Jerry Brown: Media Master
There is at least one good reason why conservatives should read the newly-released transcript of some recent Jerry Brown media interviews. They could learn a thing or two about handling reporters.
What they won’t find is an embarrassing gaffe or revelation that might help the Republicans next year if Brown, as now seems likely, faces their candidate next year in the race for governor. It wasn’t Brown’s decision to release the content of these taped interviews -- the order to make them public grew out of a dispute between a Brown staffer and one of the reporters, as the L.A. Times' George Skelton explains – but they turn out to do him no harm. In fact, they suggest why he was such a media star in his younger days and is capable of a repeat performance. He knows how to make great copy. More to the point, he makes sure that copy is not only great for the reader but great for him.
He does this with what journalist Joe Matthews calls a Socratic approach: “His media method … is to seize control of the interview by asking reporters as many questions as they ask him.” In an April 2009 interview, the AP’s Beth Fouhy asks the then-71-year-old Brown, “How do you combat that you’re past your prime,” and gets this: “What is there to combat? What does that mean?” But alongside this aggressive alpha-dog style, there’s a more subtle charm. Brown can intimidate and ingratiate all at the same time, because he knows what reporters want. They want news, they want good quotes, they want color.
They also, believe it or not, want to be liked. Brown knows how to deliver a compliment. Toward the end of his interview with Fouhy he says, “I’m sure the campaign won’t be as substantive as our conversations.”She comes back by thanking him for his time and saying, “I talked to you several times when you were mayor of Oakland. I don’t know if you know that.” “I did,” he answers, and any semblance of a hard-hitting interview melts into a friendly, free-floating conversation.
Brown asks Fouhy “Where did you hang your hat” and she ticks off the candidates she’s covered as a national writer – Hillary Clinton, McCain and Palin. The mention of Hillary gets Brown going again on the subject of why he is so well-qualified for high office. More good, pithy copy ensues: “I’ve been a candidate. She wasn’t, she was more derivative. I’ve done things … She doesn’t have the scope. She didn’t work with Mother Teresa. … She didn’t take Linda Ronstadt to Africa. She didn’t have her own astronaut. I had Rusty Schweiker, an astronaut. I put him on the state energy commission. There’s a certain texture to who I am and it’s unique, so I don’t know how you compare it.”
I’ve been a reporter and I know how pleasant it is to get a riff like this from a prominent politician, even when it verges on the ridiculous. As an interviewer, you feel like a winner. Your subject has opened up and is letting loose. You’re also flattered that the interviewee seems to respect your intelligence. Brown’s line about the superiority of “our conversations” is another way of saying, “You ask great questions.” Maybe it’s basic Dale Carnegie stuff, but a lot of politicians seem incapable of pulling it off.
Will Brown now be getting favorable coverage from Fouhy and other reporters he has charmed along the way? Many will say that question has nothing to do with charm and everything to do with ideology. Brown’s politics are left-of-center and so are those of most media people. They would favor him even if he didn’t give them such good ink. But good reporters, at least, know their biases and try to correct for them. They see this effort as part of their professionalism. That counter-bias, if you will, might even give the edge to a conservative who cheerfully gives reporters what they need. But chilly relations with the media have become something of a badge of honor on the right, as if the act of giving reporters what they want is akin to fraternizing with the enemy. The right’s worst problem with the media is not the media’s liberalism. It’s the inability of so many conservatives to understand the news business and what really drives the people in it. Jerry Brown, for all his baggage as an ex-governor, at least knows that.