UCMJ, originally was part of the Department of Transportation. After 9/11, the Coast Guard was assigned to the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security. Article 88 apparently has not yet caught up with the change.)

In addition to being totally (or was it willfully?) ignorant of how to behave around a reporter, the general and his staff appear to have violated military law. One can understand how career military officers might not know how to deal with the media, but it’s beyond understanding how they could not be familiar with the UCMJ.


BP AND THE GULF OIL SPILL:
HOW CAN YOU STAND UP WHEN YOU’VE GOT BOTH FEET IN YOUR MOUTH?

BP and its executives -- to paraphrase friend and colleague Kerry Millerick -- is the gift that keeps on giving. At least for a media trainer and crisis communications consultant looking for egregious examples of what not to say and do. BP’s gift is so (tragically) generous that there is too much for one essay, so today I’ll address only the lessons we can learn from BP executives’ uncanny gift for unfailingly saying the wrong thing.

BP is supplying us a torrent of teachable moments, a veritable gusher of simply dumb soundbites and inept media relations actions. Makes you wonder whether the company’s top brass had media training, didn’t pay attention during media training, or was trained by the world’s worst media trainer. Whatever the cause, BP’s response over the two months of historic oil spill is a textbook case on how not to deal with the media.

Those who have taken an Experience Media workshop may remember the fifth of our Five Commandments: “Thou shalt not lie, evade, speculate nor cop an attitude.” BP egregiously broke all parts of that one.

Thou Shalt Not Lie....

Begin at the beginning: BP severely underestimated (and the government uncritically accepted) the amount of leaking oil. We now know the oil leak was well over ten times BP’s original figure, but early on in the spill, independent scientists and engineers looked at live video images of the gushing oil, did the calculations and gave the lie to BP’s initial estimates. The images these experts were studying were supplied by BP which owns the cameras trained on the gusher. If the experts hired by BP, the world’s fourth largest corporation, had even a modicum of competence, they had to know the company’s early figures were untrue.

When scientists discovered that oil had formed underwater plumes that were spreading widely, BP denied their existence. The company stubbornly held to its cover story: a substantial -- but severely underestimated -- leak with all the oil floating to the surface.

As ex-President Nixon -- who knew about these things better than anyone -- said on any number of occasions, the cover up is always more damaging than the offense. The result of this cover-up was destruction of any corporate credibility. So now nothing the company says is taken at face value.

...Nor Cop an Attitude

CEO Tony Hayward, caused considerable consternation when, standing on an oil-soaked beach, he told the Today Show, “I’d just like my life back.” (See it here.)

That came across as the height of unfeeling arrogance since 11 of his oil workers had been killed in the initial explosion and tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents lost livelihoods to the spill while Hayward continued to collect his $ 5 million annual paycheck. (Update: two cleanup workers have been killed as well, bringing the death toll to 13.)

But Hayward was outdone by his boss, Board Chairman Carl-Henric Svansberg who stood outside the White House after President Obama woodshedded the BP top brass and announced: “People say that large oil companies don’t care about the small people. We care. We care about the small people.”


Big man: BP's board chairman Carl-Henric Svansberg

Apologists for Svansberg pointed out that English is his second language and that he may have been translating the supposedly less loaded Swedish word “smafolket” or the phrase “sma manniskor.” But those translate as “little people,” and it’s hard to see how “little people” is less condescending than “small people.” Might Svansberg have picked up the “small” from President Obama, who earlier had referred to small businesses destroyed by the oil spill? Perhaps, but the Swedish phrase for small business is either “smafolket foretag” or “litet foretag” both two-word phrases. Svansberg used only the single word, “small.” I read one account that asserted that in Sweden “smafolket” was not condescending because the country has such a pervasive egalitarian streak. Read any (or all three) of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy novels and you’ll learn Sweden’s industrialists look at the “smafolket” the way the 18th Century British peers looked at chimney sweeps.

With the Chairman of the Board in the lead, there was no way Tony Hayward could not compete in the arrogance derby so the weekend following the meeting with President Obama the BP CEO flew off to attend a yacht race off the Isle of Wight. It was not just any race, but one in which his own 52-foot yacht competed. (For those seeking a hint of poetic justice, Hayward’s yacht lost.)

Hayward’s outing gave the company’s critics a chance to show they, unlike BP toppers, know how to seize a media opportunity. Senator Richard Shelby (R. -Alabama) said, “I can tell you that yacht ought to be here skimming and cleaning up a lot of the oil.” And White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel unleashed this soundbite: “To quote Tony Hayward, he’s got his life back.”

As long as we’re quoting Tony Hayward, NPR dug up a 2009 speech he gave shortly after taking over the helm at BP from his predecessor whose reign was ended after a prostitution scandal: “We had too many people that were working to save the world,” Hayward said in the address. “We sort of lost track of the fact that that our primary purpose in life is to create value for our shareholders.”

To cite an unfortunate banner hanging from the superstructure of an aircraft carrier: “Mission Accomplished.” At least the first part was accomplished; no one can accuse Tony Hayward’s BP of trying to save the world.


Even their posture is wrong. BP Execs outside the White House adopt the highly defensive CUPP posture -- a no-no when on camera. (CUPP = Cover Up Private Parts)

In addition to speaking outrageously, BP has acted outrageously, excluding the media from beaches and waters befouled by oil -- beaches and waters they do not even own. In one instance, BP personnel on a launch manned by Coast Guardsmen got the Guardsmen to threaten a CBS News crew with arrest if they didn’t leave the oily waters. Right after that both the Coast Guard and BP said that had been a mistake.

But BP kept repeating that mistake, denying reporters access to public beaches where cleanup crews were working. Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, released this statement: "Recent media reports have suggested that individuals involved in the cleanup operation have been prohibited from speaking to the media, and this is simply untrue." The untruth came from Suttles, as WDSU reporter Scott Walker learned two days later when BP’s private security guards tried to deny him access to a public beach. You can see Walker’s attempt here:

BP’s gaffes just keep coming. It seems no one in this huge, multinational corporation has the capacity to learn anything from previous media mistakes.

If BP had a crisis communications plan it was either highly flawed or got thrown out the window as soon as the crisis hit. Next time, another BP teachable moment: how to prepare for a crisis communications plan.

***

For more on Experience Media Consulting's services, click here.WWW.MasterTheMedia.com

To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.

]]> Thu, 24 Jun 2010 03:35:24 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=34#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=34 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=33

By George Merlis

Television news at both the network and local levels is in a state of flux -- and the flow seems to be to be going in the direction of less news. News managers are desperately chasing a dwindling audience and that chase, thus far totally fruitless, is exacting a grievous price on coverage of real news.

Two cases in point, one national the other local: The Stars vs. the Grunts and
Real Housewives of KNBC News.

Stars vs. Grunts

I was doing a media training workshop for an executive in a Euro zone country and learned from him that in the zone it is considered bad form for a CEO to earn more than 20 times the average wage of his workers. Here in the U.S. CEOs typically earn 100 to 200 times the salary of the average worker.

In the world of television news, the earnings disparity between the stars who read the news and the grunts who actually commit journalism and gather it has been growing for a very long time and has reached 100-to-one in the most egregious case: Katie Couric’s $15 million contract to anchor the CBS Evening News.


CBS's Couric has a lot to smile about

When I joined CBS News in 1982 I was stunned to find that the so-called Tiffany network was outgunned and outmanned on every front by my alma mater, ABC News. ABC devoted more and more advanced resources to news coverage than CBS. Soon after I got there CBS underwent an economic contraction and the already-skimpy news division suffered large cuts. I was told to slash the budget of the CBS Morning News by ten percent; I could cut anything except the multi-million dollar salaries of my two anchors. I managed shave ten percent out of the budget without firing anybody by cutting back on the number of field stories I would do and booking more in-studio interviews, reducing satellite time and eliminating some studio time and tape facilities. But the president of CBS News, referring to the famous CBS skyscraper headquarters building, told me: “Black Rock wants to see blood -- fire somebody.” I fired someone bearing the name of a famous media company, figuring she would find new employment in one of her family’s many outlets. She did. But I could have achieved the ten percent saving without losing a soul and without compromising the journalism of my show if I had been able to shave a million or so from the anchors’ salaries. The way I see it, after your first two or three million in salary, do your really need more? Especially if you come to work at 4:30 a.m. and leave at 4:30 p.m. You don’t have time to spend your money.

