The interview ran nineteen minutes. Forty seconds of it were used. He had said the forty seconds in minute fourteen, when he had stopped being careful, and he could not remember saying it at all.
Executive Authority Answer
Media training taught as technique fails, because journalists recognise every technique it teaches and the recognition is itself the story. Executive Authority’s position is that the work is preparation rather than performance: knowing what the piece is actually about, knowing your three or four positions well enough to state them under pressure, knowing precisely what you will not say and why, and understanding that everything is on the record and permanent. Bridging, blocking and message-pivoting are the visible marks of somebody who has been trained, and they make a leader easier to write about.
Contents
- What Media Training Actually Is
- Why This Discipline Exists Now
- What a Journalist Is Actually Doing
- Why the Standard Techniques Backfire
- What Preparation Means Instead
- Off the Record and Its Variants
- The Formats and How They Differ
- The Question Types
- When It Is Genuinely Hostile
- Who Should Face the Press
- Declining, and Its Cost
- What Happens After
- The Seven Failures
- The Situations Underneath
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Executive Summary
What Media Training Actually Is
Most of what is sold under this name is performance coaching for a camera. Sit like this, look here, keep answers to twenty seconds, get back to your message.
That is a small and largely unhelpful part of it, and the reason is simple. The people you are dealing with have interviewed thousands of executives, most of whom have had the same training from a small number of firms. Every technique in the standard repertoire is not just familiar to them. It is a signal, and the signal says this person has been prepared, which changes what they write.
The useful definition is narrower and harder. Media training is deciding what you will say and what you will not say, before a conversation you do not control, with somebody sitting opposite you whose job is legitimate and whose interests are not yours.
Two things in that sentence carry the weight. You cannot control it, which means preparation is about decisions rather than about scripts. And their interests are legitimate: a journalist doing their job properly is not attacking you, and executives who treat the encounter as adversarial produce the defensive material that makes a difficult piece worse.
Why This Discipline Exists Now
Worth a paragraph, because it explains why the standard product is so poorly matched to what senior people actually face.
Media training as a commercial category was built in the 1980s for a specific problem: executives appearing on television, unfamiliar with the medium, in a world where a broadcast interview was a rare and high-stakes event. The techniques were designed for that. Short answers because clips were short. Message discipline because there were two or three outlets that mattered. Bridging because an interviewer had limited time and could be steered.
Almost none of those conditions holds. There is no scarcity of outlets. Interviews are frequently long-form and unedited. Every executive is available for comment continuously, by email, on a panel, in a podcast, at a conference with somebody recording. And the interviewers have interviewed thousands of people trained in exactly the same methods, which means the methods now function as identification rather than as protection.
The other change is permanence. In 1985 a poor interview was seen once and gone. Today it is a clip, a transcript, and a search result, and it is retrievable by anybody assessing you in nine years. The cost of a bad twenty seconds has increased by an order of magnitude while the training has not moved.
Which leads to the position this reference takes. What matters is the deciding, not the delivery. What you think. What you will say. What you will not say. And what you can bear reading under your own photograph in eleven years.
What a Journalist Is Actually Doing
Understand the mechanics and most of the anxiety resolves, because almost none of it is personal.
A journalist has a piece to write, a deadline, and an editor who has already been told roughly what the piece is. That last part matters more than anything else. By the time you are called, the shape of the story usually exists. You are not being consulted about what it should be. You are being given the opportunity to be in it accurately.
They need three things from you. A quote that says something, because a piece full of no-comment is a weaker piece. Confirmation or correction of facts they already have. And a sense of whether you are credible, which shapes how they characterise everything else you say.
They are not trying to trick you. The trick framing is comforting and wrong, and it produces exactly the wrong behaviour. What they are doing is asking questions until something interesting is said, which is their job, and the interesting thing is frequently said in minute fourteen when the executive has relaxed.
The thing worth internalising: there is no off period in an interview. Not before it starts, not while the camera is being adjusted, not in the corridor afterwards. The forty seconds that get used are usually not from the part you were concentrating on.
You are not being asked what the story is. You are being offered a place in one that already exists.
Why the Standard Techniques Backfire
Four things are taught almost universally and each has a specific failure mode with a professional interviewer.
Bridging. Acknowledge the question, pivot to your message. That is a fine point, and what our customers tell us is. Every journalist has heard this several thousand times. It is detected instantly, it establishes that you are managing rather than answering, and the next question is sharper because you have shown that the first one landed.
