More News on the gaffe and truly awful political style/book sales front. The first was actually a bit shocking: Michele Bachmann is proving herself to be a very talented and in some areas quite nimble politician, one willing to try and expand her constituency and take advice from a seasoned political pro like Republican consultant Ed Rollings. Yet she keeps making the same sloppy mistake over and over. The second was shocking only because you wonder who is advising her: yet another move by Christine O’Donnell that indicates that although she is no witch she is seems to be a cement-head when it comes to book sales, p.r. and her own media future in anything but a madcap reality show.
And to preface this…….no.…this post is not about Republicans, or women in politics. It is about blunders that could be prevented by two people who — if managed properly and freed from their own hubris — could go farther than they are now.
First, there’s Michele Bachmann who has gotten some unwanted ink, broadcast minutes and cyberspace posts devoted to her historical gaffees which feed the image that she is either very sloppy or needs to reaaaaaaaally needs take go to adult school and take some history classes.
Did you know that the U.S. is facing a threat from the rising Soviet Union? You know we don’t, left and right bloggers (except those that have a partisan interest now defending her anyway they can) know we don’t, school kids know we don’t — but Bachmann SEEMINGLY doesn’t if you heard or read this interivew:
BACHMANN: What people recognize is that there’s a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward. And especially with this very bad debt ceiling bill, what we have done is given a favor to President Obama and the first thing he’ll whack is five hundred billion out of the military defense at a time when we’re fighting three wars. People recognize that.
This could — and probably is — a slip. But it feeds into the image that Bachmann needs to take some online courses in history.
The only thing missing was a comment about how we have to be careful about up and coming Premier Nikita Krushchev.
And O’Donnell? We ran THIS POST about her walking off CNN’s Piers Morgan’s Show in a move that made her look bad and probably boosted Morgan’s image as an interviewer.
Now we learn that she has also she has hung up on a radio talk show host:
Former Delaware senate candidate Christine O’Donnell abruptly ended two interviews on Wednesday when the questions she was being asked became tougher, marking a rocky day of promotion for her new book. Not only did O’Donnell walk out in the middle of an interview with CNN host Piers Morgan, she also hung up during an interview with a Salt Lake City radio station.
On Wednesday morning, O’Donnell appeared on the show Radio from Hell on X96. O’Donnell started out by reciting talking points from her book, until one of the hosts jumped in and said, “The voters of Delaware trusted their guts and thought that you were crazy.”
Bill Allred, one of the show’s hosts, then began questioning her about whether or not her Republican primary win was significant:
O’DONNELL: That’s not quite true. We beat Mike Castle, the establishment Republican, in a historic primary, where we had 3 times the amount of turnout that they ever had.
Q: So there were Republicans eating their own —O’DONNELL: Yeah, no. There were some really ground-breaking records that we accomplished, and I’m very proud of what we did in Delaware.
Q: How much did you beat Mike Castle by?
O’DONNELL: Gosh. I have the exact figure in the book —
Q: Was it a lot?
O’DONNELL: It was about 5 or 6 percent. It was a very, very respectable margin, especially when you consider how outspent we were.
Q: But you didn’t trounce him. So you could just as easily say —
She’s gone. Yeah, gone. She’s gone! She didn’t hang up. I bet her publicist hung up. Yeah.
If it’s her publicist, exactly what publicist does she have that thinks walking off shows and hanging up will a)sell books to all but maybe some of those who voted for her b)propel her into another media job c)convince Republican donors that she is solid enough to finance if she runs for office again.
Bachmann needs some tighter staffwork and to be careful when she states historical facts.
O’Donnell needs to get someone to work with her who can make her someone people want to read about or listen to.
But how can they listen to her when she walks out or hangs up if she gets a question she doesn’t like? It doesn’t come across as someone must-read or must-hear: it comes across as someone who can’t take the heat and who is spoiled.
UPDATED: Now O’Donnell has escalated it with CNN. She’s claiming Morgan was sexually harassing her and that’s why — not due to his questions on gay marriage (you know, the stuff actually on the tape). Details HERE at Mediate. Here’s a bit from Mediaite columnist Tommy Christopher:
For some reason, O’Donnell is hell-bent to convince people that her walk-off had nothing to do with her views on gay marriage, and something to do with Morgan’s questions about sex and masturbation, telling WTTG’s Steve Chenevy that the “inappropriate” line of questioning was “borderline creepy,” and calling it “borderline sexual harassment” in an interview with Today’s Savannah Guthrie.
Guthrie did a good job of challenging the factual contradictions in O’Donnell’s explanation, such as the fact that Morgan’s questions were based on things that O’Donnell wrote about in the book she’s trying to promote, or the fact that O’Donnell didn’t walk out until much later, but neither Guthrie nor Chenevy raised so much as an eyebrow over the sexual predator innuendo. Sexual harassment is a real thing, a horrible thing, and equating sexual coercion with asking someone about the comments that made her famous, that she wrote about in her book, is trivializing and sick.
The sad thing is, I’ve seen O’Donnell answer these questions many times before, and although her responses don’t always make sense (what does masturbation have to do with the spread of AIDS?), they are always delivered winningly, and she has always acquitted herself well. Even in the PMT interview, she gave as good as she got, getting Morgan to accept the title of “The Pro-Masturbation Talk Show Host.”
O’Donnell also was given ample time to speak about other issues, and made some excellent points about her treatment at the hands of her fellow Republicans.
I asked Piers Morgan about O’Donnell’s comments, and he replied, in an email, “I would say that her comments are ‘borderline actionable.’ Would she say this if a female journalist had asked the perfectly legitimate questions?”
AND:
O’Donnell’s current book tour illustrates another insidious issue that’s getting little attention, which is the creeping influence of publicists. Any reporter will tell you that PR people always try to influence how their charges are portrayed (that’s their job, after all), but increasingly, they see themselves as other people’s news editors. This is usually invisible to news consumers, as negotiations about interview ground rules are normally off-the-record, but in O’Donnell’s case, she came right out and gave Morgan editorial notes during the interview, and her publicity staff blocked the camera, and also ended a later radio interview.
There are certain compromises that journalists make in order to gain access to public figures (on-camera vs. print, reference audio vs. pen and pad, Q&A format vs. narrative), and while those figures often need the publicity, the balance has shifted too far to the access side of the equation when their publicists think they have the right to dictate what questions are asked.
O’Donnell’s 15 minutes of fame are up. I can’t see how stirring up this kind of controversy and walking off cable and hanging up on radio shows will help people run out in a recession and buy her book. Or how she’ll convince people to donate lots of money to her for a future political run. Or get a Fox News contract.
And her accusations about Morgan? As Daffy Duck would say…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.