Working the Media Refs

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate.

Welcome to the program. Today, a lot in the news I want to cover that relates to speaking, media skills, crisis communication skills. Here's one of the most depressing headlines I've seen in a long time and believe me, there have been a lot of depressing headlines lately. This one is on one of my favorite websites, vox.com it's entitled why you should assume your email will get hacked or leaked eventually. Now we've all seen in the news John Podesta, the campaign chairman for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. His emails were hacked. If you dig down, it looks like he actually did a number of smart things. He didn't just give out his password, he sent it to his IT person, had it thoroughly checked out. He was skeptical and still somehow his password got out and all of his emails leaked. Now you may love Podesta, hate Podesta, love Hillary, hate Hillary. That's not the point of this. But one of the shocking things to me was how frankly mild mannered and the fact that there was really nothing horribly embarrassing in these emails. I don't think I'm any worse or any better than most people, but certainly over the years have I ever sent a joke or received a joke that certain people might find wildly offensive? You bet. And I've got a couple of concerns here. One is our future political leadership. I mean, politics is so nasty now, you'd almost have to conclude someone is insane to want to run for public office. And I say that as someone who, as a kid, I love the idea of political office. I wanted to be president. I definitely aspired to run for public office. At some point I figured out that wasn't the best calling for me. So I no longer would love to run for public office or see myself running for public office. But does that mean, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years from now if a governor, senator, president wanted me to serve on some commission or somebody or some appointed position that it's inconceivable for me to want to serve? No, it's not inconceivable. But do I have to wonder about did I send a joke that somebody thought would be Insensitive Somehow in 1997, do I want to have to think about that now? At some level, especially with younger people, the standard is going to change. It's kind of like Facebook. If you're 35 years old today and you're applying for an investment banking position and the person hiring you is 35. If somehow they can find a drunken picture of you From Facebook from 10 years ago where you just, you look trashed and half naked, does that really make anyone lose a job today? I don't think so, but it could. But when it comes to email actual words associated with you, I just don't know how that's going to play out. It is a little scary. Concepts of privacy are evolving as more and more people share everything on Facebook. There is a sense that hey, anything goes, but still the act of posting a photo on Facebook is something that people do in, in a conscious way. Typically you don't just step into the shower one morning and then act non surprised if you see live video of yourself or a picture of yourself snapped while you're in the shower. I just, I can't imagine we get to that point where there's absolute zero concept a privacy sphere. So that is my concern about these emails and it's if you're on the opposite political side of the people who've been hacked, it's funny to say, sort of ha ha ha, but it could happen to you, it could happen to me. I don't know what the solution is, but I know it's a growing, growing problem. Now let's look at some other top issues that reflect to reflect on media and communication. This next one is getting some controversy. It is, it relates to the proposed merger between AT&T, the huge telecommunications giant and Time Warner, the huge media company. AT&T is proposing to purchase Time Warner for $85 billion. And a lot of people are upset about this. You have people on the left and, and the right saying this doesn't sound like a good deal. It's too much concentration of power in the hands of one company. Part of the fear is you have a button down conservative organization that really just knows about pipes taking over an organization like HBO which is a part of Time Warner. Is some conservative straight laced executive at AT&T going to say, well gosh, Bill Maher on Real Time said something I don't like or somebody who I went to church with doesn't like, so let's cancel him. Is that going to happen? Because there are a number of programming decisions in the Time Warner empire, certainly at hbo, where there's some subjectivity. No one's purchasing Bill Maher's show directly. There aren't ratings that result in ad sales going up or down. So a lot of it is in fact subjective. Now I'm going to, I think surprise some of you in telling you my position on this in that from what I know right now, I would let the merger go through. And it's not because I reflexively think the market always knows best. It's not because I reflexively say all government regulation is bad. Now that's not my position at all. But when you look at the historic uses of anti monopoly measures, antitrust measures from the government, it's to prevent too much concentration of power and monopoly power of one company and one industry. This is so called vertical integration, not horizontal integration. Now, if Time Warner wanted to buy Fox and combine itself with Facebook and there are all these media content creation companies, that would be a problem that I could understand upsetting people and there would be a legitimate cause for concern. But with this merger at&T, they're essentially the pipes. And Time Warner is the stuff you put through the pipes, whether it's Sports Illustrated, whether it's hbo, whether it's cnn. So here's the, here's the part of mergers that people don't talk about. Because I was certainly around the last.

