MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
You can do better than that in a live debate - obviously competitive debaters do. "Ignore the question and just say your piece" is Media Interviews 101 though, and politicians do a lot more interviews than debates so it is the approach they are most comfortable with.
When I was a student politician, I did the Party training course on media interviews 101, and the line was that (unless you are important enough to insist on a live interview) broadcast media will record 3-4x as much material as needed and only broadcast the gaffes, so ignoring the questions and repeating your soundbite is a necessary defensive technique against deceptive editing. "When is it safe to answer the question?" is 201-level stuff.
Looking at the incentives facing the journo, broadcast media interviews are all about inducing the gaffe (except for the hard-to-get big ticket interview like a US President or an A-lister where it is all about giving a softball interview so other big interviewees will agree to be interviewed by you). My mother has a horror story about how a BBC interviewer started interviewing her in French (which she speaks, but not well enough to do an unprepared media interview), stopped after about 1 minute and said it was actually a sound check, and then started the real interview while she was still in "desperately trying to code-switch" mode.
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Notes -
You can do better than that in a live debate - obviously competitive debaters do. "Ignore the question and just say your piece" is Media Interviews 101 though, and politicians do a lot more interviews than debates so it is the approach they are most comfortable with.
When I was a student politician, I did the Party training course on media interviews 101, and the line was that (unless you are important enough to insist on a live interview) broadcast media will record 3-4x as much material as needed and only broadcast the gaffes, so ignoring the questions and repeating your soundbite is a necessary defensive technique against deceptive editing. "When is it safe to answer the question?" is 201-level stuff.
Looking at the incentives facing the journo, broadcast media interviews are all about inducing the gaffe (except for the hard-to-get big ticket interview like a US President or an A-lister where it is all about giving a softball interview so other big interviewees will agree to be interviewed by you). My mother has a horror story about how a BBC interviewer started interviewing her in French (which she speaks, but not well enough to do an unprepared media interview), stopped after about 1 minute and said it was actually a sound check, and then started the real interview while she was still in "desperately trying to code-switch" mode.
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