Aggressive questioning rarely comes more dramatically than was experienced last week by social media titans TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, Discord’s Jason Citron, X’s Linda Yaccarino – and above all, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. Of course, this was not a media interview: on the face of it, it was a senate hearing entitled Big […]
It is a simple but hard-to-follow rule for many leaders: avoid committing or promising something in the future, that may not be deliverable. Rishi Sunak’s political difficulties today are in part created by his bold decision to ignore this rule. Of the Prime Ministers five pledges (easily found here on the government website), two are […]
The curse of knowledge means that while every press officer understands the different types of interviews and the risks or lack of risk attached to each, a surprising number of spokespeople are much less clear. My experience is a little clarity on this goes a long way. Here is my list of the different roles […]
James Cleverly last week added his name to a long list of senior politicians who said something unwise, only to find it had been caught on microphone and made it to the front pages. It all began when Labour MP Alex Cunningham asked Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions, ‘Why are 34% of children in […]
‘I don’t want to be like one of those politicians that never answers a question.’ It is something we hear from almost everybody we media train. And we understand why so many would hate to feel they were behaving ‘like a politician’. In fact, once trained by us, any spokesperson will know that one of […]
One of the key components of preparing a presentation, or messages for a media interview, is to find and then communicate key numbers. If you are at a dinner party or down the pub it is fine to have opinions without numbers. But, if you step into the world of professional communication, my advice is […]
A very old member of our extended family was on her death bed when my father-in-law went to see her for the last time. She was one of the last of several generations of women who had mostly been, what she would have called, a housewife. As she lay in hospital there was no stepping […]
A client alerted me to an uncomfortable interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday. New Transport Minister, Mark Harper, ‘took one for the boss’ and accepted an interview on Radio 4’s Today Programme, despite the fact that the media is awash with rumours about cancellations or delays to HS2. The boss, Rishi Sunak, was […]
In my view, the seven-bin policy – which we should all theoretically support – was never going to hit the mainstream. [If you are not familiar with this news story, check out BBC coverage here.] And that is because of a simple but remarkably resilient rule: all lists should be three, at least in the […]
I know which I prefer. SEXI is apparently a mnemonic device used by university debating societies. I only know this because someone pointed out to me that this had featured in a recent Guardian article by Simon Usborne entitled: Don’t steamroll, and go easy on the stats: how to win an argument – without making […]