Time Time Warner went through a big.

Merger with a little known company that no one ever remembers anymore called AOL America Online. Now at the time, it was the biggest merger ever. Tremendous hype. I can still remember Ted Turner. This is 2015, 16 years ago. Ted Turner, the founder of CNN say he had never been this excited about a merger since the night he lost his virginity. Talk about sound bites, folks. And it was hyped relentlessly.

And of course it went down in.

History as the worst merger of all time because the value of AOL essentially went to zero. It went to near zero. Every single thing that every single part.

Of their stock that Time Warner merged into, it was lost. All the so called value of AOL essentially was vaporized.

Disastrous, disastrous implication. Now did consumers get harmed in that merger?

I don't think so.

If I had been a stockholder of.

Time Warner, I would have been harmed. Now if you're a stockholder of aol.

It was the greatest thing ever.

People forget about that. People forget about the fact that, yeah, it was horrible for Time Warner and they lost, you know, tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars of market cap because of it.

But it was fantastic for AOL because.

They probably would have gone out of business after the Internet bubble burst or they certainly would have seen their value drop by about 90 or 95% about.

A year and a half, two years later.

So they essentially kept themselves propped up.

Here's the thing, a lot of smart.

People thought that was a Great deal. The government did not stand in its way and only people in the private sector got hurt. And I think that by and large, that's where you want most risk to take place. When it comes to an economy, you want private sector shareholders taking risk. I'm simply not aware of any consumer who was drastically, radically harmed by the AOL Time Warner merger. Now, some of you can disagree. I would contend that any problems the.

Consumer faced had had a lot more.

To do with the hierarchy and the bureaucracy of time order on the time order side. On the AOL side. Do you really miss Dial Up? I didn't think so. So there's certainly a good chance that this merger won't go through, because anytime you can unite the political right and the political left in the United States, it's a good chance you can kill something off. But when I look at all the ways the economy and the society of the United States could benefit from smart regulation, from better regulation, I just don't think that I would put this on the top of my list or frankly, on my list. Now, speaking of the private sector and the free market, the video service vine is going out of business. This is the site where you can post videos, but they're only six seconds long. There's a strict time limit, and you had to make the videos on your cell phone. I confess, I don't quite get it. I've seen vine videos. I haven't participated, primarily because maybe I'm not concise enough and I'm too wordy and windy. Part of it is I like to shoot videos with a professional video camera.

Not my cell phone.

Part of it is I'm just opposed to artificial time limitations of success. It's one of the things I'm not 100% a fan of are the TED talks. I'd much rather listen to somebody give a fascinating, brilliant speech for 45 minutes than to have it artificially cut off at 18 minutes, the way the TED talks do. But if you're going to have a limit, 18 minutes is not necessarily a bad limit. Six seconds to me, just shuts down the capacity to really communicate. Not everything, but most serious ideas. Anything beyond a chuckle or something to mock or laugh at, I think you lose a great deal by limiting to six seconds. So here's the problem for a lot of people. A lot of people went on Vine.

They were early adapters.

They started to build an audience. There are stars on vine, don't ask me who they are, but they have.

Millions and millions of followers, millions of.