The epidemic of inflated anchor salaries began when ABC News lured Barbara Walters from NBC News in 1976, paying her network news’ very first million-dollar salary. At the time, I was at ABC, producing Good Morning America, and was stunned that Walters was being paid about as much money as my entire on-air team combined and twice the salary then paid the President of the United States. I asked myself how could someone reading news about the President be worth twice as much as the President? Walters was also paid about three times the salary of her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner. Up until the Walters deal, network news stars generally earned about seven or eight times the salary of the news-gathering grunts. Walters’ seven-figure salary put an end to all that.

CBS’s Couric, is the highest-paid newscaster in history. Her salary sucks the journalistic oxygen out of CBS News. While she continues collecting her full paycheck for anchoring a news show that has been consistently mired in third place, CBS is firing about 120 news staffers.

Over at ABC no one makes that kind of money, but there is a bench full of high-priced anchor talents -- Good Morning America, the Evening News, Nightline -- and ABC is firing some 400 real news-gatherers, a quarter of its staff. Adding insult to injury, shortly after announcing its newsroom massacre, ABC News hired yet another costly star for its stable: Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s globe-trotting foreign correspondent.


Christiane Amanpour: Out of the cold and into ABC's fold.

Amanpour signed on to replace George Stephanopoulos as the host of the Sunday morning “This Week” program. So the network is taking a real reporter, paying her much more money and then having her NOT report. Instead she will preside over ABC’s weekly presentation of politicians delivering well-rehearsed talking points. Talk is cheaper than journalism. And as long as the networks pay a disproportionate amount of money to their anchors, we’re probably going to be getting a lot more talk and a lot less news.

***

The Real Housewives of KNBC

KNBC, the NBC owned and operated station in Los Angeles, produces a dismal newscast. In the past, I’ve devoted a blog entry to one lapse and written to the FCC to (fruitlessly) complain about its shoddy journalism. Finally I stopped watching, which is probably a good thing for my blood pressure because it meant I missed a recent miscarriage of journalism. It seems the station, had one of the women from the Bravo network's “reality” show “Real Housewives of Orange County” “report” a story about credit cards.


"Real" housewife Vicki Gunvalson, KNBC's reporter in a staged news segment on credit card regulations.

This high jink had consequences. (I’m assuming jink is the singular of jinx, although I can’t find justification for that usage in the dictionary.) Steve Lange, Vice President for Content, the minor-mind of the misadventure, was sacked for not living up to KNBC’s journalistic standards. KNBC’s journalistic standards are a joke; the bar is set so low the disgraced Jayson Blair, the New York Times faker of news stories, could meet KNBC’s standards. The Los Angeles Times ran an excellent account about Lange’s lapse.

Did you notice Lange’s former title? “Vice President, Content.” Used to be, the person who ran the news operation at a TV station was called a news director. Now he’s a content provider. Just the title speaks reams about the state of the fourth estate at NBC’s owned and operated stations. Maybe KNBC’s next “content provider” can add some news to the “content” mix. Don’t hold your breath for that.

Final note: Jayson Blair is now a “life coach.” His web site promotes his credentials but conveniently omits his embarrassing New York Times career. Bottom line: He still can’t report the facts!

***

For more on Experience Media Consulting's services, click here.WWW.MasterTheMedia.com

To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.

]]> Fri, 28 May 2010 04:55:59 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=33#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=33 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=32
Several recent news stories have spawned good soundbites and pull quotes. Here is a selection:

The clouds of ash from the April 14 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier volcano shut down many European airports, cancelled as many as 100,000 flights and forced more than a million people to take what the New York Times called a “volcation.” The volcano also inspired a lot of good quotes, including one from a wag who said, “This volcano’s name looks like it was created when someone dropped a large book on his computer keyboard.”

I’ve seen the name spelled Eyjafjallajokull and Eyjalfjallaj”kul. I have no idea how to pronounce the quotation mark in the middle of the word, but then I have no idea how to pronounce the more conventional spelling. And neither, it appears, do broadcasters; I’ve heard it rendered several different -- sometimes within the same broadcast.


The cloud that ate Europe’s economy. A startling slide show of volcano stills was gathered by the Boston Globe and can be seen by clicking here.

Here are some good Eyjafjallajokul quotes:

Karel De Gucht, European Union trade commissioner, when asked to assess the damage to the Euro Zone economy: "What makes me a little bit afraid is that there is no timer on this volcano."

There apparently was a timer on the European governments -- and it was operating in slo-mo. Here’s Giovanni Bisignani, head of the International Air Transport Association: "It's embarrassing, a European mess. It took five days to organize a conference call with the ministers of transport."

Vanessa Rossi of the London research institute Chatham House suggested that the air traffic logjam could wipe out one to two percent of European gross domestic product. "That basically means we've got a continued recession... This is absolutely bad news at the wrong time. But nobody chooses a volcano to erupt."

Tim Clark, president of the Dubai-based Emirates airlines, said “You simply can't afford to shut down something the size of Europe."

And, Speaking of The Economy....

In terms of GDP, Goldman Sachs may not be as big as Europe, but the the Security and Exchange Commission's filing of a civil fraud lawsuit against the financial giant stimulated a good number of noteworthy quotes.


Goldman Sachs headquarters in Jersey City, New Jersey when it was under construction. The iconic Colgate factory, with its venerable octagon-shaped clock, was demolished to make way for the Goldman tower. Critics are saying Goldman’s practices may have contributed to the demolition of the world economy as well.

James Post professor of corporate governance at Boston University School of Management: “I’m pretty sure that the board at Goldman is having a bad weekend. They may be praying for some news out of the Vatican or a new volcano to get them off the front pages.”

Adam C. Pritchard, a law professor at the University of Michigan: “The basic idea that an undisclosed conflict of interest could be misleading is pretty much as old as stockbrokers.”

Matt McCormick, an analyst at Bahl & Gaynor Inc. in Cincinnati, which manages about $2.8 billion: “Goldman Sachs will now become the bogey man for all financial ills.”

Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Co. which oversees more than $4 billion in investments: “The lynch-mob mentality that is prevailing right now against Goldman is such that you don’t know where this thing could go. The board actually has to pay attention not only to the legal niceties of this thing but also to the franchise viability as well.” (Mr. Holland clearly missed the political science class when the professor explained the difference between a case brought in a duly-constituted court and a lynch mob, which forms specifically to avoid that time-consuming legal nicety.)

Death, Taxes & the “Death Tax”

National Public Radio’s Marketplace program ran a piece about a quirk in the federal estate tax law. It seems that in an effort to steadily decrease the tax to zero, the last Congress built in a preview of coming attractions: 2010 is a year with no estate tax. Then the tax reverts and is gradually lowered. Unless Congress re-imposes the tax. If it does that, it could retroactively apply the tax to the estates of people who die in 2010.

Now the whole estate tax controversy is something of a tempest in an economic teapot. Here’s why: despite the brilliance of its opponents in labeling it a “death tax,” thereby giving the impression that it is owed by everyone who dies, the estate tax is levied on only the very wealthiest. In fact in 2008 -- the latest year for which there are statistics -- only 6,000 of the two million-plus people who died had estates large enough to qualify for the tax. And collections from those 6,000 estates made up less than one percent of the net tax revenue collected by the IRS.

Uncertainty about what Congress will do led trust and estates attorney Sanford Schlesinger to give NPR this soundbite: “If we come down to November and there's no estate tax, if I were grandma, I would not show up for Thanksgiving dinner without a food taster."

