Weekend Edition - Lochte, Trump, Hillary and More

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.

Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me for this weekend edition of Speaking with TJ Walker. Now if this is your first time encountering the show, this probably isn't where you should start. The format of our show each day, Monday through Friday is an in depth interview with someone who is an influencer, someone successful and someone who excels at some aspect of communication. We dissect what they do and learn from them. The weekend is a little bit different. This is where I answer your questions about public speaking, communication, speaking to the media. It's also where I compile all my analysis of media training issues, good and bad interviews of the week and and I pull the audio from my short YouTube clips. If you want this in more or less real time, same day, you need to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube.com mediatraining but if you want it all in one condensed spot once a week on the weekend, you can get it right here. Thanks so much. Let's hop in. It's been for August a fun, interesting week. Sound bite of the day, of the week and of the month goes to Andrea Tanteros, the former Fox News commentator who is currently in litigation against that network. She's a former host. I guess she's still aligned with the network at some level. Here she's filed a lawsuit. Here's the quote you've probably seen. I want to dissect it. Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, values. But behind the scenes it operates like a sex fueled playboy mansion like cult steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny. Now I have no idea if Ms. Tantero's lawsuit has any validity whether she'll win. But I do know one thing. She does know how the media world operates. She certainly knows a sound bite what will get attention. She or her advisors or her lawyers knew when you put a quote like that in, it is destined to get played not once, not twice, but in thousands and thousands and thousands of stories. That's exactly what's happened. Now when she launched the suit earlier this week, it of course got major's play in, well, all media, but especially the New York Times. This is the third paragraph. Now lets analyze the quote. Mask. It's, it's a brutal attack. It's an attack. Attack, attack. Reporters love attacks. Now you can put into this the mix the fact that many of the so called mainstream media hate Fox News, hate Roger Ailes and they love latching on to something like this to beat up their ideological enemy. All well and good. Ms. Tanteros realized that, I think, and is playing into that. I would contend that even if a reporter or host at CNN or the New York Times made a charge with this many soundbite elements, it would get almost as much play. But she's using the term masquerade, mocking them for family values. The behind the scenes element, descriptive, sex fueled attack, vivid emotional Playboy mansion evokes images of pop culture like cult attack, steeped in intimidation emotion attack, indecency attack, misogyny attack. So right there, in really one sentence, you have more than a dozen soundbite elements. It contains very forceful attacks, absolutes, emotions, pop culture references, humor, specific example, I don't know. I believe she's written a book before that does not want a Pulitzer Prize. If there were Pulitzer Prizes for sound bites, this would get it because she contains almost every single element. When I saw this, I commented to friends and colleagues at the time, I said, it's going to be a rule now, any reporter whoever does a story about Fox News or Roger Ailes for the next hundred years will include this quote. And sure enough, ever since I've been seeing that, here it is a couple days after that, completely different story about another personality at Fox. And sure enough, in the fourth paragraph it says, and to quote from someone else, Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values. But behind the scenes, it operates like a sex fueled Playboy mansion, like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny. It's going to get played again and again and again. Is it fair? I'll leave that to others. The real lesson here is if you want to be quoted and you want your quotes not just to be in one story, but to become embedded into a larger story, a larger institution's message, you've got to contain soundbites. Now, I'm not asking you to attack, make up stuff, but if you're going to hit, hit hard. It was certainly would appear to be Ms. Tantero's goal to hit back against an institution that she felt did her harm and didn't treat her fairly. And wow, did she hit hard. She delivered a punch, it landed. And it's going to continue to shake to the foundation of Fox, I predict, for not days, weeks, months, but years. Is this going to bankrupt Fox? No, it's a wildly profitable news channel. It's the most profitable element of all of Rupert Murdoch's holdings. 