Views, some of them daily. Some of them have made entire businesses careers out of their appearances on vine. And now it's all going away. And that, my friends, is the problem of putting all your eggs in one basket, of investing all your energies in one platform. Because I've made that mistake myself. As some of you may know, I had a YouTube channel and I won't bore you with the tedious details, had more than 10,000 videos and YouTube up one day and just tricked it down, took it down, Absolutely no indication of anything wrong. To this day, they won't tell me why. But I learned an important lesson. You can't rely on some platform that you don't own. You've got to own your own platform and you've got to be in a lot of other places. So that's why I'm on itunes and about 20 different podcasting sites. And yeah, I'm still on YouTube and happy to engage with people there, but it's never going to be more than one piece of the puzzle. So for the vine stars out there, part of me feels sorry for them, but part of me wants to remind them of the lesson of you want to be a creator, you've got to create in a lot of different formats. And you know, look at great movie makers. They're often also actors, they often write, they often do their own editing. Maybe they're in theaters for one movie, maybe they're straight to HBO on another. They diversify. They diversify risk, even if they're essentially in the same creative pursuit. And that would be my advice to these vine, these vine creators.

Also in the news. I think this is sort of a fun, interesting concept. A bunch of movie chains, specifically AMC theaters here in the United States, announced that they're going to be showing CNN's election night coverage, which is just one week from today. They're going to have one theater, a so called red theater for the Republicans, a blue theater for the Democrats in 25 cities. Red regal Cinemas is doing the same thing in 200 theaters across the city. Now, others have done this before. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema did this. About 7,000 people came to debate screenings this fall. It turns out that people like to watch important events around other people. There's a social component to. And I have to confess, I almost went to a huge theater where I live right outside of New York City. I'm a part of the Huntington City in Long Island. I live in Dix Hills, which is a part of Huntington and they have a big Paramount Theater here. And they were having a showing for the last debate, I almost went to that reason I did, feeling a little under the weather. Plus was doing interviews on podcast immediately after the show. And that would have extended getting back in time to the studio and producing the show. But I do think it's. It is fascinating people who will spend so much time, energy and effort going to a Giants football game, which ultimately, sorry, Giants fans, means nothing. Why not watch speeches, election coverage with people with the community, especially if it's people you share ideas with. So I take my hat off to the theater owners. Now. They're not charging for this, for the most part, of course. I'm sure they'll have their popcorn and concessions open and they've got to make a buck. Plus, I guess some of them, if you want to reserve a seat, are charging for that. And, you know, you provide a great big screen and a chair, that's a service I think worthy of paying for. Okay, final topic of the day. And folks, I'm gonna talk about this in politically neutral terms. So anybody you don't like, just assume the people I'm talking about are those people. If you do like them, assume it's somebody else. So here's the strategy. The tactic I find fascinating as we see in the American political system today, big time or big league, as some candidates say. Or big league, as allegedly some candidates say. But here's the tactic. It's called working the refs. Now, anyone who's ever been to a little league kids game or been a part of that knows that there are some parents and some fans where every single call a ref makes, you just complain. Unless it's 100% in your favor, every single close call, you scream, yell, curse, bloody murder, saying that the ref has somehow harmed you, was blind, was an idiot. And if the other side of your opponents aren't doing that, the theory goes, and I think there's huge validity to this, that refs are human beings. And like most human beings, they start consciously or unconsciously doing things to eliminate pain, to eliminate suffering. So if it's a really close call, and I make the call in favor of little Jimmy, but that goes against little Sally and her daddy is tj, and TJ is going to scream bloody murder and threaten to take the ref out back every time and beat him up. But little Jimmy's father never does that. Her mother never does that. At some point, the ref says, you know what? It's a close call. I really don't want that mean, nasty daddy TJ cursing, screaming @ me, I'll just call it against the other little kid. That's what does happen. I've seen it happen. You've seen it happen. So what in the world does that have to do with politics? Big time news? Well, there is one political party in America, and I'm not even going to say which one. You can deduce whatever you want because this isn't a political podcast. But there is one political party in America that for the last 20 years, I mean, it's been a part of their themes for the last 40 and 50 years. But especially the last 20 years and especially the last eight years, it has been a major, major theme of every single issue that gets into the media. The media are trashed and vilified as being tools of the other party, as being mere propagandists, of being unfair, of being biased. So you have a situation where so many so called mainstream journalists, in an attempt to, to not be criticized for being biased, are in fact biasing their coverage in favor of the group that's constantly screaming about media bias. It's kind of crazy, it's bizarre, it's unfair. I would argue it's unethical, but boy, oh boy, is it successful. It really does.