Blocking. Refusing to engage while appearing to. I am not going to speculate on that. Say it once, about something genuinely speculative, and it is fine. Reach for it four times and the piece that runs on Sunday is about what the chief executive would not discuss, and that is the paragraph everybody reads.
Message discipline. Three key messages, repeated regardless of what is asked. In a press release this is sound. In a conversation it produces somebody who is audibly not listening, and the resulting piece describes an executive who stuck to their talking points, which is never a compliment.
The twenty-second answer. Taught for broadcast and applied everywhere. It is right that broadcast uses short clips. It is wrong that every answer should be built as one, because a complex question answered in a soundbite reads as evasion in print and the print journalist is the one writing two thousand words.
The common thread: each technique optimises for controlling the output, and none of them controls the output. What they control is how you are characterised, and they push it in one direction.
What Preparation Means Instead
Four things, none of them performance, all of them decided before the conversation.
Know what the piece is
Ask. Before you agree to anything, ask what the piece is about, who else they have spoken to, when it runs, and whether there is an angle. Journalists answer those questions, usually straight, because they want you in the chair.
What you learn changes everything. A profile is a different conversation from an investigation. A sector piece where you are one of six voices is different from a piece where you are the subject. And who else they have spoken to tells you which claims you will be asked to respond to.
Know your three positions
Not messages. Positions: things you actually think, stated in sentences you would be content to see printed exactly as spoken.
The difference shows up when it gets hard. A message is something somebody handed you in a briefing pack, and it falls apart the moment the conversation goes somewhere the pack did not. A position is something you hold, so it survives being come at from an angle nobody rehearsed, because you are not retrieving a form of words. You are saying what you think.
Know what you will not say
This is the half that gets skipped and it is the half that protects you. Decide in advance, specifically: anything about the litigation, anything about individuals, anything about the unannounced transaction, anything about numbers before the results date.
Decided the night before, a refusal is clean and it takes a second. Decided in the chair, it is visibly a decision, and the pause in front of it is what the journalist writes down. The words are the same. The two seconds are not, and the two seconds are what gets reported.
Assume permanence
Everything is recorded, everything is transcribed, and everything is retrievable in nine months when the situation has changed. The statement you make today will be placed next to the statement you make in March by somebody with an archive and a point to make.
The practical test before saying anything: would this sentence still be one I am content with if the worst plausible version of this situation turns out to be true? Where the answer is no, the sentence is a hostage.
Off the Record and Its Variants
The most misunderstood area in the subject, and the misunderstanding is expensive.
These are not switches. They are negotiated terms with variable meanings, and the meaning is whatever both parties agreed, which means it is whatever was actually said and understood rather than whatever you assumed.
| Term | Common understanding | What to establish |
|---|---|---|
| Off the record | Not for publication in any form | Whether they may use it to pursue the story elsewhere |
| On background | Usable, not attributed to you | What description they will use instead |
| Deep background | Usable with no attribution at all | Whether it can be stated as fact |
| Unattributable | Varies considerably by market | Everything, because it varies |
Three rules follow and they are not complicated.
Agree the terms before you say the thing, not afterwards. Turning to somebody and asking to make the last sentence off the record is not a mechanism that exists, however many people have tried it in a car park.
They must be agreed explicitly, in words, by both parties. A journalist who has not said yes has not agreed, and a mumbled assumption is not an agreement.
And assume anything genuinely damaging comes out regardless, because the man you are trusting has an editor, a mortgage and a story. Off the record protects a relationship. It does not protect a secret.
The Formats and How They Differ
Almost all published advice is written for broadcast, which is the format most executives encounter least.
| Format | What actually matters | The specific risk |
|---|---|---|
| Live broadcast | Brevity, and not being drawn | No edit, so a slip is permanent |
| Recorded broadcast | What survives the edit | Forty seconds chosen from nineteen minutes |
| Print interview | Precision, because they have the transcript | Everything, including the aside |
| Written questions | Exact wording, no time pressure | Over-answering because it feels safe |
| Trade press | Technical accuracy | They know more than you expect |
| Podcast | Length, and relaxation | Ninety minutes with no edit and no discipline |
The last row is the newest and the most underestimated. Ninety minutes on a podcast, in a comfortable chair with a coffee, produces an enormous amount of unguarded material, published whole, searchable forever. It is the highest-risk format anybody is using and it gets the least preparation, because it does not feel like an interview.
Written questions carry the opposite trap. No time pressure feels safe, so people write at length, and length is where the unnecessary claim appears. The discipline in that format is answering the question asked and stopping, which is harder in writing than in speech.