20th Century, 21st Century Fox holdings, but it's still going to be a permanent blemish. What's the most important, influential thing to ever happen to Anthony Robbins? Well, he has a new movie out, I'm not yout Guru. And the movie is a little light on personal revelations from Anthony Robbins. But the one thing I'd never heard before and struck me as interesting is he talked about this magical moment when he was in high school and he was not a particularly good student when his teacher pulled him aside and said, you're the best public speaker. He was in a public speaking class and he said, you're the best public speaker I've ever seen. You're really going to be something. And to Anthony Robbins, that was the first time he'd really gotten such strong positive approval about anything he'd ever done. So it wasn't just going to a seminar. It wasn't reading a book by Jim Rohn or some other philosopher. It wasn't mysticism and thinking original thoughts or some great other brilliant thinker. It was public speaking. And you may like his philosophy, you may like his, what he calls technologies, his ideas on nlp, all of that flows. And you may like his books and videos. And I think some of his stuff is good, but it all flows from initial mastery of this one skill, public speaking. And the thing I find humorous is tens of thousands of people flock to him every year trying to learn how to be successful, but trying to learn about this other stuff. Oh, do I eat grapefruit the first thing in the morning? Oh, am I sharing enough with my neighbor about my goals for life? Frankly, most of them would be a lot better off if they actually did what Tony did, which is first master public speaking. Become really good at public speaking, you're probably going to do a lot better in whatever existing job you have. Teacher, salesperson, customer service person, mid level executive at a company, Master public speaking. And certainly Tony Robbins doesn't hide the fact that he takes public speaking seriously. But it's a little bit of frustration to someone in my field as a public speaking expert and trainer when I constantly see people who are wildly successful, and to me it's obvious, it's because they learn how to speak more effectively, not because they're smarter, brighter or hard working. And yet everyone wants to glam onto something else that, oh, it's about, it must be about your meditation techniques. Oh, it must be about the green protein drink you drink first thing in the morning. And people are looking constantly, always for some other secret to success. And it's staring them right in the face sometimes. And Anthony Robbins, to his credit, mentions it in his movie. It was about excelling at public speaking. So if you want to be successful, you want to be the next Anthony Robbins, actually learn or whatever is success in your own world, in your own field, learn how to be a great public speaker first. It's a lot easier than going to six day seminars all over the world. Hello has seen her contract with US Soccer cancelled. Why did this happen? The longtime goalie for the U.S. soccer team called the Swedish players, quote, a bunch of cowards. And that did not sit well with officials at U.S. soccer. Now, some have suggested that her better playing days are behind her and U.S. soccer was simply looking for a way to terminate her, get, get rid of her. She certainly didn't help by calling other players a bunch of cowards. Here's the confusing thing for a lot of people. Some people look at someone like a Donald Trump who's always attacking people, saying you're weak, you're pathetic, you're a loser. And at least in the first year and a couple of months of Donald Trump's campaign, he's been rewarded. He's been rewarded repeatedly by polls, by elections, by getting the Republican nominations, and he certainly does get a lot of media attention. The problem, however, is unless you have a completely 100% independent power base, it's not enough to simply get attention. You have to look at the larger politics behind a situation. Now, everyone loves to decry political correctness until their own ox is gored. In every institution, there are certain issues of sensitivity. There are certain alliances that have to be kept. And if you trash important people, organizations that are influential, you end up getting fired. Now, if you have your own company and your own clients and your own independent wealth, maybe you don't have to worry about that. But for everyone else, you do. The other problem here is you can say 10,000 nice things about your opponents, colleagues and others. But if you have one phrase that calls somebody a coward, that's the only thing that's going to get quoted. That's what will be remembered and that is, in fact, what might end your career. The message here don't attack unless you truly have an independent power base or if you don't care about being fired. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte losing endorsements as predicted on the no genius on my part. Everyone's been predicting this. Ryan Lochte famously, as you know, was caught lying at the 2016 Olympics saying that he was held up at gunpoint. Turns out he and just his buddies, his swimming buddies, got drunk, kind of crashed a gas station. And when the owners asked for some money, he spun that into a story of a wild tale of, of being essentially attacked by hooligans and held up at gunpoint and robbed when that didn't happen. So now Speedo has officially ended its endorsement. CNBC has reported that Ralph Lauren has ended its relationship with Latte. This is not surprising, folks. I frankly can't imagine any major corporation wanting as its spokesperson somebody who is known as a liar. And unfortunately for Lochte, this one event has completely outshone everything he's ever done as a swimmer. Let's not forget, it's not like Lochte has just made the Olympic team or he won one bronze medal once. Here's a guy who, if Michael Phelps hadn't been around, would be one of the most celebrated swimmers of all time. He's got a dozen medals, half of them gold. So Ryan Lochte is legitimately a huge, huge swimming star. But now the only thing people are going to think of when they think of him is a guy who lies to make up for the fact that he gets drunk with his buddies and sort of trashes someplace in a part of the world where a lot of Americans already don't have much respect. This is by definition, to me, fascinating because it's the classic crisis communication situation where something happens and then how you communicate about it completely defines your reputation, your brand, possibly forever. Now, Ryan Lochte's already made a lot of money, so let's not pass the tin cup for him. But I can't imagine how this is not ultimately going to end up in him losing tens of millions of endorsement deals. Perhaps more than that, when you look at his lifetime potential as a spokesperson. And it just goes to show, unless you're Donald. Sorry to sound political here, folks, but there's no way around it. Unless you're Donald Trump, you simply cannot get away with telling bold faced lies to the media without it taking a huge hit to your brand, your reputation and your bottom line. And the worst soundbite of the week goes to Steve Mandel, who is an attorney for Steve Bannon, who was head of Breitbart News and is now the CEO of the Donald Trump for President campaign. A little background. Steve Bannon went through apparently a messy divorce, allegations of spousal abuse 20 some years ago. And the allegation from Mr. Bannon's former wife was, and this is according to the New York Times, she said that Mr. Bannon's lawyer threatened me and told her that she would quote have no money and no way to support the children. When the attorney was asked about this, here's what he said. This is Steve Mandel, the attorney. He said, it's possible that Steve Bannon said that, but I did not. Now, that is one of the worst denials I've ever heard in my entire life, because it certainly makes it look like it was a strategy cooked up by the lawyer and the client. First of all, is a basic axiom of media training and media interview techniques. You don't put forth everything that's possible. If someone asked my lawyer, is it possible TJ Murder murdered his next door neighbor? You don't say, well, it's possible he murdered his next door neighbor, but I didn't. As his lawyer, a million things are possible. Is it possible TJ Is a complete chowderhead? Well, it's possible he's a complete chowderhead, but I myself am not an idiot. First of all, it makes Steve Bannon and his lawyer look guilty, number one. Number two, he's repeating the negatives of saying these inflammatory things. If in fact, the attorney didn't say it, he should have simply said, I did not say that. Rather than talk about every possibility his client might have had in private phone conversations. Classic, classic blunder. You do not entertain hypotheticals about all sorts of negative things that someone might have done when you weren't in the room. PR Blunder of the week goes to not Steve Bannon, but his lawyer. This question comes in from one of my students on the Udemy platform. Abigail writes in and asks, after a crisis has hit a company, how can the company address the public if that company has a Facebook page where many people may be voicing their opinions, frustrations, and hurt. For starters, don't try to censor your own Facebook page. If people have written about legitimate inconveniences, problems with your product or service, you had better put it up there. Because if you start deleting that, they're really going to hate you and they're going to trash you on a lot of other platforms. Any place else where they can rate your company, they're going to go out of their way to trash you. So you're not helping matters. So, number one, leave it up there. My biggest piece of advice is, if it's a big crisis, something that's a big problem, let's say product tampering. People have been harmed by one of your products that they've ingested, people injured. You need to have your CEO address each and every concern in a video. Put it on Facebook now. You may even want to do live Facebook and have an answer, then the replay of that video right there. Address the concerns. And if you're a huge multinational corporation, you may have hundreds of thousands or millions of people who only deal with you through your Facebook page. You've got to deal with them in the environment where they want to be dealt with. So have your spokesperson address the concern. Let people know you're listening to them. You understand it's a problem. You acknowledge that it's happening and