If you loved the movie Casablanca, you’ll love “Answer the &$%#* Question!” in a recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Contributing editor Trudy Lieberman laments the deteriorating quality of journalism because of the increase in media-trained executives and public officials. Interview subjects, Lieberman whines, “twist an interview to fit their agenda.”

Quick. Get me rewrite: “I’m shocked – shocked – to find that media training is going on in here.”

Surely it can’t be news that CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and even less august talking heads have their own agendas. Or, that they want to take advantage of a chance to grab some “free media.” Or, that they don’t want their positions misrepresented.

Lieberman opines that the “the fancy steps” taken by the media-trained to avoid reporters’ questions shortchanges the public. She’s wrong. The growth in media training is simply another facet of the evolution of the modern-day media. Consider this:

• The Internet has decimated the media’s role as gatekeeper. Everyone can be a publisher. No one has to rely on news outlets that for better or worse filter information by deciding what to run and how to play it.
  
• The confluence of multiple all-news channels with huge programming holes to fill 7x24 and bruising budget restraints has created a need for lots of (relatively) cheap programming: live interviews. These interactions provide transparency that reveals the good and bad of both interviewers and interviewees.
  
• Old dogs learn new tricks. Just as print journalists now learn how to use multimedia publishing tools, promote their stories on TV, and meet more frequent online deadlines, the people reporters interview learn how to give an interview.

TMT’s Eric Seidel thinks the Lieberman piece is “myopic, unilateral and even somewhat arrogant. Why should the reporter get to prepare for an interview, but the interviewee cannot?,” he asks.

Media training doesn’t, as Lieberman suggests, make the public “the loser” any more than free-flowing information and increased transparency do. Rather, it provides the public with a matchup of equals.

Perhaps if reporters aren’t up to the task of interviewing those with media training, they should brush up on how to ask the &$%#* question!