While his last network TV appearance didn’t go well for University of North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick, that hasn’t stopped him from trying. ABC announced Sunday that they’ll have an exclusive interview with Belichick on Good Morning America Friday, with regular GMA co-host and Pro Football Hall of Famer Michael Strahan helming that:
It will be interesting to see what comes out of that interview. But there may be notable developments even before it airs. And that may be especially true if media reporters are able to find out what, if any, conditions ABC and Strahan agreed to here.
A large focus of the discussion around Belichick’s CBS This Morning interview that aired two weeks ago was about the “We’re not talking about that” interjection of his 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson, which led to her storming out and delaying the interview for 30 minutes. That came when host Tony Dokoupil asked Belichick how the couple met. And that led to CBS This Morning using that clip in the final aired interview, to Belichick claiming the interview was “selectively edited” and that the network had violated agreed preconditions of only discussing his new book, and to CBS saying they had not agreed to any conditions.
Conditions are a frequent part of conversations around arranging interviews. But exactly what conditions are agreed to has a lot to do with the relative balance of power between interviewer and interviewee, to the particular subjects under discussion, and to the severity of the condition. No one really cares if Matt Harvey drops a Qualcomm reference or two if the company’s paying him to do interviews, but “I’m just here to talk about Qualcomm” is not actually valuable for any media outlet (except that that interview, strangely enough, became much bigger than the usual sponsored interview thanks to Harvey’s over-the-top conditional approach).
With Strahan’s interview of Belichick, there will be an intense focus on what he does or doesn’t ask. And media reporters, both inside and beyond the sports world, will undoubtedly be working overtime to find out if he and GMA have agreed to any conditions for this interview. We’ll see if any of that emerges ahead of its airing Friday.