Fact Meets TV Fiction


X-ray shows undetonated explosive shell lodged in the skull of Afghan soldier

Several media outlets carried the compelling story of Air Force surgeon Maj. John Bini who operated to successfully remove an undetonated explosive round from the skull of an Afghan soldier at the Bagram Air Base hospital. After recounting the story Maj. Bini was told that there had been similar plot lines in the TV shows MASH (an unexploded grenade) and Grey’s Anatomy (an unexploded bomb). Dr. Bini responded: “None of that stuff you see on TV approximates reality.” How true.

****

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]]> Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:38:45 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=32#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=32 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=31

By George Merlis

If broadcast journalism is a calling then its patron saint is Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman who offered this insight about TV in a 1958 speech: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

In the last two weeks a couple of the human stewards of TV news have been revealed for having made starkly contrasting decisions that demonstrate Murrow’s warning.


First the “wires and lights in a box” decision:

On March 19 National Public Radio revealed that back in August, 2008 ABC News paid $200,000 to Florida mom Casey Anthony for exclusive rights to stills and video of her missing daughter Caylee. Those images were aired on September 5, 2008, first on Good Morning American and later in a prime-time hour-long special. Ironically that was very same day Anthony was charged with child neglect and endangerment. A month later she was indicted for Caylee’s murder. If convicted, Anthony faces the death penalty.



Before and After. Above: Casey Anthony sports an American flag in one of many party girl pictures of her that have surfaced since the murder of her daughter. Unsurprisingly, this was not among the images Anthony sold to ABC News. Below: Anthony weeps in court.



Journalism ethics are clear: news organizations should not pay sources. There are some exceptions to that rule. Someone who takes dramatic footage of an unfolding news event -- like the jetliner landing on the Hudson -- can auction off his material to the highest bidder without running afoul of journalism ethics. In that instance the videographer was covering a story in the absence of journalism professionals. (It is incumbent on the news organization, by the way, to verify that the material is valid, was obtained legitimately and has not been doctored in any way.) But paying someone intimately involved in a news story for access to that story -- in other words, buying the source as well as the source material -- is checkbook journalism and unethical. In fact, even if Caylee had turned up safe and sound and Anthony had been awarded Mother of the Year honors, it would have been unethical for ABC News to cough up that kind of payoff for the stills and photos.

ABC News make matters even worse by not disclosing that it had bought access to the material. Such transparency would have mitigated its ethical lapse a but, But the network kept mum; the story came to light during a hearing when the judge asked how Anthony had come up with bail money and her lawyer revealed it had come from ABC News.

The prodigious payment came hard on the heels of stories about ABC laying off a quarter of its news employees -- between 300 and 400 news division staffers are to be fired. David Westin, president of ABC News was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I frankly don’t think it will be particularly noticeable for viewers.” In addition to splitting two infinitives in a single sentence, Westin is wrong about the facts. It will be noticeable to viewers when his division keeps missing out on big stories or substitutes anchor “tells” for rolling video coverage of major events. Think about this: the $200,000 ABC News spent for its tawdry one-day exclusive would have paid the annual salary and benefits for one well-trained, serious news producer who might have been able to give the network five, ten or twenty good, solid news stories over the course of that year.

This is not the first time a flap has erupted over networks paying news sources. Back in the 1970s, CBS paid Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman as much as $50,000 to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace. And even earlier, in the 1960s, NBC News financed the digging of an escape tunnel under the Berlin wall in order to produce a documentary called “The Tunnel.” NBC was involved in nothing less than creating a news event and, coincidentally, risking the lives of many people in doing so. To my mind, the tunnel story was the most serious ethical journalistic lapse since exaggerations and fictions by the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers fed the fervor that led to the Spanish American War.

Now for the flip side of the ABC lapse:

When Tiger Woods finally decided to do a small, select batch of TV interviews, he offered himself to three outlets: The Golf Channel, ESPN and CBS. Despite restrictions on the interview, Golf and ESPN readily accepted. CBS News turned him down. Cold.



CBS to Woods: Thanks but No Thanks!

The decision was made by Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports (and the son of one of the best sports journalists in television history, the late Jim McKay). Woods’ conditions were too restrictive for McManus: the golfer would give each interviewer no more than five minutes of his time and certain personal subjects were off-limits. Every journalist knows it takes more than a five-minute interview to dislodge someone from his rote talking points.

In addition, the timing didn’t work for CBS. The next show up in its news rotation was 60 Minutes on Sunday night. And 60 Minutes does not do superficial, five-minute interviews. Faced with the prospect of Golf Network and ESPN beating it to air with an interview full of canned responses, CBS declined Woods’ offer. We can’t know what the CBS decision would have been had the timing been more propitious for them, but the decision the network did make was the right one.

Incidentally, as of this writing it is being reported that Woods will hold a news conference on Monday, April 5 in advance of the Masters. If he does it will be interesting to see the complete session. It’s likely to tell us as much about the media as it does about the world’s best golfer.

****

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]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:19:21 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=31#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=31 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=30
By George Merlis

If you’ve been following the public pronouncements of Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota Motor, you’ve probably heard him speaking Japanese before the English translation takes over. And you’ve doubtless heard him utter the word ano. A lot. In fact, Toyoda, says ano so much you might think it’s Japanese for a really common word like “the” or “it.”


Mr. Toyoda, "Ano..."

In fact, ano means “there” -- as in “that over there.” But like many Japanese speakers, Mr. Toyoda uses ano not as a word, but as a filler, a meaningless sound meant to buy time in a sentence. You can tell ano is being used as a filler without knowing another word of Japanese; when the meaning is “there,” as in “there is my Prius,” ano is short and choppy. When it’s buying time in a sentence, it’s pronounced anoooo. The longer the o sound, the more time the speaker is buying.

The American equivalents of anooooo are ummm and y’know. We hear them in interviews all the time. To me, y’know is the most offensive filler. Generally, when someone throws in a y’know, I do know, so they are inadvertently insulting me by asking me if I can follow their line of reasoning.

Y’know is an awkward crutch that creeps into interviewers’ questions as well as interview subjects’ answers. The otherwise excellent NPR interviewer, Terry Gross, peppers her questions with y’knows all the time, sometimes inserting two and three into a single sentence. I find her difficult to listen to because of it; I spend my time counting y’knows, not listening to her questions. Moreover, y’know appears to be contagious. When Ms. Gross does it, her interview subject is likely to incorporate y’knows into his answers.


Caroline Kennedy is, y'know, President Kennedy's daughter.

The all-time, black belt champion of y’know is John F. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline who, when she was exploring a run for the Senate seat vacated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year, used y’know 142 times in a single New York Times interview. Ms. Kennedy was able to stuff three and four of them into a single paragraph, as in: "So I think in many ways, y’know, we want to have all kinds of different voices, y’know, representing us, and I think what I bring to it is, y’know, my experience as a mother, as a woman, as a lawyer, y’know, I've been an education activist for the last six years here, and, y’know, I've written seven books – two on the Constitution, two on American politics.” That’s five y’knows in a seventy-one word answer.

Another strange turn of phrase, one that tends to come almost exclusively from scientists, is the word so used at the start of an answer as in this exchange: “How will this experiment expand our knowledge of the universe?” “So, what we are going to study is.....” At a recent gathering I attended a number of scientists spoke. In the Q&A sessions, almost every one of them began the majority of their answers with, “So....”

I think I know the reason for this one. Scientists, by inclination and training prefer to build to a conclusion. But they know that laymen want a conclusion first, followed by the supporting data. In media training sessions we drive home that message using the slogan “Key Point Up Front.” When building his argument with peers, our scientist lays out the evidence and when about to deliver his conclusion uses the word “so.” Actually, “so,” used this way is layman speak for “ergo,” which in its original Latin meant “because of,” but was adopted as a synonym for “therefore” in 14th century English.

The real question for those of us who do presentations and answer media and public questions is how to we banish our English anooooos?

First, we have to realize we have the bad habit. During media training sessions, scientists often learn they use so as a starter and laymen learn they use y’know as a filler only when I play back their practice interviews during our critiques. The expressions have become a reflex, almost like breathing and the speakers are unaware they're using them.

