Bloggingheads with Douthat

We need to start a letter-writing campaign about the NY Times “dictionary” feature. They already have links to news stories for certain names (including overly broad ones like “Republican”), which makes it even more redundant and annoying.

Henry,

I seem to remember getting savaged for providing talking points from my own (truly helpful) media training/experience here before, but here goes:

1) Practice, practice, practice saying what you want to say in a few short sentences. Then use the responses you’ve articulated in practice as a kind of “answer jukebox.” This doesn’t mean you have to go all White House Spokesman in giving pat answers, but it does mean that you’ve a) already practiced at delivering concise answers to questions and b) you’re better able to craft linking statements/redirections/clarifications that build around those to answer questions in an articulate manner without a lot of “umming” and “awing.”

2) Be attentive to the format. While I’ll never do a morning shock jock show again, there’s a big difference between the local market news segment and the hour-long NPR interview.

3) Prepare to be thrown a curve ball, asked stupid questions, etcetera. Some of my worst performances came when I rebelled (at least internally) against perceived slights, imcomprehension, etcetera. Watching The Colbert Report is instructive in this regard: the best guests do one of two things: stick to their guns with a zen-like aplomb or, if they’re fast on their feet, run with the Colbert Schtick. Still, the host is always at an advantage, since the show is their format and a format they’ve likely spent years (if not decades) learning. The Colbert-Penn “Metafreeforall” was a good case in point: Penn actually looked stiff and amateurish compared to Colbert–and he’s a pro.

4) Pay attention to pre-interviews! The questions the producers are asking you are a key to what they’re looking for in a show.

5) Expect that you’re playing, if you’re playing it, the mass media game. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it. But if you’re invited on a show, you were probably invited on for a reason (that is, you’re playing a role)–to the extent that you can shape that role to what you have to say (and vice-versa), you’ll come off looking professional and intelligent (rather than, say, squirrely). Participating in the mass media can be a truly frustrating, undignified business: Sitting in satellite hook-up sets for half an hour in make-up and then getting bumped, being asked questions that seem (are!) astoundingly stupid and ill-informed, being given no time for second or ancillary thoughts, etcetera–all things that should never happen in civilized discourse. But mass media isn’t civilized discourse: it’s an incredibly expensive, complex, chaotic business.

6) Never, ever, never interject jokes about Fassbinder films into mass media interviews (or, for that matter, try to explain Socrates’ Unity of the Virtues thesis to a NYT reporter).

interruption is considered pretty rude in a seminar

You should give a talk in the economics dept or the business school.

Nice haircut.

On a very long video conference this morning, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick’s description of stark nekked future-people using video-phones – the idea being that they don’t mind answering the video phone in the nip, because it’s just a representation, but would never answer the door like that. I’m kind of glad that idea didn’t catch on.