Los Angeles broadcast journalist Sam Rubin created a recent media debacle when he made an amateurish mistake of confusing the celebrity he was interviewing with another.
Speaking with Samuel L. Jackson on KTLA about his new movie remake of RoboCop, Mr. Rubin asked via satellite,
“Working for Marvel, the Super Bowl commercial, did you get a lot of reaction to that Super Bowl commercial?”
Automatically Samuel L. Jackson knew that Mr. Rubin mistook him for Laurence Fishburne in the Kia Superbowl commercial and retorted:
“See, you’re as crazy as the people on Twitter. I’m not Laurence Fishburne! We don’t all look alike! We may be all black and famous, but we don’t look alike.”
Mr Jackson dealt humorously with the interviewer’s mistake, but seemed enraged and continued to rant…
“You’re the entertainment reporter?!”
Later in the broadcast, the journalist apologized for the mistake:
“More often than not, I really do know what I’m talking about. But I didn’t 30 minutes ago, and I’m really embarrassed about it, and I very much apologize to Samuel L. Jackson and anyone else who was offended for what was a very amateur mistake.”
Mr. Jackson did not let it go. He could take a few pointers from Martin Short’s surprised, but gracious reaction to the Today Show’s Kathy Lee asking after his wife, who had died two years earlier.
It was a mistake for Rubin to confuse celebrities, but for Samuel L. Jackson to make it about race was not the answer. He was the only one who played the race card…
“I am the ‘What’s in your wallet’ [Capital One] black guy….And I’ve actually never done a McDonalds or a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. I know that’s surprising.”
Media training is usually reserved for media guests. But, interviewer Sam Rubin needs to learn some of the C’s of Communication: clarity, compassion, and correctness to avoid hurting his image as well as the image of his guests.
In Samuel L. Jackson’s words:
“Do some work. Do some research.”
Moral of the story: make sure you’re ready for the media; from both ends and that you act graciously when a mistake is made.