A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

In November 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s presidential bid was effectively ended after he went blank for an excruciatingly painful 47 seconds during a primary debate. Although that moment became rather infamous (I rated it the worst gaffe of Election 2012), Mr. Perry is far from alone.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer suffered a similar fate during a gubernatorial debate in 2010, when she went blank for 13 seconds. It was even worse for Jeanine Pirro, a candidate who briefly ran for Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat in 2005 but who saw her campaign almost instantaneously grounded after misplacing a page of her announcement speech and going silent for 32 seconds.

The truth is that most of us have suffered a similar–if less high profile–brain freeze. So what should you do if you go blank during an interview, debate, or speech?

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A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

Appearing on television can be an odd experience, especially for spokespersons who aren’t familiar with some of the more challenging formats (such as “remote” interviews, in which spokespersons look directly into a camera and speak to a host in a different location).

This post will help strip away some of the mystery by arming you with five details you’ll need to know prior to your next television interview.

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A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

After President Obama’s lackluster first presidential debate in October, many reporters noted the dozens of “uhhhs” that plagued his verbal delivery and made him appear ill-prepared.

You may think of that type of “verbal filler” as a minor cosmetic issue. But in the case of Caroline Kennedy, it doomed her political career before it started. In 2009, New York’s governor briefly considered her to fill a vacant Senate seat that opened when Hillary Clinton departed to become U.S. secretary of state. But her interviews were disasters. According to The Wall Street Journal, she said “you know” 168 times during a single 30-minute interview. After being roundly mocked by the local press, Ms. Kennedy removed herself from consideration.

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A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

Journalists don’t really understand the phrase “off the record”– or, more precisely, they can’t agree on what it means. If you speak to 10 different journalists, you’ll probably hear 10 different definitions.

In fact, one survey of five reporters from separate sections of The Washington Post found that each of the journalists defined “off the record” differently. Some thought it meant they couldn’t ever use information they learned; others thought the information was fair game as long as they didn’t identify their source. One of the reporters even admitted, “I have no idea what ‘off the record’ means.”

If journalists themselves can’t agree on the definition of “off the record,” you shouldn’t rely on the term to forge agreements with reporters. It’s a meaningless expression. Banish it from your lexicon.

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A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

In 2010, Toronto Mayor-Elect Rob Ford agreed to an interview with As It Happens, a national radio program that airs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (and elsewhere). But when the reporter called at the scheduled time, Ford was busy coaching a youth football game.

He proceeded with the interview anyway. Unsurprisingly, he was unfocused, simultaneously yelling at children and telling the reporter about fiscal restraint. He interrupted the interview numerous times and made his points inarticulately, until finally admitting he was “being distracted.” The disastrous interview generated unnecessary bad press for his campaign.

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A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

When people think of an “ambush interview,” they typically conjure up an image of a television interviewer–a Mike Wallace type–chasing after a scandal-tarred politician with camera and microphone in tow.

Those types of ambushes still occur on occasion. But today’s political candidates are just as likely to face ambush-style interviews from campaign trackers, who are paid by candidates’ opponents to record their every move in an effort to capture–or create–a harmful media moment.

Regardless of whether your ambusher is a reporter or a tracker, they’re both after the same thing: a great visual that makes you look bad. If you respond with defensiveness, anger, or shock, news outlets will run the video of your lousy reaction repeatedly, perhaps for days–and you’ll have handed your opponent perfect fodder for a negative ad.

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Ad Week: “The National Rifle Association shut down a key Twitter account last summer in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo. theater shootings. On Saturday, one day after the unthinkable shootings at a Newtown, Conn. elementary school, the NRA took a more drastic measure by deactivating its Facebook page after celebrating getting to 1.7 million fans on the social site earlier in the week.”

“While the group has not commented since Friday’s tragedy, it appears to have staked out a strategy to take its brand out of the social media picture in the wake of a mass-shooting news event. Given its guns-rights cause, the social media buzz after such events seems to be an unenviable conversation for the org to partake in.”

A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

In the late 1990s, I was a producer for CNN’s Sunday public-affairs program, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. Because Late Edition aired after all of the other Sunday public-affairs shows, one of my tasks each week was to watch the earlier programs to monitor what politicians were saying. If a politician said something interesting, I’d edit a video clip out of the quote so that Wolf could air it on the show.

