Control. It may be the most misunderstood and improperly taught element of media training. The time has come to finally get it right.

Media trainers typically instruct the would-be spokesperson that he or she must control the news interview using a variety of tactics. Some of the tactics are useful; many are actually harmful. But all seek to gain some form of dominance over the reporter as if the interview were a form of Hollywood post-apacolyptic death match: Two men enter. One man leaves.

With practice, you might even become good enough at this adversarial style of news interviewing to routinely wrest control from reporters and assert your messages with all the forcefulness of a ramrod against the castle gates. If so, what have you actually gained? Since our society still frowns one slaying reporters on the spot, he or she goes back to the office or station and writes the story without you there, but with a fresh image of you as overbearing, boorish, even arrogant. You feel great after having “won” the interview; but totally confused by the continued poor representation of your organization in the news media.

Joel Drucker, writing in the recent media training special edition of PR Tactics, improves on the traditional “take no prisoners” form of news interviewing with recommendations for a kinder, gentler form of control. “What must be taught in media training is the ability to take control by showing genuine curiosity for the journalist’s audience —and then building on that information to show how the company fits into that conversation,” Drucker writes.

Better, but let’s take that final step and get fully beyond the concept of control.

Drucker correctly refocuses the news interview away from the tactics of the single question and response and onto managing the emotional climate of the news interview.    Unfortunately, control, no matter how benignly it is wielded or perceived, is still a form of dominance. The message communicated to the reporter is one of intrusion into the processes of newsgathering and distribution. If you want to make an adversary of a reporter, inserting yourself into that process is probably the best way.

The fact is there is very little in a news interview you can control.

You cannot control:

v     The reporter’s agenda

v     The questions he or she will ask

v     The reporter’s attitude or demeanor during the interview

v     Who else the reporter interviews for the story

v     The way the reporter ultimately prepares the final story (the writing and editing process)

With your choices (or lack of them) you can seek to influence these dimensions of the interview, but you cannot control them. The more you seek control (dominance) over these dimensions, the greater your chances of negatively influencing the reporter and the story.

What then, can you as spokesperson or interviewee, control in the interview? There are two things and only two things:

v     You can control your emotions and the resulting physical reactions you have toward the reporter.

v     You can control the words that come out of your mouth.

Emotions and the physical reactions that result from them represent the greatest mystique in the entire arena of news interviewing. When a reporter is brash, aggressive, demanding or adversarial, a typical emotional reaction is defensiveness, denial, debate or justification. Some people respond to aggression with aggression. Responding that way to a reporter is tantamount to splitting an atom and watching the nuclear chain reaction that ensues. In some cases, a reporter doesn’t even have to be intentionally aggressive. For these people, a question based on an incorrect assumption or an opposing viewpoint even without the intention to accuse, sets off the emotional reaction resulting in counterproductive behaviors.
Emotional Self-Control

News interviews by their nature are potentially adversarial. When you as a spokesperson allow yourself to be driven by your emotions, you all but guarantee that potential will be realized. The result is a story that portrays you and your organization as combative or worse. However, if you learn the simple discipline of monitoring your emotions during an interview, you can compensate and diffuse the adversarial spiral rather than escalating it.

The starting point for employing this discipline is recognizing your attitudes toward reporters and the news media as a whole long before you ever face a reporter in an interview. TMT media training seminars routinely include a segment in which participants are encouraged to discuss their most strongly held negative attitudes toward the news media. Once those negative opinions are out in the open, and with no attempt on our part to change those beliefs or opinions about the news media, it’s amazing how seminar participants quickly learn to reframe an adversarial question into an opportunity to deliver a positive message.
The Discipline of Choice

Which brings us to the final thing you can control in a news interview: your words. No matter what anyone has told you, no reporter (or anyone else for that matter) can put words in your mouth. Your verbal response to any questions is ALWAYS a choice. The discipline needed in this case is to simply make it a conscious choice. Will I respond to veiled accusations and implications built into a question, or will I choose to make a positive statement satisfying the request for information?

Take notice here of the nature of some questions…the ones that seem trickiest and most underhanded. There are usually two components in such a question. Yes, one component includes a false assumption, an accusation or outright misinformation. But the other component is a simple request for information. Apply a little discipline here, and soon your ear will begin to separate the information request from the other, emotion-laden aspect. Now, you are prepared to make a conscious choice, not an involuntary one, about how you will respond.

Making the correct choice is also matter of recognizing your role in the interview relative to the reporter. Your job in the interview is not to recruit the reporter to your perspective. Your job is not to debate the reporter, argue a point or confront what you believe to be the reporter’s misunderstanding. The reporter disagrees with you? Asks questions that reflect a bias or conflicting agenda? So what? The interview is no place to proselytize. Remember, to assert a positive statement or message point in no way requires that you first deny or defend against a negative one. Rather, in the interview, your job is to get your words into the story your way so that readers, listeners or viewers receive and have the opportunity to be persuaded by your messages. That’s it. No more. No less.

Control, as it applies to news interviewing, has long been misperceived as the application of some form of dominance, a tactic that gets you what you want by diminishing the options of the news reporter. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. And its time to recognize the limits of our ability to affect control in the news interview.