(Photo courtesy City Lit NYC)
By Elissa Ehrlich
This weekend I saw the movie Frost/Nixon, which focused on the groundbreaking David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon shortly after his resignation. If you’re not familiar, David Frost, a TV talk show host from the UK, so skillfully interviewed Nixon that he coerced him into admitting wrong doings around Watergate that were never previously revealed to the public.
While I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone who likes a good drama, what struck a chord most with me was how it echoed the foundation of our jobs as PR professionals – the skill of teaching the spokesperson to manage their interview. The movie led me to think that these days, we’re so swept up with staying up to speed on new social media tools, the explosion of blogs and online content and the massive struggles of many print outlets that we might not be giving the fundamentals of our job the attention they need.
As Nixon’s right-hand man lectured him on managing the interview by providing lengthy, benign answers that would prevent Frost from asking too many questions, I was reminded how effective good media training can be in helping our clients achieve their goals. Perhaps the fundamental rules of the PR game have changed since the late 70s, but some do remain tried and true.
As long as everyone from The Washington Post to Wired are still in business, we’ll all keep pitching our clients to them – making the lessons of Frost/Nixon still relevant over three decades later…
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