Recently Jesse Jackson got caught whispering into a live microphone in a television studio “I wanna cut his nuts.” He was voicing his disagreement with the way Barack Obama was handling his election campaign.
Jackson isn’t the only one to be caught on a live mic. It happens all the time.
Just before his wedding to Camilla, Prince Charles was caught whispering rude comments about a journalist during a press scrum with his sons. The journalist had just asked him a question. Prince Charles muttered “Bloody people. I can’t bear that man anyway. He’s so awful. He really is.”
President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were caught having a private conversation at lunch. There was some bantering then Bush criticized Hezbollah’s attack on Syria with his mouth full of food. “See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s--- and it's over.”
And there was the time when former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s director of communications, Francine Ducros got caught calling President Bush ‘a moron’. She didn’t last long in her job.
There are too many gaffes like these to list them all here. What’s interesting is that the comments are all made by people who should know better. These are all public figures. I’m betting they’ve all been media trained to death and advised to death. And here they are falling into the simplest trap of all. Saying what they shouldn’t be saying when there’s a microphone close by.
So the rule is when there is a mic near you - edit yourself. Around journalists, or in broadcast studios, never say anything in private that you wouldn’t want made public.