tell them exactly what you are doing to make things better. If appropriate, ask for forgiveness or an apology. Whatever you do, don't delete and don't ignore it. Don't let it fester. You got to be quick. I wouldn't just put text, I wouldn't just put a press release. I wouldn't put a statement. You need a real human being in 2016 talking to your customers that will, if not make them all happy, at least satisfy them that someone's actually listening. Gerard Breaux over at the Brocast asked questions to his followers and people who interact in his world, and I'm happy to be a part of his audience as well. He asked the question, when should the CEO of an organization be the spokesperson? And my main thought there is that when it's relevant. Certainly in a crisis, if you're the spokesperson, if you're the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company and you're opening a new branch in a small town in Iowa, then whoever's going to be the head of that small town branch in Iowa should be the spokesperson. If you're talking to the local weekly newspaper in that town, it's relevant, it's appropriate, it's fitting. But if you're announcing something that has a huge impact on the whole company, only one person speaks on behalf of the whole company, the CEO. If something has happened that has a dramatic effect, positively or negatively towards the investors, then it should be the CEO. And that's why the real debate here, I think, is when there's a crisis in bad news, should you just put out a PR spokesperson? Should you put out a lawyer? Because a lot of CEOs want to hide. They're afraid, oh, say something stupid, I'll lose my $10 million a year job. This is where you earn your $10 million salary, if that's the kind of salary you have. Because in a crisis, when it comes to the legal structure, the financial structure, the investment community, the reputation an organization has within a town, city, state, country and the world, it's ultimately the responsibility of the CEO. So that's why I believe it is a huge mistake not to have the CEO as the spokesperson during a crisis. Again, you've got to be proportional. If you are CEO of a major oil company and in a small town, in a small country, has one oil company truck fall over and it kills three chickens, that may be big story to people in that town. It's not worthy flying the CEO to that small country. But if it is an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it does make sense to have the CEO because the whole world is watching many CEOs try to hide at the first sign of trouble. Not the thing to do now the thing to do that I believe Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP and some CEOs just don't do is they don't rehearse, practice and get properly trained for the tough questions. They're used to the easy questions. Tell me how great your product is. Tell me why all our viewers should invest on cnbc. They're used to the easy sycophantic questions. They're not used to the hard questions. But when hard questions are coming, the answer is not to find some hapless 23 year old $23,000 a year assistant PR FLAC to go out and be the spokesperson. The solution is to step up yourself and take the questions. This question comes in from one of my regular viewers on YouTube. Llewellyn writes in with the following TJ who do you think are some of the most competent speakers today and why? Well, I'm going to give some examples. I'll either offend everyone or fair minded people will say I'm being fair. I'm going to give examples from across the spectrum. Let's start at the far right. Rush Limbaugh is a great speaker. You might not agree with his politics, you might not like all of his tactics, but here's a guy who has spoken to millions of people for three hours a day every day for almost 30 years now. I'm not a regular listener to him these days. I occasionally listen. I do remember the first time I heard him. I was hosting a radio show on one of the original 66 stations that carried Rush Limbaugh way back in 1988. I started hosting the show in 89 and let's just say Russia's radio career did a little better than mine. He is a talent in that he can just talk to himself for hours. He doesn't need guests. He doesn't need call ins, although he does take them and he can sound conversational, interesting and believable and occasionally humorous. He used to be a lot more humorous than he is now, but in the early years, 88 to 92, 94, really compelling. And you know what? He's still the kingpin of talk radio. So I rank him very high as a speaker. Continuing along the spectrum, the ideological spectrum, Bill O'Reilly. Bill O'Reilly is very different from Rush Limbaugh. Not quite as doctrinaire, not quite as knee jerk Republican on every issue, although probably 80% solid Republican conservative. He does come across more as the newsman and as someone who isn't trying to actively be a conservative Republican. And you cannot argue with his success. The number one rated cable TV news show, and not for the last quarter or the last year or the last couple of years, but we're going on like 15 years, folks. It's a long, long time to be number one again. I don't necessarily buy into his ideological perspective. You