Maria Sharapova Crisis Communications and More VP Debate Spin

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. It's Thursday, October 6th. It's now three days since the vice presidential debate. So the tea leaves have been sifted, things are sort of falling out, the consensus has congealed. It's not that different from my instant assessment that I made 15 minutes after the debate. I said at the time that Tim Kaine had interrupted, perhaps too much, but overall he still gave a very good performance. I gave high marks to Governor Pence for just looking great, sounding great, coming across smooth. And I thought that both would be perceived as winners and that both would get high marks from their partisan supporters. Now, here's what has surprised me somewhat in that the assessment of a lot of Democratic Party activists and insiders and liberal leaning media groups has been more negative against Tim Kaine than I thought. The other thing I did predict is that polling data would shift and that it's certainly a possibility that one would be perceived as the bigger victor a week later than the other, but that it wouldn't be any sort of huge blowout and that it would have no real impact on voting polling on the top ticket in the actual election. I still feel exactly the same way that not a single vote was changed based on the vice presidential performance. And pretty much I didn't predict exactly that it would be a 48, 42% split with 48% perceiving that Governor Pence won. But I do think I suggested that it would be, you know, someone would get a plurality, but there wouldn't be any slam dunk the way Hillary Clinton did in the first presidential debate or the way Mitt Romney did in the first debate in 2012. Now here is what did surprise me. Most of the commentary has dealt on two main aspects. Number one, the fact that Tim Kaine interrupted a lot and he did interrupt a lot. And I commented on that 15 minutes after the debate. The other thing that has gotten a lot of commentary is the fact that Mike Pence just, and I don't have to be diplomatic here, folks, Mike Pence just flat out lied when confronted time and time again with seemingly bizarre extremist policy positions and statements by Donald Trump. He just denied that Trump ever said them and he denied his own statements. And folks, these are not minor quibbles or interpretations. These are things where flat out Donald Trump said things or Mike Pence said things, said things, captured on video in an unambiguous way. And Mike Pence just denied it, shook his head, said no, never happened. Now, he did it in a persuasive way. He did it in a way that made him seem likable and where he didn't seem angry. So stylistically, he did everything the right way. But still, the big issue is, can you be said to win a debate if you just ignore facts, ignore questions and lie? Now, people expect me to be the superficial guy. I'm the media. I'm not the policy expert. I'm the media trainer and presentation coach. And people often assume that all I care about is your style and not substance. But at some point, if you're talking about being a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, your substance does have to matter. So I have a hard time saying that, okay, you've got two candidates. One of them was rude. The other one just ignored all tough questions and lied when asked about tough questions, that the person who interrupted is going to be deemed the loser of the debate because interrupting is a bigger sin than lying and ignoring tough questions. And tough. I have a hard time with that. Now, some of you may say that I'm being partisan, although, again, I've claimed that Obama has lost debates. I've given very high marks to Romney in general election debates, primary debates. I've given high marks to Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz as communicators. But here's the thought experiment for you. Imagine if there were a Republican nominee for vice president who was rude, perhaps interrupted in a debate, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, when confronted with issues regarding Hillary Clinton's email foundation issues, just flat out said, that's crazy. Hillary Clinton has never had an email account. She's never sent an email in her life, and there is no Clinton foundation. You're just confusing this with the Benton Foundation. And this Democratic nominee smiled, was affable, had a full head of hair, and was great with a demeanor. How do you think that would have played out among the commentariat and the pundits? I mean, my suspicion is that that Democrat would be laughed at, ridiculed, mocked, and the mainstream media, the liberal media, certainly the conservative media, would spend all of their time talking about how the Democrat embarrassed himself. And in this hypothetical case, let's say it's a him. All of the commentary across the spectrum would be that this person humiliated himself, dodged questions, was a farce, was a joke, defied logic, did not even show up to the debate, was an utter embarrassment, and was a disgrace. I mean, I think that is the sort of commentary you would get if a Democrat just simply ignored the reality of certain things that trouble people, certain facts about institutions like the Clinton foundation or that there even was a so called email scandal. I think someone just ignoring that those things ever happened would be dismissed out of hand. And yet the opposite scenario that I just described is essentially what happened. And yet basically all conservative commentators gave a strong victory to Pence. And a huge percentage of moderate and even liberal leaning commentators suggested that Mike Pence won. And it just sort of almost a given that, well, it's it because Trump says so many obnoxious things, it's sort of okay to just have his own running mate pretend it didn't