Ever felt an interview slipping out of your control? Media-trained guests will try to deflect and dominate, here’s how to spot it and push back effectively.
This guide outlines the signs of professional media training and offers practical techniques to help you regain control and keep the interview focused.
Media training is often delivered by former journalists who have all the skills of carrying out a news interview and are using that knowledge to help their clients avoid tough questions, take control of the interview, and spin a line.
Why some journalists cross the line
Some journalists decide to change careers and move into PR (public relations) and media communications (comms). At that point their role changes from digging for stories to controlling stories.
In the past they would be the ones who asked the tough questions, but, in their new role, they teach business leaders and politicians how to avoid tough questions and promote either one side of an argument or a particular product or business decision.
During my career as a journalist, a couple of close friends — who were excellent news journalists — have crossed the line from journalism into PR. Most have done it for financial reasons. One in particular was headhunted by the very company that he had been investigating when working as a reporter on a local newspaper. They doubled his salary and got their man.
These communications professionals run workshops in media relations teaching their clients how to “handle journalists effectively”.
I got approached once. It was when I was working as a bi-media political correspondent. A friend asked me to tag along to a training session he was running where he wanted me to “share my TV and radio experience and skills”. He offered to pay me well, so I went along.
When I got there I discovered that those expecting to receive the media training were PR consultants who wanted tips and tricks for controlling encounters with journalists on TV and radio.
It felt wrong. Ever since I started in newspapers I had loved the concept of journalism as ‘shining a light in dark places’, ‘digging where others don’t’, ‘holding truth to power’, and delivering journalism in the category of ‘had it not been for you the world would never have known’. Idealistic, I know, but those aims never faded.
In that office surrounded by communications professionals who wanted advice on how to avoid the sort of questions that would deliver the journalism I believed in, everything froze. I realised this was not for me. Just taking part for one session was crossing a line that I didn’t want to cross. So I excused myself and never went back.
We have several pieces on Media Helping Media about threats to a journalists integrity how journalists can avoid such manipulation, and how relationships between journalists and politicians can get murky and unhealthy if compromise sets in. We have tips on how to interview politicians while recognising that they have an agenda not related to your line of questioning, and understanding the fine line between journalism and propaganda, and handling story leaks and tip-offs.
Here we look at how journalists should deal with interviewees who have learnt to use — and to avoid — all the tools a journalist relies on to get to the truth.
Spotting the signs
The reason I walked out of that communications training event was that I could see exactly what was being constructed. It was a set of techniques designed to neutralise the kind of journalism I cared about. Here is what PR and communications experts teach clients to help them avoid difficult questions from us, the journalists.
Calm composure: The first sign is usually composure that seems rehearsed rather than natural. A genuinely nervous interviewee fidgets, loses their thread, corrects themselves. A media-trained one rarely does. They have been trained to project calm authority especially when the question is likely to unsettle them. They have practised in front of cameras. They have been grilled by former journalists — people who know exactly what you are trying to do, because they used to do it themselves.
Key messages: Watch for the prepared phrase. Media training workshops spend considerable time on what trainers call key messages — three or four polished lines that the interviewee is coached to return to regardless of what they are asked. When someone uses the same form of words twice in an interview, or delivers a sentence that sounds slightly too crisp for natural conversation, it’s almost certainly one of those prepared lines.
Body language: This can also give the game away. Trained interviewees are taught to lean slightly forward, maintain eye contact, and nod as they listen — all signals of confident engagement. When those behaviours appear in combination, and without variation throughout an interview, they tend to look more like technique than natural responses.
Redirection: Listen for attempts to divert the question. A skilled media trainer will teach their client to hear the question, acknowledge it briefly, and then restate it in a form they find easier to answer. “That’s an interesting question, and what I think is really at the heart of this is…” is not an answer. It is a redirect. The interviewee has just replaced your question with one of their own.
The language of avoidance
Media trainers have developed a fairly consistent toolkit of deflection techniques, and once you know the phrases, you cannot unhear them.
The bridge: This is the most common technique. It involves acknowledging the question, however briefly, before using a connecting phrase to move towards the prepared message. Classic bridge phrases include: “What I can tell you is…”, “The important point here is…”, “What really matters to your audience is…”, and “Let me put this in context.” The bridge is designed to make the change of direction feel like a reasonable continuation of the conversation rather than an evasion. It rarely is.
The block: Sometimes an interviewee will simply decline to engage with a question. “I’m not going to speculate about that”, “That’s a matter for others to comment on”, or “I don’t think that’s a helpful way to look at this” are all forms of the block. They do not answer the question. They signal that the interviewee has been told, in training, that certain questions are off-limits.
The positive reframe: Rather than defend a negative, the interviewee pivots to a positive. “We’ve faced challenges, yes, but what this really shows is how resilient our organisation has been.” The difficulty is acknowledged — just enough to avoid seeming evasive — and then swiftly replaced with a preferred narrative.
The false statistic or vague authority: “The evidence shows…”, “Research tells us…”, “Most people would agree…” — these phrases lend weight to a claim without specifying which evidence, which research, or which people. They are designed to sound authoritative while being impossible to pin down. Press for the specific source.
