Most Media Crises Begin Before the Interview – Here’s How to Avoid Them

Every so often, a chief executive reminds the rest of us why media training exists. In May, Standard Chartered’s Bill Winters was asked about the bank’s AI plans and told reporters in Hong Kong that the technology would replace what he called “lower-value human capital.”

The bank had already announced thousands of back-office job losses, so the headlines were coming regardless. That one phrase decided what they’d say. Regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore opened inquiries within days. Halimah Yacob, Singapore’s former president, called the comments demeaning. Within the week, Winters was on LinkedIn apologising for wording that had, in his own words, upset colleagues.

None of that was really the problem. After all, banks cut costs, roles change, and boards expect executives to justify both. The problem was the choice of words: “lower-value” and “capital” – combined, they turned redundancies into an accounting line, and the moment it landed, the story stopped being about strategy and started being about how Winters saw his own staff. An apology can address the fallout – the regulators, the criticism, the unease inside the bank. It can’t remove the sentence that caused it. That quote is now the opening line of every piece written about Standard Chartered’s AI strategy from here on, whatever Winters says next.

Most media disasters don’t happen in the interview chair, they happen weeks earlier, at the point nobody sat down with the key spokespeople and worked out what to say – and crucially, what not to say.

Two or three points, not 20

Under pressure, most people try to cover everything: context, caveats, every reasonable objection, on the theory that more detail means more safety. It has the opposite effect.

Give a journalist 10 points and they’ll lead with the one you least wanted in print, because that’s the one worth printing. Decide your two or three points beforehand, write them in words you’d actually say out loud, and treat the rest of the interview as scaffolding for those points.

A rough test: read the line back. If it sounds like a paragraph from a strategy deck, cut it. If it sounds like something you’d tell a mate over a pint, keep it.

Silence has a meaning too

“No comment” feels like the cautious option, but it rarely reads that way. The journalist still files the piece, and the audience fills in the blank. And in typical fashion, it’s usually with a worse explanation than the truth.

A better move is a short, honest answer: what you can confirm now, what’s still being worked out, when you’ll come back with more. It says less, but it keeps you part of the story instead of a name that declined to be.

Structure beats improvising

When pressure hits, a fixed structure holds an answer together:

• Lead with the point
• Follow with one line of explanation
• Add a concrete example if there’s room.

Headline, explanation, example – a pattern simple enough to sound obvious, yet hard to reach for on the spot without having drilled it beforehand.

The same goes for hostile questions:

• Acknowledge what’s been asked
• Answer briefly
• Steer back to your point

Done well, it looks like confidence. Done badly, or not at all, it looks like you’re dodging the questions. Which outcome you get usually gets settled in the prep room, long before anyone’s holding a microphone.

Preparation is cheaper before the story breaks

Most organisations only book media training once something’s already gone wrong – the corporate communications equivalent of shopping for a fire extinguisher mid-blaze. As we’ve discussed before, it pays to be prepared in a crisis, and while training beforehand won’t stop hard questions coming your way, it does mean your key points hold up when a journalist leans on them.

Winters had a defensible business rationale sitting right behind him. What he didn’t have was a version of that rationale that had been said out loud, tested, and stripped of anything that could land as contempt. Every spokesperson can build that. Most simply haven’t sat down to do it yet.

The author: Joseph Price-Moore is PR director at WPR.  He’s a communications professional, with a global outlook and a passion for navigating complex narratives across sectors, audiences, and borders, who brings clarity, creativity, and confidence to the table.