happen. Seems like a bit of a bizarre universe and somewhat of a double standard. We're about to hear the end of the commentary on the whole vice presidential debate because we're only a few days away from the next presidential debate that's going to get a huge audience again. By the way, the ratings for the vice presidential debate, about 36 million, less than half of the presidential debate, not surprising, but this is the lowest rated president presidential debate I believe in about 16 years. So it was a low rated vice presidential debate, did not spark a great deal of interest comparatively. Now, 36 million is still a huge audience. I sound like Donald Trump now, a huge audience. Compare that with Bill O'Reilly getting a couple million people as the number one primetime news program. And 36 million is a gigantic number. But still, nobody's really excited about these vice presidential candidates. People are fixated on the top of the ticket. And as you've heard me discuss earlier this week, that is pretty much standard in every single presidential election. American voters reason that it's really the top person who's going to run things, make decisions. And if it's going to be a good presidency, it's typically going to be because of the person at the top of the ticket, not the vice presidential choice. Although, as we've discussed last 50 years or so, vice presidents have had a very high percentage rate of getting their party nominations. Therefore they're pretty serious and they often become presidents. So for that reason, I'm going to be following what the vice presidents do, what they say, what happens at their press conferences, even if most people don't. Switching gears. Fascinating story in the New York Times today about Donald Trump's business ventures. They analyzed about 60 different ventures that he's taken on in the last dozen years or so and they came up with sort of a pie chart. And it turns out about a third of the ventures turned out well, a third were very, very mixed. And a third were complete unmitigated disasters. Now, I have a couple thoughts on this. Number one, that's a better winning percentage that I would have thought based on what we know of Donald Trump's business acumen. Number two, I guess my question to the New York Times is why are you waiting until now to do a really thorough business analysis of Donald Trump? It would have been a lot more useful in the primaries because back then there was just this blind assumption by so many voters, especially in the Republican Party, that, well, of course, Donald Trump is a wildly successful businessman. Of course, everything he puts his finger on turns to gold. Of course, we have to give him credit for tremendous business savvy. Now, as many people have learned in just the last month, some cases of the last week, none of that is necessarily true. We don't even know if Donald Trump is a billionaire. We certainly don't know he's worth the 10 billion he claims to be worth. So hats off to the New York Times for doing an interesting story, but a big thumbs down for it being about a year too late to necessarily have much of an impact. Certainly it isn't having any impact on Republican voters trying to figure out who would be their best nominee. By the way, folks, thanks for listening to me today as always. As you may have noticed, I have. While I praise consistency and I try to be consistent, our show has not always been consistent. I used to do solo form monologues, essentially taking your questions on public speaking, and I'll still take your questions on public speaking, speaking to the media. I then gradually shifted over the last month to doing long form interviews. We're in the process of rebuilding the studio here at Media Training Worldwide and frankly, we've had some technical glitches. I've done a few interviews lately and the audio simply wasn't usable. So I'm in the process of installing new mixers, new microphones. So I do appreciate you bearing with me those of you who have been loyal regular listeners. I appreciate it. But pretty soon, I hope in the next week or so we'll go back to doing long form interviews with newsmakers, interesting people, influential people. The real mantra is I want to talk to the most interesting, influential people in the world, talk about their ideas and how they communicate their ideas. That's really what this program has gelled into, although it's not apparent yet if you listen to the show every day for the last two weeks. So we are going through that transition, building out the studio. Meanwhile, I do want to give you commentary on top communication issues of the day as they're reflected through the news. Something else that caught my by the way, more than happy to take your suggestions on topics, guests and suggestions for how to improve the show. You can always just reach out to me directly. Tjediatrainingworldwide.com youm can also post your comments whether you're listening to this on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, iTunes, wherever you're experiencing it. Something did catch my eye. Today is sort of a good example of crisis communications and that is from the world class tennis player Maria Sharapova. She was, as those of you who follow tennis, suspended from playing at the international tennis level for violating their drug policy. She tested positive for meldonium, which is a drug that many, many people used for decades, if not longer. And it was just recently added to the list of banned substances. Now when I first heard this, my suspicion was, well, okay, she's a cheater. All these athletes are cheating and of course she should be punished. That was my initial reaction when this story broke many, many months ago. But then you dig a little deeper and as often is the case in a crisis situation that is destroying someone's