Work.

Work. Now, I'm not advocating this as a media training technique for my clients, but if I'm going to be honest with you, and I am and fair with you, I do have to give you a sense of what is working around the world. And I got to tell you, this is really, really working. If every single day you look at every single piece of news coverage through the lens of does this make me and my time, my team, look good? If the answer is yes, then you say it's fair coverage. If it's anything that makes your team look bad, even if all the facts are obvious to anyone, that your team deserves criticism, let's say I'm your team and I have murdered someone and stolen from banks and committed all sorts of atrocities and a reporter writes the facts well, using this strategy, you would just scream bloody murder and say that the reporter has written these facts about tj, is unfair, unbiased, unprofessional, is a partisan hack and deserves to be fired. And you might not win retraction, you might not necessarily get that one reporter to write more favorably about me in the future. But you start to bend the sense of possibilities from all the other reporters. You start to shift the zeitgeist because it's only human nature to avoid pain. And if reporters know they're simply going to get a lot more pain from criticizing your side even when it's accurate and fair, than criticizing the other side. It's only a matter of time before the criticism of you softens.

And.

The criticism of the opponent attack. Now, you do this long enough and the very same people who work the refs can now get any negative story they want about their opponents in. Because if they put something out there, if they hold a press conference or they plant it in one particular obscure website that's considered to be part of their team, they can now go to these so called mainstream media people, these refs, and say, aha, you didn't cover this negative, nasty story about my opponent. And the mere fact that you didn't cover them means you're biased, means you're unfair, means you're now a member of the other team. Now, initially the reporters will say, yeah, but there's really no proof here. And it's kind of an obscure website. But then your team can just come right back. It's, well, at least do it fair. At least quote us saying what we want. You can always quote the other side saying, no, we did not molest that tree, or no, we're not guilty of attacking that penguin. Do what he said, she said, and find finally the mainstream.

Reporters. Okay, you got me, I'll do.

That. But if one side is willing to attack and just make up stuff and just pull things out of thin air and throw that mud up against the wall, to mix my metaphors, if that's a daily strategy of let's just throw as much stuff on the wall against our opponents every single day, then what happens is the reporters are covering 10, 20, 50, 100 negative stories about the other team. The other team, if they don't play that strategy, they spend all their time on defense. So if you're the other team and you're against me, I have to spend all my time saying, well, it's not true. I didn't put my own dog in the mic microwave. It's not true. I didn't drown my cat in the pond. It's not true. I didn't run over neighborhood children on my tractor for.

Fun. And if all you ever hear.

About me is that, you know TJ is the guy who's accused of putting his cat and dog in the microwave, killing animals, running over kids, and he, he's defensive about it, pretty soon you're going to think TJ is just the worst guy in the history of the world. And that is what I believe is going on in the media world today. And if it does present horribly difficult ethical challenges. Because if you are on the.

Receiving of that, if you're not playing the the work, the ref's media strategy.

And all you're doing is defending and sticking to the facts, you're going to lose. You're at least going to lose a tremendous amount of ground, and it's not going to be a fair debate, and I don't have the solution for it. I'd love to hear from you. What do you think the solution is? And folks, we're not this is not a purely partisan or it's not in any way a partisan podcast. So if you notice, I have not even mentioned any one party name. I'd like to hear from you. Give me your comments. Send them to J. Walker on Twitter. Thanks a lot. See you next.

Time. Thanks for listening to speaking with T.J.