Dodging the question – but not the bullets

Twenty years ago, you could always spot the politician who had been through the media interview bootcamp known as the Bunny Carr media charm school.

The reference to Bunny Carr (an RTE television personality many moons ago) was to the communications company he founded, Carr Communications.

The particular methods were perfected by the husband and wife team of Tom Savage and Terry Prone when doing media training with politicians.

The style became parodied by a stock response to a tricky or sticky question: “I’m very glad you asked me that question.” Of course, the question would never be answered.

A generation of politicians, many of them in Fianna Fáil, privately swore by the training they received to deal with those clever jumped-up cynical know-it-all presenters.

Over the years, Ministers and their opposition markers have become very adept at not answering question on live television or radio, or using a formula of words prepared by handlers. Any brief for any senior politician will anticipate every difficult issue and question that will come up and will also brief on what the appropriate response will be.

Politicians avoid answering the direct question by answering a completely different question uninvited.

No matter what question they have been asked they will respond with an equally uninvited summary (and not a short one) of all the achievements of the administration since coming into office.

In the fast-moving world we live in politicians know that the clock is their friend not their enemy. The slots allotted to live interviews have shortened. So a canny politicians can give long and convoluted answers (and for some bizarre reason Alan Shatter comes to mind) and effectively run down the clock.

Another thing a politician can rely on is that journalists are human beings and not of the chess grandmaster variety. So they will ask the hard question, mar dhea, and then not really listen to the response given by the politician. So instead of picking up on an inconsistency or flaw or absence, they will blithely move on to the next question having failed to elicit the required information.

And the last I’ll allude to is a relatively new media phenomenon: the doorstep interview.

This has emerged really only in the last 15 years, since the advent of local and independent radio.

They were originally designed to give radio journalists an opportunity to get a short sound-byte from a leading politician that they could use for their hourly bulletins.

But now they have become the main form of interview for politicians, most notably Taoisigh.

They usually take place before or after a formal event and allow journalists to ask questions of the politician. Each journalist is allowed one question. If the answer is not satisfactory, there is no chance of a follow-up. The next journalist will be more interested in their own question than in following up.

The upshot is that it allows a politician to pick and choose. If he or she doesn’t like the question, they can quickly answer it with some platitude and then move onto the next question.

On the face of it, it seems democratic. All the journalists get a chance to ask a question. But in reality it is the exact opposite. A skilled politician can play the crowd and can tell them as little or as much as he or she wants. For a reporter it is a deeply frustrating experience to walk away from such interviews knowing that you haven’t even scratched the surface.

For more from Harry McGee and his insights into the Garda Taping issue see this week’s Connacht Tribune