Who does the celebrity interview really purpose?
[...] But really, what can one get out of a five-minute interview that has been groomed and pre-approved by a team of public relations experts? Jefferson writes about the relationship between celebrity, public relations and journalism in a post for GOOD.
Jefferson is sure to note that there are great reporters who work the entertainment beat, but that pre-packaged interviews are the norm, not the exception.
Several years ago, I was offered a 15-minute interview with a well-known and well-respected musician. "You can't ask him about any of [his band's] internal drama," his publicist told me, "but everything else should be all right." Restricting what I could talk about rubbed me the wrong way, but I was young, inexperienced, and excited to speak with an artist I really liked, so I agreed to it. On the day of the interview, I waited for the musician and his publicist to call me, and then I waited some more. By the time I finally heard from them, they told me that, instead of 15 minutes, I now had "about nine or 10." I got flustered trying to decide which of my questions were most pertinent considering the new time constraints. Then, at the five-minute mark, the publicist cut in to tell me to wrap it up. "Has he been listening in this whole time?", I thought, which flustered me even more.
In the end, the publicist and the magazine for which I was writing the piece both told me they were happy with how it turned out. But I couldn't ever bring myself to read it. The whole process made me feel silly and amateurish. I had been somebody's mouthpiece, and it sucked.
As I would eventually learn, that kind of incident is not a rarity, nor is it relegated to the music world. Actors, politicians, and all kinds of self-important people often reach out to media outlets requesting coverage. It's only after you agree to provide that coverage that the caveats begin: "He doesn't want to talk about his divorce"; "The band's not here to discuss their legal troubles"; "Actually, she doesn't want to speak to those allegations at all, and if you bring them up, we're walking." The celebrity interview is a strange beast: Something that should make the celebrity feel at least a little bit vulnerable ends up being taken over by the celebrity and their publicist. The "journalist"? They're just there to transcribe.
[...]
The celebrity-industrial complex is a real phenomenon, and a big part of the problem is the droves of publicists and PR people whose sole job is to shield their famous clients from saying or doing anything to tarnish their reputations. This means hawking out 10-minute, highly regulated interviews to newspapers and magazines in the hope that some of them won't care that they're being condescended to. And many of them don't care as long as they get to chat on the phone with a rock star—who won't tell them anything they wouldn't be able to find in the press release his publicist sent along in advance. To be sure, there are some great reporters who do beautiful work on the entertainment beat. But most of the time these interviews result in canned answers to pre-approved questions, and they're worthless. [x]
