I Was Ungood At Talking Heading Today

I'm disappointed with how I handled a talking head segment on the American United Nations Ukraine vote debacle, so let me play it for you then take another stab at it

Man squatting with head resting on his hands on his knee. Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons

Accountability starts with yourself, so let me put my hand up and go “I didn’t handle this one well,” explain it, and take another stab at it. It is a privilege to get to do what I do, so when the standards I set for myself are not met, I need to say so. I demand the same from politicians, office holders, pundits, and others in my writing and talking heading so we must be consistent here. Especially on such an important topic.

For the uninitiated, there are two kinds of segments I do for the good folks at News Forum, which is a growing national news outlet in Canada. One is what you see here, pretty typical of newscasts, where the story is told and then someone is brought on to commentate, explain, or otherwise exposite on the issue at hand. These are pre-recorded usually with a producer at their desk or control room, and then spliced in. The other is a longer two-shot segment where the anchor/host is asking the questions directly and you do a back and forth either live or what used to be called VTR (taping it as if it was live for playback later) but it is all digital now.

For the first time in my working relationship with the News Forum, I actually had to stop and ask them to just start over and recut the segment. I’m still not happy with it, but they were ok with it. So here is the segment that aired, which was the second take of me trying to get through it coherently:

I said “the Ukraine” which is wrong and horrifying. I couldn’t pronounce conference to save my life. My eye contact was all over the place. I was purposefully trying to not go down the rabbit hole that doomed the first take. Ungood. Semi-related pro tip: Don’t go on tv as a talking head 15 minutes after your mental health appointment with VA just ended and try to switch gears that fast. Seriously, that was poor planning on my part.

But no excuses, I wasn’t good enough there.

I offered to do it again but the very obliging producer was happy with that and went with it. I spent the rest of the day second guessing it and working up an apology and “I’ll do better next time” message to the news director like Bart at the blackboard.

Image generated with Google Gemini

Anyhoo…

President Trump and his administration’s mask-off moment in support of Putin at the United Nations was well telegraphed, but still viscerally gross to watch play out in real time for normal human beings of any moral character whatsoever.

Putin has long since told the world who he was. The long-time dictator of Russia has screamed his true nature at the world; with his invasion of Georgia, invasion and “annexation” of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine, plus various and sundry examples of thuggery, oligarch enrichment, and enemies randomly coming down with uranium poisoning, falling out of windows, and having their aircraft shot down along with the periodic civilian airliner.

Likewise, President Trump’s actions shouldn’t surprise anyone after decades of being a media fixture and a decade in presidential politics. Anyone paying a lick of attention should have the mythology of Donald Trump and the man Donald Trump in clear alignment by now. But folks have agendas, business models, and entertainment needs that sometimes affect that. Most of the news media do not have those two things in alignment, turn it into multiple Trump phantasms, and thus go for the old Paulie and Duke advice of “hit the one in the middle” whether that one exists or not.

When I’m called upon for analysis and opinion, I do my level best to be informed and try to lay out context and some reasoning. The thing with President Trump is, and this Putin situation is a great example of this, Trump the leader doesn’t really require deep analysis. It’s all right there, barenaked and brazen, all the time, unchanging, unfazed. The verbiage and carnival barking pitch varies and oscillates to make sure the spew is widely distributed, but the core is stationary, steadfast, unmovable.

At the core, and what I took the incoherent route in trying to explain in that segment, was everything Trump does goes through a filter of Trump first. Those of us who burn bandwidth on understanding what is going on spend mental power on consequences, actions-reactions, historical precedents, effects on the persons, places, and things involved in the news item du jour. Donald Trump does not. By his own admission, from denigrating folks who are serious about their business to his own habits of “executive time,” having material read to him instead of reading it himself, and the well-established habit of being easily persuadable by those who get the last word in his ear.

So, here I am trying to fill a segment with reason and logic, when I could honestly just say “Trump wants to be Putin without the limits on power, he can’t stand Zelensky for being against the thing he wishes he was and for perceived injury and slight in the ‘perfect phone call’ mess & subsequent impeachment debacle. And because of all that millions of people have to suffer because they don’t figure in that equation when doing Trumpian math, which never works out to a solution that makes the equation true.

But commentary habits die hard, and that 15 seconds doesn’t fill a segment. That’s how the media works, for good, bad, or indifferent. There is fair criticism to how things are done by those of us in the media to be suffered there. That segment went bad because I started doing normal, realized I was babbling nonsense that didn’t meet the moment, and asked to redo it. But you just can’t do normal then change speeds on something this important. So, when in doubt, tell the truth from the go.

I’m going to work on doing more of that. But I will also workshop doing it in a proper format to still carry out my part of the talking head duties.

My resolve to not give Donald Trump all my time and attention holds. When I do, I’m going to make sure I don’t wordy word too much around the amoral chaos actions of our president, lest folks miss the latter for the former. Actions being louder than words, or at least they should be.

Plus Canada is going through some things, and deserves better from the designated American trying to still explain the mostly unexplainable of our current representative government.