If you’re not in a media training session, how do you know you’re using so and y’know? The best way to find out is to record a conversation with another person, play it back and see if you’re so-ing and y'knowing.

If you are, sometimes preempting the filler works. For example, you can start a response with “You know, the most important thing to realize is....” By using the fully spelled out “you know,” you put yourself on mental notice not to use the filler conjunction y’know. Similarly, to eliminate the answer-starting so, a scientist need only incorporate the sense of the question at the start of his answer. “This experiment will expand our knowledge....”

In fact, I recommend always incorporating the sense of a question in an interview answer because it makes your answer self-contained and gives you a moment to decide where you want your answer to go. Of course, that presupposes that you’ve come into the interview with an agenda of points you want to make. If you have, if you’ve practiced them in mock interviews, if you’ve recorded those exercises and listened to yourself critically you’re unlikely to fall back on fillers.

So if you, y’know, don’t practice, you’re, y'know, setting yourself up for......” You get the idea.

****

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]]> Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:51:12 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=30#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=30 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=29

By George Merlis

Two subjects this time: a Teachable Moment on notes in an interview and a sarcastic State of the Fourth Estate observation.

When Are Notes Appropriate?
Former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s appearance before the Tea Party convention in Memphis brings this question to mind. Gov. Palin had written three message points on the palm of her hand and, during a Q & A session, was photographed referring to those notes before she answered a question.


Former Gov. Palin using notes on her hand at Tea Party convention

The fact that she used notes in the first place and wrote them on her hand in the second subjected her to a cascade of ridicule. Personally, I remembered a Geology 101 final in college during which I noticed the center of our football team copying the names of the geological eras off his palm. (Somehow he failed the test anyway!)

In media training workshops I urge participants to use notes when doing a phone interview but to avoid them in a face-to-face interview. Using notes in front of a reporter just invites him to write that you were dependent on notes. I recommend against using notes during television interviews, because they can undermine your credibility and credentials. However, notes are a legitimate aid in two isolated and unique circumstances: To get quotes right and to convey complex concepts or statistics.

For instance, if you want to highlight a point with an historical quote, there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I’m quoting Thomas Jefferson, who had it right, but I want to read his words exactly as he wrote them.....”

Similarly, it’s okay to say, “There is a lot of room for error here, so I want to read you these numbers.....” In other words, if you are going to use notes, explain why you are using them. And have a good explanation.

Your notes should be on an index card and after reading them put the card aside -- otherwise you may keep glancing down at them or fidgeting with them.

In no case do interview notes belong on the palm of your hand -- to most people they evoke the same cheating-on-the-test image they did for me. And certainly, if you need notes they ought to be about complex matters or exact wording, not about general themes. Ms. Palin’s notes were “Energy,” “Tax,” “Lift American Spirits,” general themes she makes all the time, not specific details that she might need to drive home those themes.

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Follow-Up Questions
At a recent gathering, I -- along with many others -- was asked to deliver a two-mintue proposal in my area of expertise that I would impose if I had the authority. I elected to address the state of the fourth estate. The remarks could be serious or unserious and I elected to made a serious point unseriously. Since my proposal was well-received, I share it here:

To understand this proposal, you have to know about Facemelter, a free iPhone application extremely popular with children four and up. With Facemelter, you take a photo on your phone and then use your fingers to distort the image by smearing the subject’s features all over the screen. Here is Illinois ex-governor Rod Blagojevich unmelted and Facemelted:



Now to the problem: Back in October, the balloon boy's family appeared on CNN, right after the nation heaved a collective sigh of relief that little Falcon had not, in fact, been in the gondola of the "escaped" balloon. Wolf Blitzer asked Falcon why he had run away and hidden. “You said we did it for the TV show,” Falcon said to his father. Blitzer ignored that bombshell and calmly asked the next entry on his list of questions.

No follow-up.

Flash forward to January 8 of this year. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is on ABC’s Good Morning America, discussing the recent underwear bomber attempt. He tells GMA’s new host, George Stephanopoulos, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.” Did the GMA host challenge Giuliani’s convenient memory with a mention of the 2001 anthrax mailings -- which included envelopes going to several of Stephanopoulos’ fellow journalists? No. Did Stephanopoulos cite the Washington, DC sniper incidents which terrorized the area where the host then worked? No. Did he cite the July 5, 2002 shooting incident at the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport? No. Did Stephanopoulos recall for the former mayor that transcendant day of infamy, September 11, 2001 in which Giuliani played a major, even heroic, role? No.

No follow-up.

So, my proposal is this: everyone who conducts interviews on television must attend the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism class conducted by the only broadcaster who understands and regularly asks follow-up questions: Jon Stewart.



Professor Stewart

Since, alas, there is no such course, my fallback proposition is that software engineers create a version of Facemelter for TV that will distort the image of any on-camera liar, evader or exaggerator and that the visual distortion be in direct ratio to the severity of the lie, evasion or exaggeration.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

****

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]]> Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:01:00 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=29#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=29 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=28

By George Merlis


Captain Murphy, author of Murphy's Law. Yes, he really did exist.

In 1949, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward A, Murphy, came up with his famous Murphy’s Law, “Anything that can go wrong will.” (The facts behind the legend are here.) With a nod in Captain Murphy’s direction, I have come up with my own law for media interviews: “Anyone unprepared for tough questions will get them.”

My law is completely unscientific and unprovable, just like Murphy’s, but both come from real world observation. Captain Murphy came up with his law after observing a particularly inept technician. I crafted mine as a cautionary note for media training workshops after watching countless spokespersons fall apart when they were asked unanticipated tough questions. Why weren't they prepared? Don't they know any reporter is capable of asking a tough question? And there's no down side to preparing for tough questions. If an interview subject prepares for nightmare questions and gets none, nothing's lost. But if the she does get them, she’ll be prepared to gracefully answer them.


I ask clients to list their nightmare questions.

In my media training workshops participants write a list of nightmare questions and then we collegially figure out how to respond to them. In the next round of practice interviews, I ask the nightmare questions. And when the interviews are over, we critique how well the participants deployed their responses.



The unprepared interview subject feels overwhelmed when he gets tough questions.

How should you answer a tough question? I recommend the interview equivalent of General Colin Powell’s “Shock and Awe” tactics: overwhelm the negative in a question with multiple positives. How many positives? Three is the ideal number. Vincent Covello, a social scientist and risk consultant with whom I once worked, did research that indicated three positives overwhelm a negative. Why three? I don’t know the neuromechanics, but there is something about the troika that appeals to our brains. Comedians will tell you that jokes work best when using threes, as in the ubiquitous, albeit unlikely, trio of priest, minister and rabbi who populate bars that exist only in standup routines.

To illustrate how a three-pronged shock and awe response works, let me cite a real world example. I do a lot of media training for NASA and inevitably in those workshops someone -- if not everyone -- comes up with some variation of this tough question:

“Why spend money on space exploration when there are such pressing needs here on earth?” Sometimes this is phrased “Why WASTE money on space exploration when our classrooms here on earth are overcrowded,” or “Why spend money IN space when (pick your problem):
There are homeless in America?
People are going to bed hungry?
So many Americans are out of work?
You could use the funds to find a cure for cancer?

Leaving aside the wise-guy response (you can’t spend money IN space.... all expenditures for space exploration are right here on planet earth), participants needed to come up with three positives for a shock and awe response. In this case workshop participants have, over the years, supplied me with an embarrassment of riches. Taking multiple effective responses and merging them, we find that not only are there three cogent points, but the last point has a subset of three more points.

Here are the elements of that response:

1. NASA’s budget is approved by the people’s representatives in Congress.
2. NASA’s budget is less than one percent of the total federal budget.
3. NASA’s budget is an INVESTMENT that pays society a variety of beneficial dividends.

