TJ Walker examines whether public figures should walk off during TV interviews, using Iceland's Prime Minister in 2016 as a case study. Walking off usually backfires by turning a small story into global headlines. Walker recommends staying composed with brief responses instead, except in rare cases like purely personal attacks.
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Should you ever walk off the set in the middle of a TV interview.
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For the most part, the answer is no. There are exceptions. I'll get to that in a moment. But perfect case study happened earlier this year. In early 2016, the Prime Minister of Iceland was being interviewed by a reporter and was all of a sudden asked questions about his wife's offshore accounts. Millions of dollars in offshore accounts, as revealed by the data dump from the Panamanian law firm that captured so much attention. He claimed that the questions were out of bounds, stormed up, walked off the interview. Here's the problem with doing that. What would have been seen by maybe a few,000 or 10,000 people is now seen by millions and millions and millions of people all over the world. Anytime you walk off an interview, you create ratings gold. You create the ultimate in conflict and drama. Let's face it, most of the time when reporters are interviewing politicians, it can be staid, it can be boring. You're in an office that looks like any other office, everyone's wearing a conservative suit. So it's hard to really make a lot of interviews stand out as interesting. But when you have the drama, basically you see steam coming out of someone's head. The conflict, the storming off, the anger. It becomes compelling. Must see tv. Now, I can certainly understand when a politician or a CEO is faced with questions and he or she does not like those questions. We're all human beings, there's always something we don't like. But the big question is what to do about it. If you don't like the question, in this case, what the Prime Minister was trying to do was contain it, put it back in a box by storming out. He just poured gasoline on it. This became certainly the biggest political news in Iceland, probably the biggest news since their own financial crisis a number of years ago. But it became just huge, huge news all over the world. I had people emailing me clips of this from all over the world to comment on it. And that's the big problem. Now I'll get to the exceptions in a moment. But if you are a politician or a CEO and the reporter's asking you a question you don't like, you've got to ask yourself, how would a member of the viewing public view this question? Would they view it as a cheap shot? Now, if a reporter asks you something just beyond the pale about your private sex life and absolutely any fair minded person you believe would contend that that's just a cheap, nasty, tawdry thing and you want to walk off, that may work in your favor. But if we have international financial crises and someone is asking you about millions of dollars that your spouse has in offshore accounts and this relates to issues that you regulate and that you're responsible for, nobody in the world thinks that is an out of bounds question except for you. So you have to have some sense of perspective, some sense of self awareness. And that's the problem many politicians and CEOs get themselves into. They lack that sense of self awareness. If you are a CEO and a reporter says, I have research showing that you've changed the data on your gas mileage for your diesel vehicles, you can't just say the interview's over. Because here's the problem. The second you walk out of an interview, you look 100% guilty. You have a gigantic stamp on your head that says guilty as sin. There's nothing you can do about it at that point. And that's really the problem with ever walking out of an interview. I will give an exception in just this one case in a moment.
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Okay, here's the exception. Let's say you are a conservative politician of any country and your followers part of your brand. People in your party believe that the reporters all have a liberal agenda, an agenda against you. And let's say that reporter, I'll give a US political context. Let's say that reporter, that talk show host says, I think Ronald Reagan was the worst president ever. I demand that you give me three things you hate about Ronald Reagan. Now if you were a conservative Republican politician in America and you walked out of an interview at that point and just said I find you ill informed and disgusting, you took your mic off and walked out. That would generate news, there's no doubt about it. But in that particular political context, the politician would benefit. The politicians ratings would go up. Among key supporters. They would say, good for you for standing up to that ideological enemy of ours. Good for you for thumbing your nose at the baloney that host was spinning. And it would work because it would be seen within a larger ideological context. It wouldn't be personal. The problem of course is that's not typically what makes politicians and CEOs walk out. The problem for any politician or CEO who walks out of an interview is it's seen within a context. And the context is the vast, vast majority of the time when this happens, it's because the reporter asked a fair, tough question about something that individual or that individual's organization was doing to harm people or to do something unfair. And now the person simply doesn't want to defend himself or herself, doesn't want to have to make that issue public. They want to keep it hidden. And that's the real problem. If you are a politician, your finances, your life is fair game for the most part. Again, there are exceptions. You're a governor, a senator, and someone wants to talk about the social life of your teenage child who hasn't been caught doing anything illegal. Certainly you could say that's completely out of bounds. You wouldn't necessarily store them out of the interview. Here's my recommendation. A reporter asks you something that's really, really hard hitting that you weren't expecting, you need to have a little bit of a smile on your face and answer at some level in a brief, bland way. You might not have the perfect answer, but at least you won't be putting a major spotlight on it. At least you won't be taking out billboard ads for free for that reporter getting 10 times the normal audience for that interview. You can always say, I'm happy to talk to you about that subject if you'd let me know and I would have prepared, I would like to do more research. I can get back to you on that later today. If it is something dealing with specific aspects of accounting, for example, or your taxation. The main thing is that you don't want to look bothered, you don't want to look angry. If you act like I'm more than happy to talk about this, even if your answer isn't great, it's not going to be memorable. And that's the key thing when you subject yourself to an interview. You go into this knowing you cannot control the questions. The only thing you can control are your answers. And you can control how you package your answers to be quotable or not. If you simply don't act bothered and you answer giving the best answer you can, the issue is likely to be much less remembered. It's certainly not going to blow up in your face and you end up having to resign a few days later, as in the case of the Icelandic Prime Minister. Now, this doesn't solve every problem. If you were caught stealing and the reporter found out that you've embezzled a million dollars and the proof is there, well, you'll probably still be hounded out of office. But you don't have to make matters worse with how you react when the spotlight is on you. So other than those exceptions I mentioned to you never storm out of an interview, one other exception did just occur to me. Donald Trump did this many years ago where he was just disgusted by the reporter. He took the mic off and theatrically dropped it, stormed out. That can work for Donald Trump. And as we have talked about many times on this podcast and on this program, Donald Trump is the exception to almost every media training and public speaking rule there is. You follow his example at your own peril. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.
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