After each mock interview, our trainers provide feedback to the trainee. We have a list of skills we rate regarding the delivery of the messages. We then provide qualitative analysis of the content that was delivered. During this process, we inevitably get our own feedback from the trainee regarding the mock interviewer, who typically is channeling a real-life journalist these spokespeople will be facing in the near future. Sometimes they think we have been too soft. Sometimes they are amazed at how tough or tricky we were. Often they can't believe how well we have captured the voice and style of a particularly difficult journalist whom they know.
With this in mind and my media training checklist in hand, I watched both parts of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's interview with ABC New's Charles Gibson.
From a delivery standpoint, here's my scorecard for Gov. Palin:
Pace: Needs to slow down. This is a mistake many new spokespeople make in interviews. They rush to get their answers out and therefore do not control the pace of the interview. She seemed anxious and rushed in the face-to-face portion. It isn't a race and slowing down the responses generally helps the spokesperson come across much more positively. In the second segment, when they were walking around her home and hometown, she resumed a more moderate pace and therefore regained her conversational tone, which is where she shines. Her comments regarding Hillary Clinton were handled well during this part of the interview. They seemed real, which is what people find appealing about Gov. Palin.
Pausing: This was Gov. Palin's one major media training mistake. She did not pause before answering questions during the face-to-face interview portions. As noted above, she seemed a bit over-anxious to get her answers delivered, particularly in response to Gibson's multiple questions about whether she felt she was ready to be VP or potentially President and whether she at all hesitated when she was asked to take this on. She came across forced, studied and over-eager, which is not good.
Answer and stop: Gov. Palin did well here. She did answer the question and wait for the next one. She did not provide run-on answers that could have gotten her into trouble.
Conciseness: Same as above. She did well regarding conciseness.
Bridging: She had a good "bridge" back to her messages when she was asked about being the Commander-in-Chief of the Alaska National Guard. Gov. Palin bridged to the subject of energy independence and her experience in this regard due to her leadership in Alaska. It was definitely a "non-response response," but it gave her time to prepare for the inevitable followup, which is something a bridge can do for a spokesperson. Her other "bridge" was not so much a bridge as a question back to the interviewer when Gibson asked whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine and she tried to have him define this for her before she responded.
Much has been written about the interviewer in these segments. Charles Gibson was under as much pressure as his subject and was doomed to be criticized as either too tough or too softball in his approach. He clearly was trying to walk the line. When I personally have assumed this type of interview stance with a media training subject, I keep a complete poker face so they get no clues from me regarding their answers. I keep this game face and persistently ask question after question.
Gibson did this effectively, I thought, for the most part. I thought that the look of his glasses perched down on the nose look made him seem older and professorial, which is a style that drew some criticism. During his series of questions regarding whether Gov. Palin hesitated at all to join the McCain ticket and felt she was qualified (where I noted above she was too quick to respond), he semi-muttered under his breath that this seemed like "hubris." The comment was a response to her lack of pausing to think or couching this in any way that would have shown the humility he was expecting, but his delivery of the comment seemed like a cheap shot to me.
The much written-about tricky question about the Bush Doctrine was absolutely designed to trip up the interviewee and it did. I think the series of questions could have yielded valuable information about Gov. Palin's views without the need to trick her up front by not defining it and forcing her to try to figure out what she was responding to.
I won't go into the content, as this has been well covered elsewhere. I will say, though, that when we train people for interviews, we tell them they need to plan to leave the interviewer with the most important two or three (at most) points to remember after the interview has ended. We call them anchor points and you bridge back to them and make sure you deliver them during the interview without seeming too studied or robotic. I don't believe this was successfully executed, as I think you can take many different things from the interview rather than two or three that were brought home well.
Personall, I took away the following three things:
- Her own son is being deployed to Iraq [good message for her to deliver]
- She has only been to Mexico and Canada and to Kuwait to see the troops [not so good unless you think that's a lot of foreign experience]
- She is not going to blink [she said this several times] and is going to be tough on terrorists [good or bad, depending on the listener's viewpoint.]
Overall, as a media trainer, I would suggest she is not yet ready for prime time with this type of sit-down, hard-boiled, no nonsense interview. She needs to get more comfortable with putting messages into her own words. Tori Clark was one of several communications analysts who commented on the interview on ABC Friday evening. She cautioned that what Gov. Palin's supporters like about her is her spontaneity and that her team should not drain this from her presentation style with too much preparation. Clearly, if they can arrange to have her walk around in familiar surroundings while being interviewed, she will fare much better.