Subset; The dividends:

1. The space agency creates a lot of science and technology jobs; the kind of jobs America needs in order to stay competitive in an increasingly technology-driven world economy.
2. NASA’s missions have broadened our knowledge of our planet, our solar system and our universe. In fact they have rewritten astronomy and physics textbooks.
3. Spinoffs of technologies developed for NASA have improved our daily lives by enabling powerful computer microprocessors, by giving us global positioning satellites, by supplying life-saving accurate weather predictions and by creating the means to build medical imaging devices that give early warning of cancers and other dread diseases.

This three-part answer, with its three-part subset is a shock and awe response to the negative “waste” or “spend” money on space. For media purposes we can’t get all of this to fit our ideal soundbite length of 30 words, spoken in ten seconds and comprised of three sentences. But with some condensation, here is a soundbite version:

NASA’s budget, less than one percent of federal expenditures, is an investment in high-tech jobs; knowledge of earth’s place in the universe, and spin-offs that make life easier and safer.

Following up on the soundbite portion, the respondent then cites any or all of the specifics to complete the shock and awe answer.


****

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]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:45:28 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=28#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=28 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=27
On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, was subdued by crew and passengers when he tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines Airbus bound for Detroit from Amsterdam. Abdulmutallab had packed his briefs with a high explosive known at PETN, but rather than destroying the aircraft, he succeeded only in burning his pants, legs and -- judging by the burns visible in the photo below -- sensitive areas of his anatomy.


ABC News obtained this photo of the underwear bomb.

On to the teachable moment: Two days later, on December 27, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appeared on three Sunday news shows and wound up setting off her own little explosion when she used the phrase “the system worked.” Her words were criticized and ridiculed by those who reasoned that if the system had worked, Abdulmutallab would never have been on the plane in the first place since: his own father fingered him as a radical Islamist at a meeting with CIA agents in Nigeria; his British visa had been pulled; he paid cash for his one-way ticket to the U.S., and he had no checked baggage.


Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. Her media messaging system didn't work very well.

The following day, Monday, December 28, Napolitano was back-peddling about the system working and said that the criticism had come about because her remarks on the Sunday interview shows had been taken out of context.

Had they? Since “I was taken out of context” is a near universal alibi for unfortunate statements to the media, I went back and read the transcripts of her three Sunday morning interviews. Let’s look at what she said, bearing in mind that on that Sunday no one knew for sure if the Nigerian had packed his shorts with explosives at the behest of Al-Qaeda, some other terrorist outfit or was just a freelance jihadist. True, he was claiming an Al-Qaeda link, but that Sunday the investigation was in its early stages. We did know, at that point, that the material Abdulmutallab attempted to ignite was the same compound used by Richard Reid, the Al-Qaeda shoe bomber, in his failed attempt to bring down an American Airlines flight over the Atlantic in December, 2001.

Here is the relevant part of the secretary’s Meet the Press appearance:
QUESTION: "Let me start by asking you, the suspect allegedly was carrying a compound on his body of PETN.  That was the same chemical compound that the "Shoe Bomber," Richard Reid, had on him some eight years ago.  The fact that he had this very same compound, does this, to you, represent a failure of security to detect?"

ANSWER:  "Well, I think we don't know enough to say one way or the other in that respect.  The forensics are still being done, the investigation is still underway.  I think the important point here is that once the incident occurred, everybody reacted the way they should; the passengers did, the flight crew did.  And literally, within an hour, additional measures had been instituted not only on the ground here in the United States, but abroad and, indeed, on the 128 flights that were already in the air from Europe."

Let’s analyze her answer. Or, more accurately, her non-answer. The question was about detecting PETN, not about passengers and flight crew subduing a terrorist with his pants on fire and certainly not about notifying other aircraft that an incident had taken place. So on the face of it, Napolitano was being evasive. She was using the classic acknowledge, bridge, positive point technique: acknowledge the tough question with a short form answer, build a bridge and make your positive message point. The only problem with her approach was that instead of acknowledging the actual question with a short form answer, she dodged it. An less evasive answer with a transition to her point might have been: “Yes, there was a failure to detect this compound. We are still looking into why that was.” She could then have said, “There are multiple layers in the system. So after the initial lapse resulted in his getting aboard, the rest of the system worked. The crew and passengers were able to restrain him and we were able to alert all 128 inbound flights from Europe.” Instead she said “we don’t know enough to say one way or the other in that respect.” She did not use the “system worked” phrase here. So while she was evasive, she gave critics little to hang their hats on.

Next up, the secretary appeared on ABC’s This Week where she was interviewed by Jake Tapper, and delivered this line: “I think the important thing to recognize here is that once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have. The passengers reacted correctly, the crew reacted correctly, [and] within an hour to 90 minutes, all 128 flights in the air had been notified. And those flights already had taken mitigation measures on the off-chance that there was somebody else also flying with some sort of destructive intent. So the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.” Reporters picking up “The system has worked really, very, very smoothly” out of that answer certainly would have been taking that out of context. But they didn’t have to do that because Napolitano failed to supply the context in her next interview, on CNN’s State of the Union.

On the CNN show, Interviewer Candy Crowley asked: “Do you think -- has there been any evidence of the Al Qaeda ties that this suspect has been claiming? “

And here’s where the secretary got into trouble. Her answer:

“Right now, that is part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing, and I think it would be inappropriate to speculate as to whether or not he has such ties. What we are focused on is making sure that the air [travel] environment remains safe, that people are confident when they travel. And one thing I'd like to point out is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. Within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred on the Northwest Airlines flight. We instituted new measures on the ground and at screening areas, both here in the United States and in Europe, where this flight originated. So the whole process of making sure that we respond properly, correctly and effectively went very smoothly. “

This is the one the critics seized on because she said, “the system worked” without qualifying it as she had on ABC with “once this incident occurred.” Were reporters and critics taking her out of context by quoting her CNN answer? Not really, because she, herself, failed to supply the context as she had done on the other shows.

The next day on NBC’s Today Show, Matt Lauer, wrested the “out of context” claim from the secretary. Here is that exchange:

LAUER: “You made a comment over the weekend and I want to call attention to that because a lot of people are disagreeing with it this morning.  You talked about this incident aboard this Northwest flight and you said ‘when it came right down to it, the system worked.’  A lot of people don't think the system worked at all, that the only thing that prevented outright disaster was luck.  Can you respond to that?”

NAPOLITANO: “Sure, I think the comment is being taken out of context. What I'm saying is that once the incident occurred, moving forward, we were immediately able to notify the 128 flights in the air of protective measures to take, immediately able to notify law enforcement on the ground, airports both domestically, internationally, all carriers, all of that happening within 60 to 90 minutes, so....”

LAUER: “So you're only talking about what happened after this man tried to ignite this explosive device on the plane.”

NAPOLITANO: “Indeed.”

LAUER: “You would then concede that the system prior to that, the system that's supposed to prevent something like this from happening, failed miserably?”

NAPOLITANO: “It did.  And that's why we are asking a lot of the same questions I heard you asking before this interview.  How did this individual get on the plane? Why wasn't the explosive material detected?  What do we need to do to change perhaps the rules that have been in place since 2006 for moving somebody from the generic database to more elevated status.  All of that under review right now.”

The media mastery lesson from this episode: If you’ve got a positive message to get out when responding to a crisis or a negative situation, you’re responsible for putting it in context. And you need to do it every time you address the matter. How much better (and less evasive) would Napolitano have appeared if she had said in every interview: “There was a terrible failure to keep this man off the plane in the first place, but the other elements of the system worked -- crew training, passenger alertness and our notification system all worked."


The accused would-be bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab. Fortunately for all aboard, his system didn't work, either.

Oh, another lesson to be taken away from this incident, one that has nothing whatsoever with media mastery: Al Qaeda doesn’t like Christmas -- Richard Reid tried his shoe bomb just before the holiday and Abdulmutallab ignited his pants and legs on Christmas day. So maybe our security authorities might want to think about being especially vigilant come next December.