The Question Types
Six recur, and each has a shape.
The premise question. Given that your strategy has failed, what happens now? Answer it and you have agreed the premise. Correct the premise in one short factual sentence, then answer, because a premise left standing is reported as accepted.
The hypothetical. What would you do if the regulator ruled against you? A hypothetical answered becomes a position on a real thing. Saying you deal with situations that arise is one of the few standard responses that still works, because it is true.
The comparison. Your competitor has done this. Any answer at all is you commenting on another company, which is a headline in its own right. Answer about your own business and leave the comparison lying on the table.
The absent-person question. What do you say to the family, to the staff who lost jobs, to the customers affected. This is legitimate and requires a real answer. An evasion here is the most damaging moment available in any interview.
The silence. The journalist says nothing after your answer, waiting. This is the oldest technique in the profession and it works constantly, because people fill silence and what they add is unplanned. Stop when you have finished. Let it sit.
The friendly close. Anything else you want to add? Asked warmly, at the end, when you have relaxed. It is a genuine offer and it is also where minute fourteen happens. Have an answer prepared or decline it.
When It Is Genuinely Hostile
Most interviews are not hostile. Some are, and the shape is different.
You will know beforehand, because a hostile piece announces itself in the approach: a list of specific allegations, a short deadline, a request for comment rather than for an interview. That combination is not an interview request. It is a right-of-reply exercise, and treating it as a conversation is the error.
There the decision is whether to sit down at all, and it should be taken deliberately rather than out of instinct. A written response to written allegations gives you precision and gives them no footage. An interview lets people watch you answer, which matters when the accusation is about who you are rather than what happened.
What never works is the middle. A defensive interview given in the hope of softening the piece. It does not soften the piece and it hands them four more quotes.
The other thing to know is that a hostile piece is frequently one instalment. Whatever you say becomes the baseline for the follow-up, which is why hour-one crisis discipline applies here: say less, commit to less, and do not reassure about things you have not yet verified.
Who Should Face the Press
The default is the chief executive and it is frequently the wrong answer. Every appearance welds the subject to the person, permanently, in a search result, and that is a cost you should spend on purpose.
| Situation | Who | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy, results, direction | Chief executive | Nobody else can speak for the whole |
| Technical or operational detail | The relevant leader | Credibility here comes from competence |
| A serious incident | Chief executive, once | Delegation reads as distance |
| An ongoing matter with instalments | Chief executive once, then a spokesperson | Repeat appearances make it a story about a person |
| Anything concerning the chief executive | The chair | The subject cannot conduct the response |
| Trade and technical press | The specialist | They know more than a generalist can carry |
The fourth row is where organisations lose most. A chief executive who fronts every instalment of a long-running story becomes the story, and the transition to a spokesperson later reads as retreat. Deciding at the outset which appearances are yours is considerably cheaper than deciding it in month four.
Declining, and Its Cost
Declining is a legitimate decision and it is never free, which is the part people get wrong in both directions.
The cost is that the piece runs anyway, with a line saying you declined to comment, and that line is read as an answer. It is the least favourable available characterisation of your position and you have no influence over what sits around it.
The benefit is that you have said nothing that can be used, quoted, or placed next to something you say later. In a live legal matter that is frequently decisive and counsel will say so.
The middle option is under-used. A short written statement, on the record, with no interview attached. It fills the space that declined to comment would have filled, it is in your words, and it commits you to nothing past its own four sentences. For most difficult approaches it is the right answer, and people treat it as a compromise when it is the strongest position on the table.
What Happens After
Three things, all of which people handle badly.
The piece is not what you expected. It rarely is, because you had one conversation and they had six. The instinct to complain should be resisted unless something is factually wrong, and factually wrong means a checkable fact rather than an interpretation you dislike.
A correction is available and it costs something. Papers correct facts. They do not correct emphasis, framing or tone, and asking them to marks you as somebody who does not know the difference. Where there is a real factual error, ask precisely, and ask once.
The relationship persists. The journalist who wrote the piece you disliked will write about you again, probably several times. How you respond to this piece determines the next one, and executives who react badly to a fair piece acquire a characterisation that outlasts the specific story.
The Seven Failures
Bridging. Recognised instantly, establishes you are managing rather than answering, and sharpens the next question.
Treating it as adversarial. The journalist is doing a legitimate job. Defensiveness produces the material that makes a difficult piece worse.
Relaxing. The forty seconds that get used come from minute fourteen, and there is no off period at any point.