reputation, there's often a bigger story there if you dig a little deeper. Now she claimed she was basically she wasn't vindicated entirely, but they reduced her sentence dramatically. Her ban is being reduced to 15 months, which means she will be eligible to play before next year's big French Open. So she's going to be back and this is not going to be, you know, a huge difference between a 15 month penalty and a 4 year penalty. So here's what she pointed out and she gave some excellent analogies in defending herself. I'm looking at a story from the New York Times. She's pointing out that the way this policy was instituted, it was sort of a link within a link buried within five different emails. And there was so little notice that this drug was now going to be banned by the way the drug is used by a lot of people, she claimed, and I'm not a doctor folks, she claims she used the drug because there is a history of certain health problems in her family, including diabetes, and that her doctor in fact prescribed this drug for therapeutic uses, not to enhance her performance. Of course that's a fine line between what's therapy and what's performance enhancing. This drug is widely used by a lot of people, athletes and non athletes in Eastern Europe for some historical reason that I don't necessarily know and I'm not going to get into. It's hard for me to imagine that a player at her caliber knew that it was illegal, but said, you know what, it's such a big difference in my game. I'm gonna just try it anyway and see if I can get away with it. From what I have read about this drug, it certainly doesn't seem to make that much of a difference on someone's athletic performance. Again, I'm not a doctor, but here's what she says. The itf, and that's the International Tennis Federation says the ITF didn't put up a no left turn sign. This is after she explained that the ban was essentially announced buried deep within emails in a link. And how many of us read every single link in an email? But here's what she said. The sound bite, I thought that was a winning sound bite in a crisis situation. The ITF didn't put up a no left turn sign. A sign wasn't even there. It wasn't even behind a tree. It was a complete false advertisement. It was like it was written on a second grade piece of paper, folded up and glued to a tree. If there was a sign, I would have been like, okay. But through this process there were no signs. And there was something that was obviously very evident in the report that there were no signs. She points out if she had known there are other drugs that have not been banned that she could have used to treat her issues, revolving diabetes and other health concerns she has, I have to say she makes a pretty compelling case. I certainly understand that big time athletics and athletic federations need to safeguard against drugs and performance enhancing drugs. It ruins the whole experience for the fans. It puts pressure on the athletes to dope themselves up. So I commend any athletic federation for trying to do its best to police drug use. This particular case though, does seem to be a bit odd. It does seem capricious. She has some other quotes that are picked up in the story. She says then it was the question of how is this ban? When I knew it was legal end for that amount of time, I just couldn't fathom it. And then it was like, how did this happen? Something that is so common. Are you sure? I mean, my grandparents take it talking about the drug. Millions of people in Russia in the beginning I couldn't believe that. I think that makes you wonder, makes you think six bands in a row that have been overturned. She's talking about other issues that have come up. You wonder, how does the International Tennis Federation think about it? Is that on their mind? The tribunal that they chose that they call neutral by no means is it neutral? The part of it doesn't make sense. She does a good job of attacking attacking the federation. Now when you're an athlete at this caliber, especially someone where your sport is so intertwined with big business. Because let's not forget big time tennis is not like big time archery or darts or curling. The players in those other sports are lucky if they make $100,000 a year. Someone of Sharapova's caliber in a sport like that with and sorry if this seems crass, but someone with looks that she has, she makes tens of millions of dollars mostly from endorsements, but the endorsements stem from the fact that she's doing well in the tournament. So this is big business. The stakes are huge and that's why everyone has to pay such close attention. Now she also points out that she typically had her agent do all this vetting. The agent was going through a divorce and was preoccupied. That's not really a good excuse, but it just seems like everyone involved here wasn't at the top of their game. Sorry to use a sports analogy and that something has to be done better at all levels. Anyway, Sharapova, I do give credit for how she spoke out yesterday. I thought it was an excellent defense, certainly persuasive to people like me who don't know that much about enhancement drugs in high level sports. And I think she is well along the way of mending her reputation. Certainly as she starts playing again and winning again, all of the endorsements will come back and she will not be seen as a tainted property. What do you think? I'd love to hear your opinion on both of these issues today. The settling of the vice presidential debate in terms of public opinion, how Sharapova has handled herself in the media with her own crisis communications and any other issue. Again, post your comments or send them to me on Twitter. I'm J. Walker. Thanks for spending a little time with me today. Appreciate it as always. See you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to speaking with TJ Walk.