And, finally, in the Closing the Barn Door After the Horse has Fled Category: on January 4, ten days after the incident, the State Department revoked Abdulmutallab’s visa to visit the United States. That, too, has absolutely nothing to do with media mastery, but I thought everyone would take comfort from the fact that in addition to being an accused terrorist, now Abdulmutallab is an illegal alien as well.

***

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]]> Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:26:16 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=27#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=27 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=26

By George Merlis

NBC'S ETHICS AND THE WHITE HOUSE GATE CRASHERS

Full disclosure: for seven years I was at the helm of Good Morning America and during that period nothing gave me more satisfaction than seeing the Today Show discomforted. But this comment does not flow from that ancient rivalry. On Dec. 1, the two publicity-craving Washington society wannabes who crashed the White House State Dinner for the Prime Minister of India, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, gave their only interview to date to Matt Lauer of Today. First, NBC’s announcement of their appearance used the word “crashers” in quotes, as if questioning whether or not their presence at a White House State Dinner without an invitation was, indeed, “crashing.”


Lauer omitted an inconvenient fact.

Then Lauer neglected to mention in his interview that the most notorious “reality” show aspirants since the Balloon Boy’s father, were being videotaped during their party-crashing adventure by cable channel Bravo for its “Real Housewives of Washington, DC” series. Bravo is NBC’s little brother, owned by the same corporate parent, General Electric. Lauer’s failure to mention that little bit of corporate synergy was either an ethical or journalistic lapse. Or both.

***

TOO MUCH REALITY?


President Obama greets the party-crashers. Transparency note: this is a White House photo. The fact that it was not withheld is about the only positive out of this story.

One possible explanation for the Secret Service’s lapse in admitting the publicity-hungry Salahis to the White House, sans invitation, could be the presence of Bravo’s reality show lights and cameras recording their every step. Might not that coverage have added an aura of credibility on the couple? If it did, it’s a greater lapse than first imagined because the cameras should have prompted extra caution not less. Here’s why: On September 9, 2001, two days before the 9/11 atttacks, two Belgian jounalists of Moroccan descent showed up with a video camera at the headquarters of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to interview Ahmad Shah Massoud, the resistance group’s leader. The Belgians were actually Tunesian operatives sponsored either by al-Qaeda or Pakistan’s pro-Taliban intelligence service. Their video camera contained a bomb, which they set off, killing Massoud and another top Northern Alliance figure.

So rather than granting the gate-crashers the glow of celebrity acceptance, the cameras should have set off Secret Service alarm bells. This is not a new concern, by the way. About 30 years ago, I accompanied David Hartman, then host of Good Morning America, to a Manhattan hotel for an interview with Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. After passing through U.S. State Department security we confronted Rabin’s Israeli bodyguards. They not only passed a metal detecting wand over us, they frisked us and then proceeded to take screwdrivers to our Sony video cameras, opening them up and inspecting the interiors for weapons or explosives.

Oh, and one final question: was Bravo a co-conspirator in the party-crashing? As a TV producer, I would have wanted to see the invitation -- not just to vet that it existed, but to shoot some video of it. Since "The Real Housewives of Washington, DC" is a "reality" show, and not a news show, if I were producing it, I would want video of the hyper-excited Salahis opening the invitation and "spontaneously" reacting to the good news. Congress is looking into the lapse. It remains to be seen if they will ask questions about Bravo's role in the matter.

***

TIGER AND OPRAH:
TWO BRANDS


Brand icon: Tiger Woods.

The biggest reality show currently on TV, the Tiger Woods Saga, is taking place almost entirely off-camera. The media have conferred on a handful of individuals the status of a brand; these people have grown beyond mere celebrity to become so iconic they are, like Coca-Cola and Kleenex, brands in and of themselves. Think about it: Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna and Tiger Woods are enterprises powered by personality; brands, just as surely as Ivory Soap and Heinz Ketchup are brands.

On November 30, Nancy Armour, a reporter for the Associated Press, called to ask me how I thought Woods was handling his Escalade-bashing incident. At this point only one rather disreputable tabloid had made a single salacious allegation against Woods. The golfer had crashed the SUV, been to the hospital, returned home and refused to talk with the police or the media. Instead he issued the first of his series of web site comments (this was the one where there was neither domestic abuse nor extra-marital dalliances).

I told Ms. Armour I thought Woods was handling his PR badly. Woods would be wise to get out in front of the story, even if he gave only one interview to one reporter, I said. Clamming up opened the floodgates of rumor and speculation and once the current is running through, it’s impossible to close those floodgates. Evasion and/or cover-up are almost always worse than the initial problem. And they never work. The more one evades, the deeper the media dig.

There remains the very basic question of whether the media should even be digging in this ditch. Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS sports, was quoted in another AP story as saying, “At some point, he’ll play golf and he’ll move on. And at some point this will become more embarrassing to the media than to Tiger.” The media have a lot to be embarrassed about. Watching CNN and other broadcasters, I had the impression that they felt compelled to race through the news of President Obama committing an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and the Senate health care reform debate so they could dwell at length on the really important stuff: the Tiger scandal.

Woods, meanwhile, in his favorite -- well, his only -- method of communication with the world at large, posted this on his web site: “Although I am a well-known person and have made my career as a professional athlete, I have been dismayed to realize the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means.” By tabloid, I assume Woods means NBC, CBS, ABC along with the National Enquirer, since those broadcasters, plus virtually every publication I have seen, extensively covered the story. (Dan Schorr, NPR’s Senior Correspondent is notoriously disinterested in sports. On Weekend Edition he said, “I not only know who Tiger Woods is, I now know more about him than I ever cared to know.”)


If your privacy is so important to you, why pose for and then release a photo like this with your wife and newborn child?

Should Woods have been dismayed by this “tabloid scrutiny?” Short answer is, yes. He did put himself out there for scrutiny. While it is true that he owes you and me and the rest of the public absolutely nothing more than the best golf game he can deliver, he owes the sponsors who have made him a very rich man a lot more. He owes them what they paid for which is unsurpassed talent wrapped in a clean, wholesome image. At the moment, the talent remains, but the image is showing lots of tarnish. Woods owes them the behavior that goes with the image they bought. If these sponsors wanted a “bad boy,” the sports, music and movie businesses offer no end of rogues they could hire. (And, might he not owe them the courtesy of using their products? The Escalade he wrecked belonged to General Motors and had been loaned to Woods when he was a spokesman for Buick. What? He wouldn’t even drive a Buick although he was urging the rest of us to buy one? What will we learn next? That he uses an electric shaver, not a Gillette Fusion, and drinks Red Bull, not Gatorade?)


Tiger touted Buicks, but drove a loaner Escalade -- until he wrecked it.


Three of Woods’ sponsors, Nike, Gatorade and Gillette, say they will stand by him. Another sponsor, AT&T, had yet to be heard from at this writing. But it remains to be seen just what “standing by” means in this instance. A company can continue to pay Woods and use him far more restrictively than in the past, trotting him out for corporate events but not running his TV commercials and magazine ads. Certainly, Nike, which sells a lot of gear to women, has got to be thinking seriously about how it can use Woods in a way that won’t alienate those customers.

And, we will never know about the deals that don’t come his way because a corporation that might have ponied up another fortune for a Tiger Woods endorsement decides not to approach him in the aftermath of the scandal.


Oprah: a brand untarnished by commercialism.

It is worthwhile to contrast the Tiger Woods brand with the Oprah Winfrey brand.

The iconic figure for both brands is an extraordinarily talented person. But what they have done with their talent speaks volumes.

Woods may well be the best golfer since 12th century Scottish shepherds began using sticks to knock stones into rabbit holes on the current site of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. Oprah is doubtless the most successful talk show host in the far briefer history of television, an interviewer who unfailingly asks the questions most on the minds of her viewers in a manner that equally unfailingly digs beneath the superficial talking point answers and gets to the heart of the matter.