I was always on the lookout for a politician saying something off message. Why? Because anything unscripted and off-the-cuff was inherently more interesting than the canned responses we always heard. And in a newsroom, a less scripted response will almost always be deemed more newsworthy.

Years later, I developed a name to describe that phenomenon: “the seven-second stray.” I call it that because if a spokesperson is on message for 59 minutes 53 seconds of an hour-long interview but says something off message for just seven seconds, I can virtually guarantee that the reporter will select that seven-second answer to play over and over again.

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The New York Times profiles former Clinton strategist Mark Penn show is now in charge of “strategic and special projects” at Microsoft and “much of his job has involved efforts to trip up Google, which Microsoft has failed to dislodge from its perch atop the lucrative Internet search market.”

“The campaigns by Mr. Penn, 58, a longtime political operative known for his brusque personality and scorched-earth tactics, are part of a broader effort at Microsoft to give its marketing the nimbleness of a political campaign, where a candidate can turn an opponent’s gaffe into a damaging commercial within hours. They are also a sign of the company’s mounting frustration with Google after losing billions of dollars a year on its search efforts, while losing ground to Google in the browser and smartphones markets and other areas.”

“From outside Michigan Republican circles, it appeared that the Republican drive to weaken unions came out of the blue – proposed, passed and signed in a mere six days.”

But Reuters reports the transformation had been in the making since March 2011 when two state senators “first seriously considered legislation to ban mandatory collection of union dues as a condition of employment in Michigan… The upstarts were flirting with the once unthinkable, limiting union rights in a state that is the home of the heavily unionized U.S. auto industry and the birthplace of the nation’s richest union, the United Auto Workers. For many Americans, Michigan is the state that defines organized labor.”

“But in a convergence of methodical planning and patient alliance building — the ‘systematic approach’ — the reformers were on a roll, one that establishment Michigan Republicans came to embrace and promised to bankroll. Republicans executed a plan — the timing, the language of the bills, the media strategy, and perhaps most importantly, the behind-the-scenes lobbying of top Republicans” including Gov. Rick Snyder (R).

“You always have to assume, and I know this better than anyone, that anything you do in public life will catch up with you.”

— Former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), quoted by WPTV, commenting on the Romney hidden camera videos.

First Read notes an important, unintended consequence of the hidden camera Romney video:

“It’s only going to make politicians more scripted and stale. Even the folks who shell out $50,000 in contributions aren’t going to see an unguarded moment from political candidates. Everything — and we mean everything — is going to be considered for public consumption.”

Andrew Golis has advice for politicians: “Turn on a camera at all times.”

Jonathan Chait: “Most campaign advice falls into two broad categories, each with its own cliché. One cliché is: When You’re Explaining, You’re Losing. The argument here is that attempting to rebut the details of attacks simply allows the campaign to remain on your opponents’ chosen terrain, so you must avoid any such arguments, deflect attacks, and turn to your own themes. The second main cliché is Never Let an Attack Go Unanswered. This supposed cardinal sin is to decline to respond to an opposing charge.”

“Of course, the two clichés point in opposite directions, which suggests that, when a campaign hits a stretch of rough media or bad polling, there’s a ready-made argument to show why it obviously blundered.”

Just published: The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling.

Nate Silver looks the impact of a vice presidential nominee’s home state on the ticket’s ultimate success and finds it is “is normally quite modest — perhaps two or three percentage points on average, if a little more in some cases and a little less in others. To be sure, two or three percentage points in the right swing state is not trivial, but it is probably not enough to outweigh the other strengths and weaknesses that a vice presidential candidate could potentially impart onto the ticket.”

“Indeed, presidential campaigns in recent years have largely abided by
this principle, with recent vice presidential nominees hailing from
states like Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, New York and Wyoming that did
not figure to be competitive.”

From the political dictionary: Dorothy Dixer

New York magazine has a must-read piece on how political campaigns go negative:

“What these negative tacticians are attempting to do is to simplify. Psychologists talk about the ‘availability heuristic,’ the tendency of a person to judge something, or someone, by the most readily available information. If viewers are told in a well-produced movie, for instance, that Romney laid off workers at a factory to enrich himself while running private-equity firm Bain Capital — regardless of whether it was three or four instances out of 100, or whether he ultimately created more jobs than he destroyed — they’ll tend to assume the single illustration demonstrates the greater truth because it’s the most immediate example.”

“The best way to exploit the availability heuristic, political consultants know, is to find the unstable territory between the legitimate facts and a smear.”