With reputation management (or ‘spin’, as it used to be called) so important in our world of round-the-clock news and instant analysis, it is unsurprising that many top corporates are sending their executives to media training courses in a bid to keep them on-message and avoid any injudicious remarks that could send the share price plummeting.
Tell-tale signs of such media programming among subjects include overuse of the interviewer’s first name and replying ‘That’s a very interesting question’ to challenging queries – a move that simultaneously flatters said hack and buys the subject extra time to conjure up a half-decent answer.