Both are extraordinarily wealthy. But Oprah got that way without endorsing products for money. If she recommends a book, it is because she read it and thinks it will enrich her viewers’ lives. The Oprah brand sells Oprah’s up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy -- not cars, drinks, wireless service, athletic equipment and the like. Oh, and when there’s a scandal -- as there was when the elite girls school she funded in South Africa experienced a sexual abuse scandal -- Oprah did not hide behind gates and post messages on a web site. She was readily available to the media, actively involved in a very public house-cleaning and bought cell phones for every student in the school with her number on speed dial so they could report directly to her any future problems.

All of which suggests a solution to Tiger Woods problem: he should go on Oprah’s show and give her a full and honest interview. If she forgives him the rest of the nation will, too. Such is the power of the Oprah brand.

***

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]]> Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:45:42 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=26#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=26 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=25

By George Merlis

While listening to a recent broadcast of NPR’s Weekend Edition I heard host Scott Simon describe the venerable Dan Schorr, NPRs senior analyst, as “ the only man I've ever heard of who covered the Wall when it went up and you covered it when it came down.”

As it happens, I, too, covered both the beginning and end of the Berlin Wall. And I witnessed how television -- 48 years ago -- nearly turned the cold war into a hot war and how the medium -- 20 years ago -- was part of the joyous circus surrounding the end of the wall.

As souvenirs of those two momentous events, I have a lucite display case containing two newspaper stories I filed from Berlin in 1961 and a piece of the wall handed to me by a Berliner in 1989. The artifacts are reminders of that long-running story; the story of a wall which divided a city for 28 years -- time enough for an entire generation to be born and grow up with no personal frame of reference to a wall-less, undivided Berlin.


My Berlin Wall display.

In August of 1961, I was working for the “Rome Daily American,” a small-circulation tabloid that catered to expatriots living in Italy. In a bit of journalistic miscasting akin to having the late Hunter S. Thompson serve as a society editor, I had been hired as the paper’s sports editor.

When a German classmate from journalism school tipped me that there was about to be a big story breaking in Berlin, I went to Ed Hill, the Daily American’s editor, and asked him to send me there. He told me he wouldn’t assign me to Berlin, but that I could quit my job and go there and cover the news as a free-lancer. I did.

Before I left, Hill said, “Stay out of East Berlin.” Americans had free access to all sectors of Berlin, and I thought Hill was being overcautions. What I did not know at the time was the Rome Daily American was a CIA front, a fact I didn’t learn until 1973 when hearings chaired by Sen. Frank Church disclosed intelligence agency abuses. The Daily American had legions of “reporters” working in the Middle East as spies while back in Rome a small handful of us non-agents wrote and edited the paper.

In blissful ignorance of my real employer, I set off for Berlin, which was a unique city-state 100 miles inside the communist DDR, or GDR in English (GDR stood for German Democratic Republic, and the country was two out of three: it was German and it was a republic, insofar as there was no monarch. Democratic? Not so much.)

A little background is in order: At the end of World War II, Berlin was occupied by the Four Powers: the U.S. the U.S.S.R., France and England and the city was divided into four sectors, one under each nation’s control. Because the city was the traditional German capital and was so deep into East Germany, the Soviets unilaterally decided it was “Berlin Hauptstadt der DDR,” or Berlin, capital of the GDR. In fact, in June, 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev demanded that Berlin be ceded to the GDR. The U.S. allies wavered, but President John F. Kennedy told Khruschev that the U.S. would not hand West Berlin over to the Communists and would pay any price to defend its democracy. As he did in the Cuba Missile Crisis, Khruschev blinked first. But two months later, faced with a steady stream of East Germans defecting to the west via Berlin, the GDR and its Soviet sponsors erected the first iteration of the Wall over the course of a single night -- August 12-13.

This early Wall, the one I saw that summer of 1961, was only several courses of crudely cemented cinderblock surmounted with with some strands of barbed wire. As you can see from the photo below, architecture, it was not.



The Wall was so low I could see over it; the cinderblock rose no higher than four to five feet, in some places it was only three feet high. The wall was set back a couple of meters from the sector border line, which meant anyone who cleared the cinderblock and wire had to jog several paces to freedom. That short jog was enough distance to give the dreaded East German Volkspolizei -- People’s Police, or VoPos -- a chance to shoot defectors. And they did. Regularly.



On September 5, the Rome Daily American, above, carried a first-person account I filed after riding in a two-hour U.S. Army jeep patrol along the Wall in the American sector. There were four enlisted men in the jeep -- a driver, a sergeant who was in charge, and the two-man crew of the .50 caliber machine gun mounted behind the front seats, its long barrel extending out over the jeep’s hood. The story was headlined “A Jeep Ride Along Berlin’s ‘Chinese Wall.’” The G.I.s called it the Chinese wall, not realizing that the Great Wall of China was built to keep people out, while the Berlin Wall was built to keep a captive population in. As we drove, East Berliners who spotted us looked around cautiously for VoPos and, if they saw none, waved to us. VoPos, on the other hand, tended to stare at us through binoculars or unsling their rifles when we came into view.


I took this photograph from a sniper's nest overlooking Checkpoint Charlie on the second floor of a building housing a very busy, lively bar. The Soviets knew it was there and had hostilities broken out it would have been an early target.

The very next day, September 6, I ignored Ed Hill’s warning and crossed over into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie -- the only opening between east and west in the American sector -- and I strolled around East Berlin. World War II had ended 16 years earlier and while West Berlin still exhibited some damage, East Berlin looked as if the war had ended 16 days earlier. There was rubble everywhere. In vacant lots here and there I saw parked Soviet tanks, their crews lying on the fenders and turrets, sunning themselves. I walked deeper into the Communist zone, never realizing my two pieces of identification might be dangerous -- a press card from a CIA-front and a passport with a year-old 14-day Soviet visa and stamps indicating I had been in Leningrad and Moscow for only six of those 14 days. (Six days into a student tour of Russia in the summer of 1960, I had been arrested for distributing “noxious anti-Soviet propaganda” -- a Russian version of Life Magazine -- and expelled from the Soviet Union.)

When I headed back toward West Berlin, all those parked tanks were out in the streets, their engines roaring, dirty exhaust fumes filling the air. The crews were wearing their helmets and there were companies of infantry -- both Soviet and the East German NV troops (National Volksarmee, or National People’s Army) -- in formation behind the tanks. This looked serious, so I hurried to Checkpoint Charlie and presented my passport to an East German border patrol officer, who thankfully was too preoccupied to study it and let me pass through. Just beyond the crossing gate, I learned the reason for the border patrol officer’s preoccupation and the tank-and-infantry alert: television.

NBC talk show host Jack Parr had brought his program to Berlin and, for the benefit of the cameras, the army loaned him 50 fully-equipped infantrymen, a jeep armed like the one I had ridden in the day before, and a few high-ranking officers. With his little army, Parr staged a war game, having the G.I.s rush toward the wall, carrying their weapons at port arms. This was alarming enough to get the Soviets to scramble their tanks which, in turn, provoked the Americans to scramble their tanks. On either side of Checkpoint Charlie there were dozens of tanks and hundreds of troops lined up, facing each other because Jack Parr decided to invent reality television by playing war in the most dangerous city on the planet. Fortunately, no soldiers on either side of the checkpoint got trigger-happy and both armies stood down after a confrontation that lasted hours. It was the first time I observed television becoming, rather than covering, a news story. As a print reporter, I waxed self-righteous about that.

The coincidence of my stroll through East Berlin at the exact moment Jack Parr and crew decided to see how close they could come to igniting World War III, was matched by another coincidence 28 years later.

At the time I was supervising producer of ABC-TV’s Home Show, a nice mix of homey content that was rendered obsolete by the birth of the Home and Garden Television cable network. In the autumn of 1989, the East German government had begun loosening the restraints on its people; allowing East Germans to walk into West Berlin at specified times through some of the checkpoints. It was clear that it was only a matter of time before the GDR collapsed. Our show’s executive producer, Woody Fraser, decided to send Bruce Jenner, as a correspondent, and me, as his producer, to Berlin to do some pre-Thanksgiving segments with U.S. troops on the East/West border and to talk to Berliners about the gift of freedom.