don't have to. But his ability to string together ideas, project a worldview, have a narrative, have the right mix of actually having some real interviews and listening, also some showmanship, some theatrics, using other guests as a punching bag. He is a master communicator. And when you look at his massive success, I know the question's about best speaker, but you have to give Bill O'Reilly credit for also being wildly successful as an author with all of his Killing series. Moving along the spectrum. Let's go sort of in the middle of things, someone not particularly ideological. Howard Stern. Again, Howard isn't my. I've listened to him before, of course. Who hasn't? But I'm not a regular fan. But the idea that he can just talk for hour after hour after hour, for decade after decade on a daily basis and keep people interested, that's not an easy thing to do. Most folks, you put a microphone in front of them and after about seven minutes they'd be like, I got nothing. I got nothing else to say. And Howard Stern can talk hour after hour, day after day, for decades, and still keep people engaged. That's good public speaking, folks. Moving further along, as someone purely in sort of the Democratic left of center position, Bill Clinton, pound for pound, no better public speaker in the world. I don't know why I say pound to pound. It doesn't mean anything, especially since Bill Clinton has lost so much weight. But Bill Clinton is still, I think if you strip the politics out of it, if you don't happen to like his politics, is the best public speaker. In the English speaking world today, even though some say, oh, he's not quite as good as he used to be, I don't, I don't see that moving further along. Looking at someone more overtly liberal, I would say a couple of the hosts, not many, but a couple of the hosts on msnbc. I do think Lawrence o' Donnell comes across as urbane, insightful and fair minded and intelligent. That's very much a personal preference. So those are some of my speakers. Llewellyn, I'd love to hear from you. The problem of course is if you're judging someone on giving a pure keynote speech, so many people just can't see most of the speakers. So it's harder to judge. So I've used more media figures and those who do see set speeches were kind of limited to the political realm. There were great speeches at both Republican and Democratic conventions in 2016 and 2012. To me, the standout speaker in 2012 at the Republican convention was Ted Cruz, which is the first time I had ever really seen him. Fantastic speech. There are good speakers everywhere. There are bad speakers everywhere as well. I'd love to hear from you. So Llewelyn, please tell me who you think your favorite speakers are. And as far as anyone else listening or viewing, post your comments as well. It. Do you want to own a newspaper? That's the question put out by a newspaper based in Vermont, the Hardwick Gazette. And what they found is that no, nobody wanted to buy their newspaper. Now they're left with giving away the paper in a newspaper writing column contest, which is a little bit sad. It's a weekly newspaper, a small town, it has infrastructure, I guess, printing presses of sorts. And what they're finding is there's no value when you put something up for market, for sale in the marketplace. And there is not a single offer. You need to conclude that the value is zero because that's what the market is offering. Now. This newspaper may have been an important part of social cohesion of this community for decades. I don't want to denigrate them in any way, but this is the new media reality. The cost, the means of production, of creating media. It gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every year. Digital, pixel, storage space, everything, it just gets less expensive. The hard part is creating interesting content that people want to spend time with, whether it's reading old fashioned newspaper, looking on a screen, text, audio, video. And increasingly the value of any media property is the new content you create and the audiences you can either bring in or keep. If it's a newspaper. The second you stop publishing for that day or you don't have a reporter, the value is zero. It's less than zero because you have rent, electricity and other hard costs associated with is perhaps a sad ending to this newspaper. Whether they get someone to buy it or win it and have to maintain it. If you win a prize that you paid nothing for and you do it for a week or two and you realize you're losing money and spending a lot of time, good chance someone will just walk away. There's going to be news in the world, there's going to be new ways of communicating that news. But at some point, if you have an infrastructure that's based on paper, printing presses, overhead, it just might not work anymore. You have to cut your losses and throw it away at some point. My own YouTube channel, my own podcast, my own website, blog included. We're only as good as the content we put out today. We're only real if we have an audience today. Otherwise there's no inherent value to any of this.

Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker, where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.