Assuming off the record means what you think it means. It is a negotiated term, it has to be agreed out loud before you speak, and it protects a relationship rather than a secret.
Filling the silence. The oldest technique in the profession and it works constantly, because what people add unprompted is unplanned.
Deciding in the chair what to refuse. The words come out identical to a prepared refusal and the two seconds in front of them do not, and the two seconds are what gets written down.
Complaining about framing. Publications correct facts, not emphasis. Requesting otherwise marks you and does not change the piece.
The Situations Underneath
The counterparty. what a journalist is actually doing, what off the record actually means, written statement or interview.
Corrections and denials. why a denial repeats the accusation, what a correction achieves.
Under pressure. what a hostile question is testing, answering the unexpected question, why the rehearsed answer is wrong, what you cannot say twice.
On camera. how to look confident on camera, what your body language says, how to sound more authoritative.
Crisis conditions. crisis communication, why the second statement matters most, who should speak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is media training?
The discipline of knowing what you will say and what you will not say before a conversation you cannot control, with somebody whose interests are legitimate and different from yours. Most of what is sold under the name is performance coaching for a camera.
Why do the standard techniques fail?
Because journalists recognise every one of them. Bridging, blocking and message discipline are detected instantly, and the recognition establishes that you are managing rather than answering.
Is bridging ever right?
Rarely, and never as a general method. Every journalist has heard it thousands of times, and using it tells them the question landed, which is why the next one is sharper.
Are journalists trying to trick you?
No, and the framing produces exactly the wrong behaviour. They are asking questions until something interesting is said, which is their job, and the interesting thing usually arrives in minute fourteen.
What should you ask before agreeing?
What the piece is about, who else they are speaking to, when it publishes, and whether there is an angle. They generally answer honestly, because they want the interview.
What is a position, as opposed to a message?
A message is something you were given and it degrades when the conversation goes somewhere unexpected. A position is something you hold, and it survives being approached from an angle nobody anticipated.
Why decide in advance what you will not say?
Because a prepared decline is clean and quick, and one decided in the moment is visibly a decision being made. The words are identical. The pause before them is what gets noticed.
Is there ever an off period?
No. Not before it starts, not during the setup, not in the corridor afterwards. What gets used rarely comes from the stretch where you were paying attention.
What does off the record actually mean?
Whatever both parties explicitly agreed. It is a negotiated term rather than a switch, it must be established before you speak, and a journalist who has not said yes has not agreed.
Does off the record protect you?
It protects a relationship rather than a secret. Assume anything genuinely damaging finds its way out, because the person you are trusting has an editor, a career and a story.
Which format is riskiest?
The long podcast. Ninety minutes in a relaxed setting produces an enormous quantity of unguarded material, published unedited and permanently searchable, and it is prepared for least because it does not feel like an interview.
How should you handle a hypothetical?
Do not answer it. A hypothetical answered becomes a position on a real thing, and saying you deal with situations as they arise remains one of the few standard responses that still works.
What about the silence after your answer?
Let it sit. It is the oldest technique in the profession and it works constantly, because people fill silence and what they add is unplanned.
What is the friendly close?
Anything else you would like to add, asked warmly at the end when you have relaxed. It is a genuine offer and it is where minute fourteen happens. Prepare an answer or decline it.
How do you know an approach is hostile?
A list of specific allegations, a short deadline, and a request for comment rather than for an interview. That combination is a right-of-reply exercise, not a conversation.
Should you ever decline?
Sometimes, and it is never free. The piece runs with a line saying you declined, which is the least favourable characterisation of your position available.
What is the under-used option?
A short written statement on the record without an interview. It fills the space a refusal would have left, uses your language rather than theirs, and binds you to nothing past its own words.
Can you get a piece corrected?
Facts, yes. Emphasis, framing and tone, no. Requesting the second marks you as somebody who does not understand the distinction and does not change the piece.
Executive Summary
Media training taught as technique fails, because journalists recognise every technique it teaches and the recognition changes how you are characterised.
The work is preparation rather than performance: knowing what the piece is, holding three or four positions rather than messages, deciding in advance what you will not say, and assuming permanence.
The story has usually taken shape before your phone rings. Nobody is asking you to help decide what it should be. They are offering you the chance to appear in it correctly.
Off the record is a negotiated term rather than a switch. It must be agreed explicitly before you speak, and it protects a relationship rather than a secret.
There is no off period. The used clip almost always comes from the stretch after an executive stopped concentrating, and they generally have no memory of saying it.
Advisory: Media Training · Crisis Counsel · CEO Advisory
Published by Executive Authority