One of my interview rules — a rule so fundamental I call it a commandment — is:  “Thou shalt not lie, evade, speculate nor cop an attitude.”  Let me address the last of these — the one expressed in the least Biblical language: copping an attitude.

There is little the media like more than knocking someone off their high horse.  If you don’t get in the saddle in the first place, that temptation is eliminated. When might we climb on a high horse?  When we are asked the same question innumerable times, when the question comes from profound ignorance and  when the reporter asks a “gotcha” questions designed to catch you up.

Let’s deal with how to avoid copping an attitude in each of these circumstances.

That tired, old question.  A couple of years ago I got a phone call from a long time client who was having a problem with an entertainment personality.  It seemed that this young woman, tiring of a very routine question, was rolling her eyes, heaving sighs and sometimes just snapping angrily at the reporter asking the routine question.  She thought that since she’d answered the question for other reporters previously, there was no need to address it again.  When I spoke to her I recommended that she think of an interview as a performance.  “You sing the same song over and over, don’t you?  Well, perform the same answer.  Each reporter — especially broadcast reporters — want that soundbite delivered fresh for them.”

You want to make the routine answer to the routine questions sound and feel fresh, too. The late Peter Falk was a champion at this.  For 30 years he played the role of the disheveled detective, Lt. Columbo.  When asked what about Columbo appealed to the audience, Falk appeared to think hard, and then work out an answer that essentially said, “People see themselves in Columbo.”  But he ACTED out the answer, making it appear that it was forming in his mind at the moment he spoke it.  No doubt Falk’s answer was as convincing the last time he delivered it as it was the first time — three decades earlier — because he made it look and sound fresh each time.  He performed it.

Had Falk snapped, “Oh, come on.  You KNOW what makes Columbo appealing, he’s like all of us.”  THAT would have been the story — his attitude would have overwhelmed his message.

The dumb question.  Increasingly, as newsrooms consolidate and as outlets try to save money by dropping experienced (read highly-paid) reporters for just-out-of-school rookies, you get questions soundly grounded in the journalist’s total ignorance.  You would expect that when a reporter is assigned a story, he would do at least cursory research on it before interviewing anyone.  But these days reporters are expected to be highly productive and quantity of stories is more valued in many outlets than the quality of the story so the reporter may not have had time to inform himself.  (And, sad to say, there are some reporters who, even with the time, won’t bother.)  The problem with answering in the condescending tone that such questions warrant is that the final story is in the reporter’s hands and if he feels he’s being patronized, he may try to get even.  It is said there is no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb answers.  I’m here to tell you that there are lots — legions — of dumb questions.  But giving a a condescending answer to one is even dumber than the question.  If a reporter’s question clearly indicates that he doesn’t understand the subject matter, patiently explain the facts and do it without showing your justifiable exasperation.

The gotcha question.  In this instance the reporter asks you a question you can’t answer because you don’t know the answer or any answer would be incriminating (“When did you stop beating your wife?”)  Typical of the former is the new stock-in-trade of political reporters: asking an official or a candidate the name of an obscure office-holder in a far-away land that the reporter has just gleaned from a last-minute Google search.  In either case — “When did you stop beating your wife?”  and “What’s the name of the environmental  minister in Austria?” — it’s important not to get angry or defensive. A good approach is to label the question.

“When did you stop beating your wife?”

“No matter how I answer that question, my response will sound incriminating.  In point of fact, my wife and I have a wonderful, mutually-supportive relationship…..”

“What’s the name of the environmental minister in Austria?”  “That’s a “gotcha” question.   I don’t know, but I’ll find out.  What I can tell you is…..”

The key to a successful outcome when confronted with one of these questions is to avoid copping a defensive attitude, to label the question for what it is and to use a bridge from the question to your own agenda.

I’ve always found it particularly ironic — not to say downright hypocritical — that some try to teach children that honesty is the best policy by telling them a fib: George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then ‘fessed up because he could not tell a lie.  Somewhat less ironic is the teachable moment wherein people in the media training business try to impress upon clients the dangers of an open microphone.  This lesson involves Uncle Don, host of a 1930s kids radio show who, thinking his microphone was off at the end of a particularly arduous broadcast, said aloud — and over the air — “there, that ought to hold the little bastards.”  Uncle Don, the legend goes, was summarily fired, declined into alcoholism and died a pauper.

Like Washington and the cherry tree assassination, Uncle Don’s gaffe never happened.  It was totally made up.  And here’s the ironic part: the author of the mic mishap fable was a newspaper columnist in Baltimore (where Don’s show wasn’t heard).   So we have a fake news story about a blooper that never happened being used to teach news interview subjects to be wary of what they say in proximity to a microphone.  I guess those who use the fable — like parents to dispense the cherry tree story — feel that the ends justify the means.

Years ago, I dispensed with Uncle Don in media training workshops when I learned it wasn’t true.  Besides the news, with great regularity, supplied me with real examples of people opening their mouths in front of open microphones and broadcasting thoughts that were better locked in their mental vaults.