On the ninth of November, 20 years ago, Jenner and I were set up to do a live feed. Because of the time difference, it was night and our lights illuminated our broadcast platform and a portion of Wall. The Wall itself looked nothing like the one I had seen in 1961. It was concrete, not cinderblock and rose to the height of a two-story building. On the Western side it was covered with graffiti. Just over the Wall patrolling VoPos and their police dogs stood on high scaffolding, the men visible from the knees up. As soon as it was clear we were going to be broadcasting, they began waving at us, smiling broadly. It was a world removed from my introduction to the VoPos three decades earlier.

Five minutes before we went on the air live we caught an amazing break: the East German government announced it was opening the wall at the Brandenberg Gate, a symbolic act that signified the end of the divisive Wall. West Berliners took that announcement as clearance to attack the wall and they immediately had at it with hammers, sledges and anything they could lay their hands on -- all of it unfolding as we went live on the air. Even the VoPos atop the scaffolding got caught up in the moment, leaning over the Wall and shouting encouragement to the hammering West Berliners.

Afterward, TV journalists asked me how I, producing a show for housewives, had known exactly when the big story was going to break, how we had arranged to be on live just when the announcement came and the destruction started, how the Home Show had scooped everyone else. No one would believe it was just dumb luck and the fortuitous time difference between Berlin, where we were originating, and Los Angeles, where the Home Show show was fed to the network live at 7 a.m., Pacific time. THAT was reality television.


When our segment ended, our translator handed me this shard of the Wall which he had secured from a hammer-swinging young man who had never known a wall-less Berlin.

HISTORIC PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES
AT THE BERLIN WALL

The Berlin Wall has served as a dramatic backdrop for major political speeches almost from the start. Two U.S. presidents, Kennedy and Reagan, each made one of their most memorable speeches in front of the Wall.


In 1963, President Kennedy came to Berlin and delivered his famous "Ich bein ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner) speech. It is estimated that fully half the population of West Berlin -- well over a million people -- thronged the streets that day to catch a glimpse of the president who stood up to the Soviet demand that their city be handed over to East Germany


Twenty-four years later, another American President, Ronald Reagan, stood in front of the Brandenberg Gate and also used a German phrase: "Es gibt nur ein Berlin" (There is only one Berlin). Then he demanded of the Soviet Communist Party's General Secretary, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Last year, while still a candidate for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama delivered a speech where the Wall once stood and drew the largest live audience he had ever spoken to up until that time: 200,000-plus.

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]]> Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:58:06 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=25#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=25 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=24
By George Merlis

Those of you who have been through my media training course know that I teach that today’s media are driven by five F words (all of which can be broadcast without fear of a huge fine from the FCC). They are:

Fear -- The media love to scare us. Fright glues us to the page or the TV screen.
Fury -- The media are biased -- in favor of controversy. If it’s a scary controversy, all the better
Fame -- The media love stories about the famous or those they can make famous.
Fun -- Every stolid local anchor thinks he’s Jon Stewart these days. The media love stories that they can make fun of or that are funny in and of themselves.
Fascination -- The media still go for those “I didn’t know that” kind of stories

In conflicts involving science, the media can often drum up the first two -- fear and fury -- but it’s rare they can add a really famous name to the mix.

Enter global climate change. It’s got three out of five going for it, and for some it’s got four out of five. FEAR: The consequences of a significant rise in the world’s sea level in the next 75 to 100 years is scary -- since the vast majority of the earth’s population lives in proximity to a coastline. FURY: There is a vociferous community angrily denying either climate change or a human hand in climate change. FAME: The leading spokesperson calling attention to the climate change issue is the only man ever to win a Grammy, an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, former Vice President Al Gore. And, for some, FUN: Gore’s sometimes stiff personality provides a rich target for comedic barbs from global climate change deniers.


Former Vice President Gore

I broach this subject because of the confluence of three events:

1. Gore just published his new book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” and he began making the rounds of TV shows to promote it (including back-to-back appearances on the two most influential fake news programs on the air: “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the “Colbert Report.” Oh, and he did a full hour with Charlie Rose on PBS on the same night.)

2. Climate change deniers have taken a new tack: since there were several colder-than-normal summers in much of the world, especially in parts of the world, like New York City, where media headquarters are concentrated, they are claiming we face global cooling, not global warming. (Never mind that globally 1998 was the warmest year since the invention of the thermometer and 2005 was close. The fact that years between '98 and '05 did not send the mercury higher is taken as evidence that the peak has passed and we will soon be building igloos in Florida.)

3. I spent a week media training scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, including two days working with earth scientists, many of whom devote their considerable talents to observing, charting and understanding climate change.

The good news about having Al Gore as a spokesperson is that he is famous and he speaks in layman’s terms. The bad news about having Al Gore as a spokesperson is that his fame is based on his being a politician and politicians’ motives have been made suspect, largely due to a steady drumbeat of accusations from other politicians. Moreover, the New York Times raised some questions about Gore’s motives by running a front page article about the former VP’s substantial investments in alternative energy technologies. Apparently the newspaper expected him to buy stock in Exxon, Halliburton and the Mingo Logan Coal Company. In any event, the deniers’ answer to any point Gore makes will always be: “He’s just serving his political agenda” and now, “He’s just serving his personal financial interest.”

But what of the scientists making the same points as Gore? True none of them has a similar degree of that third F word, FAME, but then what politically or financially is in it for them? How can their motives be impugned? Aren’t the impugners at best what The New Yorker writer Michael Spector calls, “people who find scientific research too heavily burdened by facts” or at worst people simply serving THEIR political and financial agendas? (Case in point, the book “Censoring Science” by Mark Bowen chronicles the successful efforts in 2006 of political appointees, serving in posts formerly occupied by career professionals in the NASA public affairs office, to censor climate change science in press releases in order to suit political and economic agendas.)

The title of Spector’s new book says it all: “Denialsim: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives.” Spector defines denialsim as what happens “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.” Clearly the “comfortable lie” regarding climate change has great appeal; a poll this year found 57 percent of Americans think the climate is warming, down a full 20 points from a 2005 poll which found 77 percent of respondents convinced of global warming.

This is largely a media problem and it revolves around the second F word: FURY. In order to gin up a good controversy, the media need two sides. Never mind that the denial side is smaller, weaker in its science and frequently influenced by financial motives; the controversy, the FURY is what’s important. So the media give inappropriately disproportionate weight to the weaker argument. And taking advantage of that, the deniers have been emboldened enough to come up with the canard of “global cooling.”

The economists who wrote the best-selling “Freakonomics” have decided to challenge the worldwide general consensus of reputable scientists by joining the climate cooling team. The new book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is "Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance," a compelling a title if ever there were one.

Levitt/Dubner write: “There's this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased." That led the Associated Press to present global climate statistics to a group of prominent independent statisticians in a blind test. The statisticians unanimously said the numbers do not prove global cooling and, in fact, point to global warning. For his part, Levitt told the AP that he had not done a statistical analysis of the numbers, just “eyeballed” them, which is proof -- if ever you needed it -- that economics in not a science. Or, at least proof that Levitt, who is not letting facts get in the way of a lie, is no scientist. And not much of a journalist, either.


Global temperatures since 1855

Levitt further told the AP that the reference to “cooling” in the book title was about ideas to cool the planet down through geo-engineering. In this case geo-engineering means combatting the warming effects of carbon dioxide emissions by spewing millions of tons of aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect back the sun’s heat. In other words, pollute the atmosphere to cool the planet, rather than reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Levitt has been called to account by many scientists, not the least of them climatologist Ken Caldeira who the book quotes in support of the thesis that the world is cooling. Caldeira, smarting from what he considered a misrepresentation of his views, told physicist and climate expert Joe Romm, who writes the blog climateprogress.org:

“I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.”

Now that was a terrific soundbite.

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]]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:36:15 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=24#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=24 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=23

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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