I’ve posted a great YouTube video below that shows in excruciating detail how to deal with a hostile interrogator in the media. The only thing is that this interrogator wasn’t hostile; she was very nice, just not very smart.
I was once told by Reid Buckley (William F. Buckley, Jr’s younger brother and a famous debater in his own right) that the most potent force one has in dealing with a hostile interrogator on TV or radio is silence. Silence is death to them. Silence makes them keep on jibbering and end up looking the fool. But most people fall into the trap of the much more experienced talking heads and end up looking the fools themselves. In the clip below, you can see what I mean about the silence and one word answers. Watch the poor woman conducting the interview struggle.
MD and I have been on many, many TV and radio shows, and what we’ve learned from it all (plus from talking to a lot of people in the biz) is that it’s all entertainment, pure and simple. Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, all of them, are entertainers. If their shows aren’t entertaining, they lose ratings, and they ultimately go off the air. Many people think of these folks as hard news people, but they’re not, they’re entertainers. So they’ve got to be entertaining. And the way most of them are entertaining – especially the Sean Hannity types – is by attacking their guests.
Most guests who go on these shows are experts of some kind and they know their stuff, so they figure they can hold their own with O’Reilly, Hannity or any of the rest because the expert knows that he/she knows way more than the interviewer about the subject in which the experts are expert. What the experts don’t count on, though, when they walk into the lairs of O’Reilly, Hannity, Matthews et al are that they are experts in doing live TV and in savaging guests whose opinions they don’t like. And the guests pay the price for their hubris.
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