Citing three or four of the most recent examples — they ARE endless — I tell my clients to treat a microphone like a gun.  Anyone familiar with gun safety has been taught to treat all guns as if they are loaded.  Similarly, I recommend treating all microphones as if they are on, recording or broadcasting live.   I like to add, “Never say anything in proximity to a microphone that you don’t want the world to hear.”

This may seem self-evident, but again and again we are treated to people who should know better — including broadcasters — saying stupid, embarrassing or counterproductive things in the presence of a microphone, only to have their off-the-cuff remarks become on-the-web curiosities and then in-the-news scandals.

There is an added caution to “Treat a Microphone Like a Gun.”  And that is, treat a reporter as if he is a microphone.  Just because a reporter has put away his pad, pencil and digital recorder doesn’t mean he’s off-duty.  He is recording you in his head.

In fact, when I was a newspaper reporter I found it useful to emulate the TV detective created by the late Peter Falk, Lt. Columbo, and to throw out a “one more thing” question as I strolled casually toward the door of an interview subject’s office.   Thinking the interview over, they sometimes responded with far greater candor than they had during the official, formal interview.

Incidentally, encountering a reporter in a restaurant or at a bar is still encountering a reporter.  When a good story is in the air, any reporter — in any stage of relaxation — will focus like a laser and begin making mental notes.  The French ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Bernard, learned this the hard way.  At a 2001 dinner party at the London home of Lord Black — at the time the owner of the third-largest newspaper publishing concern in the world — the ambassador made a particularly undiplomatic and scatological reference to Israel.

For an ambassador to do something like this anywhere, anytime is dumb.  To do it in front of a room full of reporters is suicidal, at least career-wise.  There was no way that the many journalists at the dinner were going to ignore that one.  Knowing reporters, I suspect most of them had mentally written their stories before coffee and dessert.

So when around a microphone — or a reporter — emulate the real Uncle Don.  Don’t say anything  you don’t want the world to hear.

In 1949, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward A, Murphy, came up with his famous Murphy’s Law, “Anything that can go wrong will.”  With a nod in Captain Murphy’s direction, I have come up with my own law for media interviews:  “Anyone unprepared for tough questions will get them.”

Captain Murphy  came up with his law after observing a particularly inept technician.  I crafted mine as a cautionary note for media training workshops after watching countless spokespersons fall apart when they were asked unanticipated tough questions.  If an interview subject prepares for nightmare questions and gets none, there is no down side.  But if she does get them, she’ll be prepared to gracefully answer them.

In workshops I ask participants write a list of nightmare questions and then we collegially figure out how to respond to them.  In the next round of practice interviews, I ask the nightmare questions.  And when the interviews are over, we critique how well the participants deployed their responses.

What should that answer contain? I recommend the interview equivalent of General Colin Powell’s “Shock and Awe” tactics: overwhelm the negative in a question with multiple positives. How many positives?  According to Vincent Covello, a social scientist and risk consultant with whom I have worked, you need three positives to overwhelm a negative.

To illustrate how this works, let me cite a real world example.  I do a lot of media training for NASA and inevitably in those workshops a participant  comes up with some variation of this nightmare question:

“Why waste or spend money on space exploration when there are such pressing needs here on earth?”

Over the years workshop participants have supplied me with an embarrassment of riches for the answer.  Taking multiple effective responses and merging them, I came up with three cogent shock and awe points, and a subset of three specifics to illustrate the final point.

Here are the elements of that response:

1.  NASA’s budget is approved by the people’s representatives in Congress.

2.  NASA’s budget is less than one percent of the total federal budget.

3.  NASA’s budget is an investment that pays society a variety of beneficial dividends.

The subset are specifics that illustrate the third point:

1.  The space agency creates a lot of science and technology jobs; the kind of jobs America needs in order to stay competitive in an increasingly technology-driven world economy.

2.  NASA’s missions have broadened our knowledge of our planet, our solar system and our universe.  In fact they have rewritten astronomy and physics textbooks.

3.  Spinoffs of technologies developed for NASA have improved our daily lives by enabling powerful computer microprocessors, by giving us global positioning satellites, by supplying life-saving accurate weather predictions and by creating the means to build medical imaging devices that give early warning of cancers and other dread diseases.

This three-part answer, with its three-part subset is a powerful shock and awe response to the negative “waste” or “spend” money on space.  For media purposes we can’t get all of this to fit our ideal soundbite length of 30 words, spoken in ten seconds and comprised of three sentences.  But with some condensation, here is a soundbite version:

NASA’s Congressionally-approved budget, less than one percent of federal expenditures, is an investment in high-tech jobs, scientific knowledge and spin-offs that make life easier and safer.

Following up on the soundbite, the respondent can then cite any or all of the specifics.

Whether you’re dealing with outer space or outerwear, when you prepare for an interview, it’s critical to anticipate tough questions and to be ready to respond with shock-and-awe answers.