Margaret Thatcher’s legendary former press secretary Bernard Ingham has died at the age of 90. Whatever your views on his politics (or the politics of his boss), he was a formidable operator. I love this quote attributed to him:

“Always feed the dogs at the front gate or they’ll scavenge from the bins at the back.”

Keep that quote in your mind as you prepare for media engagement. Journalists will generally want to seek out a news line and if you don’t feed them one they’re more likely to pursue paths you might not want them to head down.

Good content leads to control and direction. A lack of content means you will always be on the back foot in interviews.

Incidentally Ingham was very generous with his time. At university I (smugly) wrote my dissertation on whether his power and influence undermined our democracy. Despite this premise he agreed to meet and we ended up talking for over three hours. I was determined to get a decent news line out of him…and failed to get even remotely close.

Respected science journalist Jonathan O’Callaghan tweeted the following last week:

“Someone declined an interview with me because they said their discovery was “too small and not worth reporting.”

He went on to insist, “I told them it was cool!”

Where do your sympathies lie? You might applaud the honesty of the academic, heroically turning down the chance of headlines and column inches.

It just leaves me frustrated. Journalists don’t chase stories “too small and not worth reporting”. Often researchers absorbed in the detail and the process can’t see the bigger picture and the impact their work has (or might have) on the audience.

To be fair there’s a chance something else is going on here. O’Callaghan may be pursuing an unspoken angle that might portray the science in a negative light, but I very much doubt that’s the case.

If a journalist you respect (and that word is crucial) thinks what you are doing is newsworthy then go with them. They know how to do their job. Don’t sensationalise, don’t distort, and root what you’re doing in the audience’s world.

Language sits at the heart of a good interview. It sits at the heart of a bad one.

Regular readers may vaguely recall we like to collect the odd word or phrase.

Let’s start with some positives, and the power of language to paint a picture or prove a point. Here are two compelling examples, both on the same theme of inequality or – depending on your perspective – greed:

“The richest one percent grabbed two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020 – a colossal $42 trillion.”
Oxfam/Politico 16th January

“Chelsea FC spent more in January than the combined total of every single club in the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1.”
BBC Sport 1st February

What about language that does the opposite – obscures, or confuses? One of each from media training sessions this month, starting with the former…

Toolkit (“We’ve developed a toolkit to help…”)

I can’t stand the word. It means nothing to the audience unless you explain what it actually is or does.

As for a word that confuses? Arisings (“Arisings vary each year but have been between 10 and 25 tons over the last five years”)

I’ve never heard the word used in this context before. What they were actually talking about was…grass cuttings.

So why not just say that?

As promised I’ve listened to Archive on 4’s ‘What Has Media Training Done To Politics?’ so you don’t have to.

Nobody comes out of this programme particularly well. Politicians, interviewers, media trainers, it’s a 58 minute plague on all our houses. (“We’re media training politicians into a bland mush”).

“I think the right word is armour…but when it become a way of controlling not just a narrative but stopping any discussion of a more truthful version coming out…that’s when it becomes detrimental to democracy.” Emily Maitlis

I don’t media train politicians. Not on principle, simply because nobody has ever asked me. I’d love a crack at it. There’s a familiar rhythm to a media trained politician accepted within Westminster as “the right approach” that I’d love to try and change.

This rhythm centres around the pivot, which there’s nothing wrong with in principle – the problem is it’s rarely done effectively. (Incidentally the analysis of the Ed Miliband pivot is worth the license fee alone.)

There’s also a recognition in the programme that journalists must change their approach. The fear of interviewees saying something accidental – the obsession with the gotcha moment – is what drives a reliance on media training.

The impact of rolling news is maligned, the death of the long form interview (Walden, Day etc) mourned. It’s a pretty good listen. Brimming with big hitters and some lovely archive. You just don’t really come away with any answers about how to improve the situation.