Being interviewed: a conversation with stakes
Politicians are interviewed all the time. It is one of the best ways to get a message out and an important way of maintaining accountability among our leaders. But it is also an odd experience the first time it happens, or at least it was for me.
Not long after I announced my run for office, I was interviewed by Gin Dimucius for the State House News Service.
I had already spoken at the Medford and Somerville Democratic caucuses, so it wasn’t the first time I was talking about my campaign.
And I’ve also spoken in the media numerous times before as a political analyst. My first big appearance was in 2013 when I was invited on BBC World News about the US government shutdown. I didn’t think any interview could be more difficult than that one, since I was 2 minutes to air and heard in my earpiece that they instead wanted to talk about Janet Yellen being nominated to chair the Federal Reserve.
But the experience of talking to a good reporter about my own career and life - not a piece of research or something in the news - was completely different.
The easy part
I had met Gin a few times at events on Massachusetts politics and read his work at Commonwealth Beacon and SHNS. He’s a very good journalist and I always appreciated that his work covered politics in a substantive way. We’re lucky on that here. Massachusetts does not have the same pathologies that DC has in what NYU professor Jay Rosen calls the “savvy style” of journalism - where how something plays is more important than what it means - and our reporters are usually hard at work doing good reporting.
That was reassuring to me. I didn’t need to worry too much about clever lines or triangulating messages. I figured I’d get straightforward questions and I could answer them in kind.
As it turned out, that’s how it went.
Gin called, we started with some small talk, and then he went into the questions he had prepared. Some of them had follow-up questions. He emailed me after the call to clarify a few things. The next day, it was published.
The tricky part
All told, this phone interview was much easier than any of the live interviews I had done. I didn’t need to worry about stumbling over words on camera. I got go back and be more precise if I phrased something incorrectly.
But, as I thought over it later that day, it was also far harder than any live interview.
The article was 543 words. My own quotes were 95 of those words. If I recall correctly, the interview was half an hour. If I spoke for most of that, at 150 words per minute as the usual speaking pace, then I probably said more than 4,000 words. That means about 2% of what I said ended up being published.
From between when we hung up the phone and when I read the article the next morning, I kept wondering what of my lengthy answers would make it to their audience. Would it only be the parts where I talked about deciding to run, maybe making me seem focused on the race as part of my career? Or would it be on a single particular issue, which might pidgeonhole me as caring about only that?
As it turned out - and I knew I didn’t need to worry that much - the article was fair. It touched on most of the things we discussed, gave readers additional context, and then moved onto the next story.
The importance of access
The whole episode was much less painful that I thought it might be. There were no gotcha questions and I never had to say “no comment.” But that was also because I didn’t need to be evasive. We talked about my policies and my background, things that are important for voters to be aware of and completely reasonable topics of discussion with a candidate.
In Kamala Harris’ campaign memoir, she often wrote about the media as if it was an arena to perform in, like handling a difficult witness in cross-examination where the right phrasing of a question could win or lose the case. Here’s how she describes her appearance on The View where she talks about a question about where she differs from Joe Biden as something she’d prepped.
I can only imagine what running at a national level is like, when every word is parsed by hundreds of pundits and millions of voters. I was unsure how I’d sound depending on what quotes were used, and the pieces left on the cutting room floor was just me being boring about rail electrification.
But at the state or local level, this isn’t really the problem. The harder task is to get any press coverage at all. Local journalism is suffering, with a 75% drop in journalists since 2002.
The voters are the ones that pay for this. They have to go to the polls either not knowing who their candidates are or have to rely only on the candidates’ own media, which can be heavily edited or not even written by them.
That’s why I plan to be as open to journalists as I can possibly be over the course of this campaign. Yes, there is always doubt about which quotes will be used and it is odd to have to talk for half an hour knowing that any particular phrase might be the one used.
But it’s important for voters to know what their candidates are planning and the back-and-forth with an experienced journalist is a good way of showing that your plans can handle the scrutiny.
