Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message

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The Good, the Bad, the News Media—or, Juggling Chain Saws

Would you willingly walk into a lion’s den unarmed and unprepared? Of course not. So why would you willingly agree to sit down with a ferocious reporter who wants to feed on your bones for dinner?

Mark Twain never lived to see a modern chain saw, so for his metaphor of the interview process, he likened it to a cyclone. In a treatise he penned around 1890 called “Concerning the ‘Interview,’” he wrote:

No one likes to be interviewed, & yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their ...