The empathy manoeuvre: “I completely understand why people feel that way” is often deployed as a device to neutralise a difficult line of questioning. It sounds reasonable. It sounds human. But it does not engage with the substance of the challenge. The interviewee has expressed sympathy for the concern while saying nothing whatsoever about it.
The false outcomes: “We can either do this, or we face much worse consequences.” Media-trained interviewees are sometimes coached to reduce complex situations to black or white choices, framing their preferred course of action as the only sensible one. Probe the alternatives they are not mentioning.
Appeal to irrelevance: “I think what viewers really want to know is…” is a technique for suggesting that your question is somehow beside the point. It is not. The interviewee is simply trying to replace it.
How to handle question avoidance
The most important thing to remember is this: if a question is not answered, ask it again.
That sounds obvious. In practice it requires nerve, because trained interviewees are skilled at making unanswered questions feel answered. The pivot is smooth. The bridge sounds conversational. The positive reframe feels like engagement. A less experienced interviewer can come away from an exchange believing they got something useful when in fact they got nothing at all.
The technique for handling avoidance is simple in principle and demanding in practice. When an interviewee delivers a non-answer, do not follow them into their preferred line of questioning. Do not respond to what they said, return to what you asked.
“I appreciate that, but my question was specifically about X. Can you answer that?”
The phrase “my question was specifically about” is useful because it is precise. It names what was asked. It does not allow the interviewee to claim that they addressed it. Repeat it, calmly, as many times as necessary.
Some interviewers use silence after a non-answer. This can work — especially in a longer-form interview — because silence creates pressure to fill, and trained composure does not always survive an extended pause. Most people’s instinct is to keep talking, and the more they talk, the greater the chance that something unscripted emerges.
Another approach is to name the technique. “You’ve moved away from what I asked — I’m going to bring you back to it.” This is more confrontational, and it requires judgement about whether it creates the right atmosphere to bring results. But it is entirely legitimate. You are not being rude. You are doing your job.
What you must avoid is being drawn into a debate on the interviewee’s terms. If they have reframed your question and you respond to their reframing, you have handed them the interview. Always return to what you originally asked.
Keeping control of the interview
Control of an interview is not about aggression. It is about structure. You came with questions. You are there to get answers. The interviewee may have other intentions. Your job is to hold the line between those two things.
Prepare more questions than you can use. A media-trained interviewee will consume time. They will use the full length of their answers. They will pause, apparently thoughtfully, before delivering a line they rehearsed three days ago. If you have only five questions and two are successfully deflected, you leave with little. Go in with depth.
Know your material better than they do. The most powerful tool an interviewer has is specificity. Vague questions invite vague answers. Specific questions are much harder to dodge. “Your company’s annual report shows that customer complaints rose by 34% last year. Why?” is considerably more difficult to dodge than “How do you respond to concerns about customer service?” If your research is thorough, you can follow up with facts when you receive deflections. “That may be the case, but the figures I have show…” is difficult to argue with.
Keep your follow-up questions short. In the rhythm of an interview, a long follow-up can feel like a gift to an evasive interviewee. It gives them more material to respond to selectively, more angles from which to approach their preferred answer. A short, direct follow-up — especially one that simply returns to the original question — keeps the pressure on.
Do not let the interviewee set the agenda for the end of the interview. Media-trained interviewees are sometimes coached to save their key message for the close, knowing that it is likely to be used in edited clips. Be aware of the time. If you have not got the answer you came for, use the final minutes deliberately. “Before we finish, I want to come back to my earlier question, which you haven’t answered directly.”
And accept that sometimes you will not get what you came for. A well-trained interviewee who sticks to their discipline throughout will not give you what they have been trained to withhold. But that itself is information. An interviewee who refuses to answer a direct question three times, on camera, has told your audience something important. You do not always need the answer. Sometimes the avoidance is the story.
10 tips for interviewing a media-trained interviewee
- Do your research thoroughly. Know the facts, figures, and context better than your interviewee does. Specific questions are far harder to dodge than general ones.
- Prepare more questions than you need. Media-trained interviewees consume time. Depth of preparation gives you flexibility when answers fail to materialise.
- Learn to recognise the techniques. The bridge, the block, the reframe, the empathy manoeuvre — once you can name what is happening, you are less likely to be drawn by it.
- If a question is not answered, ask it again. Use the phrase “my question was specifically about…” to bring the exchange back to what you actually asked.
- Listen for prepared phrases. Sentences that sound slightly too polished, or that appear more than once in different forms, are almost certainly rehearsed messages.
- Use silence. A pause after a non-answer puts pressure on the interviewee to keep talking. Unscripted material often follows.
- Keep follow-up questions short. Long, multi-part follow-ups give evasive interviewees too many angles from which to construct a deflection.
- Do not debate on their terms. If you respond to the interviewee’s reframing rather than your original question, you have handed them the interview.
- Name the technique if necessary. Calmly pointing out that a question has not been answered is not aggression — it is professional rigour.
- Remember that avoidance is information. An interviewee who repeatedly refuses to answer a direct question has told your audience something significant. The evasion itself can be part of the story.
