Dear politicians,
Here at Shevlin Media, we are seekers of the facts. Not polite or impolite fiction, bullshit or other forms of evasion, deflection, ducking and weaving.
We know that for many of you, those forms of interactions have always been collegial and pleasant, an opportunity for you to show up with pre-baked talking points that you then get to repeat over and over again. Then we thank you for allowing us to question you, and you keep being invited back.
Those days are gone.
In future, all of our guests will be operating to a new set of rules. As follows:
- You will stay on topic and answer our questions
When we ask you a question, we expect you to answer that question. Not a different version of the question, or a completely different question.
So if you show up intending to recite a collection of talking points that bear little or no relation to the questions we intend to ask, we will stop you and remind you that you are not answering the question. if you persist in not answering the question we will remind our viewers that you did not answer the question. And we will keep reminding our viewers of this, just to ram the message home.
2. You will not interrupt the questioner or other guests
Interrupting somebody else in a question-and-answer or debate dialogue is at best discourteous, and at worst is a form of bullying. We will not do that to you, and we expect you to not do it to us or other guests. We will operate to a three strikes rule. If you violate the rule more than three times, the interview will be terminated.
If you persistently refuse to obey these rules, we reserve the right to immediately terminate an interview, and ask you to leave the studio. If you will not obey the rules and you will not answer our questions, you’re wasting our time, and that of our viewers.
If you show up and don’t play by the rules, don’t expect another invite. We are under no legal obligation to invite you online. There is no Fairness doctrine governing our guest appearance policies, so if you decide that you will not appear on our network, that is your call, but we will probably then have a lot more airtime to give to your opponents, and non-politicians, who tend to be a lot better at answering questions in any case. We will be casting our guest net a lot wider in the future.
If you don’t want to come on to answer our questions, because you only want to answer your own questions, so be it. We might invite actual experts on instead, to talk about important topics. We will invite anybody who agrees to appear according to these rules, and we will be happy to invite people back if they show that they can operate according to these rules.
