By Roz Morris, Managing Director, TV News London Ltd
Clients often tell me that one of the most useful pieces of advice I give them as a media interview trainer is how to use the bridging technique.
Bridging is used every day in media interviews and once you know about it you can spot it. But, if you don’t know anything about it, you won’t notice it unless it’s done badly.
Basically, bridging involves making a bridge from an interviewer’s question to your own messages. For example, a journalist could ask you when your company/organisation first brought in a policy on xyz. You may not be sure of the exact date, and you may not think this is a relevant point to spend time on during your media interview. How do you get away from this?
Use bridging to handle difficult questions
The answer is to make a bridge away from a difficult question and get to the main points you want to get across. You can do this by addressing the question directly and saying something like: “We have had policies in place on this for many years and what we are most concerned about now is to ensure that people realise how important it is to implement the steps we recommend in our report ….”
You then keep going with the points you must get across to convince the audience of your case.
This is just one example of how to use bridging and there are many others in my book The Visual Revolution Guidebook where I also look at the use of the pivot and give real examples of how these techniques are used.
A bridge to nowhere is not convincing
The whole point about bridging is that you build a bridge to some messages you’ve already prepared and are on top of delivering with authority.
You can really come unstuck if you don’t have anywhere safe to bridge to. That’s what has happened with the UK Labour Government and their handling of the series of negative stories about them regarding free gifts of clothes and event tickets for cabinet ministers as well as questions about the salary of labour’s most senior official, the Downing Street Chief of Staff, Sue Gray.
The Government showed that it had a clear lack of a central message on all the problem questions thrown at ministers. They all said different things, most of them thoroughly unconvincing to many members of the public.
This chaos in handling difficult questions was also very evident once the scandal over freebies began and the Prime Minister’s’ wife Lady Victoria was sent to London Fashion week the very next day wearing clothes lent to her by a designer. This. in itself, promoting a British designer, was not a particularly unusual thing for a Prime Minister’s wife to do.
The problem was that wearing clothes she had not bought herself when it had just been revealed that she and her husband had taken a lot of money for free clothes plus designer spectacles for him, just did not look appropriate.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, defended the donated clothes from Labour peer Lord Alli as the Starmers “wanting to look their best for Britain”.
Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, made the extraordinary statement that it was part of Starmer’s job to accept gifts, since people wanted to talk to decision-formers. This appeared to be tantamount to an admission of gifts for access.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson actually defended her taking of free Taylor Swift tickets by saying her daughter ‘really wanted to go’. Presumably, that also goes for lots of teenagers not offered free tickets. She also defended taking £14,000 from Lord Alli to host ‘work events’ after it was revealed how he paid for her 40th birthday party.
The MPs’ register of interests reveals the Education Secretary took a total of £14,000 from the businessman in November and December last year, described on the register as being used to ‘host a number of events’.
There were lots of differing defences. There was no central defence, no one line for ministers to take and the rows rolled on for a fortnight right up to the Labour Party annual conference.
We won’t take any more free clothes
Even the official announcement that senior ministers would no longer take donations of clothes was bewildering to many of the public. They were frequently being told by Government ministers that everything was bad, times will be hard in the future, we can’t afford to give all pensioners a winter fuel allowance, and then being expected to believe that people on high and even six figure publicly funded salaries needed other people to buy them clothes and spectacles.
Watching all this, Dominic Cummings, who knows a thing or two about government chaos, was quoted in The Times saying: “Starmer’s handling of donations and his chief of staff (supposed to sort out things like donations) is a masterclass on bad management.” It takes on to know one – you can read my assessment of how Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson got things wrong on communications in my blog here
As I have pointed out previously for Conservative Governments, optics matter in the 21st century and you don’t improve your optics by not controlling your messaging. Unconvincing inconsistency does not win hearts and minds- or positive headlines.
Want to know more about how to handle media interviews professionally?
There’s lots more advice in my book ‘The Visual Revolution Guidebook’.
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