EDITORIAL – How to turn an interview with the mayor into a total gong show

An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.

SOME PEOPLE should never be in the same room together. In the case of Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson and CHNL’s afternoon talker Brett Mineer, make that the same planet.

Nevertheless, the two of them got together Friday afternoon at the station to lock horns again and it wasn’t a pretty sight. The mayor got emotional, Mineer got pompously condescending, and the whole thing amounted to half an hour that would have been better spent anywhere else but listening to them fight.

Mineer’s feelings about the mayor are no secret — a year ago he declared RHJ “unfit” for the job. Hamer-Jackson pulls no punches in his assessment of the radio host either, dismissing Mineer as “just a biased guy who yaps off.”

The problem with these two is that they don’t understand each other. Hamer-Jackson is a tough interview because he demands more answers from the interviewer than the interviewer has questions.

Instead of playing Mr. Nice Guy with the media, he insists interviewers explain and justify their questions; a guy like Mineer doesn’t like that. “You’re not here to interview me,” he told Hamer-Jackson at one point Friday. At other times, all he could do was lamely declare the mayor was “obfuscating.”

Here’s the problem. Hamer-Jackson isn’t your typical smooth-talking politician who offers pleasant-sounding word salads when he talks to the media. He talks like a guy who’s spent his working life using his hands and his street smarts, not emoting corporate speak in board rooms.

He doesn’t speak fluently. He starts a sentence and doesn’t finish it. He sometimes puts three different thoughts on three different things into the same sentence and by the time he finishes you have no clue what he’s trying to say unless you learn his language.

In other words, he’s not what some people would call articulate. But if you listen carefully, and if you have a reasonable knowledge of the issues or incidents he’s addressing, you’re able to translate for yourself.

Mineer, though, doesn’t seem particularly interested in that. For example, Hamer-Jackson returned several times to the subject of “updates.” What’s an update, he demanded. He was taking issue with a statement by City operations director Jen Fretz that she had provided council with “a private update” on security in City Hall. He was making the point that he hadn’t received any previous reports on that particular matter, so how could it be an update, but Mineer didn’t get it.

Towards the end of the interview he resorted to a cheap shot, asking, “Are you OK these days?… You seem to be losing control.”

But it was Mineer who’d lost control of the interview long before that. “I’m not sure what we’ve learned here today,” he concluded, overlooking the fact it takes two to make a good interview, or a bad one.

Finally Mineer ended the pain, wrapped things up and thanked the mayor for coming in. The mayor thanked Mineer in return, adding, “It’s too bad you don’t mean that.”

Which pretty much sums up what these two think of each other, and why they shouldn’t bother trying to talk, ever.

“I probably shouldn’t have got so emotional,” Hamer-Jackson admitted later.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.