Edberg Award

The Perils of Telephone Interviews!

A few days ago, I got a surprise mail from the Edberg Foundation in Sweden saying that I had been chosen by the Board for this year's Edberg award for my work in conservation and conservation filmmaking. Subsequently a Press Release was put out in India. Following the press release, I got a call from a senior journalist from a news agency, who wanted to ask a few additional questions. Normally I'm extremely wary of telephone interviews and insist that questions be sent to me by email to enable me to give precise answers. Unfortunately that day, the gentleman caught me as I was about to go out. Also, there was a power cut and my modem was dead, so the email thing could not be done that instant.

I patiently answered all the questions in detail and, at the end of the interview, requested that the copy be mailed to me for fact checking before publication. To this the journalist insisted that he had taken copious notes and was not in the habit of making mistakes. I had to leave at that.

Horror of horrors, when the report came out, I was shocked and embarrassed to find a plethora of mistakes, major and minor. The report made me sound boastful, put words in my mouth that I had not spoken and ignored all the details I had given about important environmental campaigns of which I had only been a part. The report made out that I had done things single-handedly and implied even that important court decisions had been made on the basis of my films alone, which is rubbish.

Upon seeing the report I immediately wrote a polite email to the journalist pointing out all the errors. To his credit, he called me very soon thereafter and agreed to do another piece "in the near future" setting right all the mistakes I had pointed out. Unfortunately, once a report has been released on the web it's like a genie out of the bottle; you can't put it back. Now hundreds of websites have reproduced this report and it will stay on the net more or less forever.

I can't believe that with all my experience in dealing with the media in India, I could have made the mistake of giving a telephone interview to an unknown journalist. I've been kicking myself since!