How to answer a risky question without fuelling a viral disaster
There’s a reason I spend more time media training clients than ever before. It’s not because the questions have got harder. It’s because the clips have got shorter.
In the TikTok era, you don’t even need to say the wrong thing to be in trouble. All you need is to pause too long, pull the wrong facial expression, or have one sentence clipped out of context. From there, someone stitches it with commentary, adds dramatic music, and suddenly you’re being called “exposed” for something you didn’t even say.
This is why I always say: PR training isn’t about learning lines. It’s about learning how to survive the edit.
Why older interviews are haunting people now
Many of the clients who come to me in crisis are people who’ve been in the public eye for a long time. They might have given interviews years ago, back when the biggest risk was a newspaper headline. In those days, an awkward or clumsy answer might earn a column in the Daily Mail. Today, it resurfaces as a 15-second TikTok, stripped of context, and fed into an algorithm that rewards outrage.
That’s why you see so many “celebrity exposé” accounts pulling old footage from the 90s and 2000s. An interview where someone was flippant, sarcastic, or even just joking around now looks damning when recut against today’s standards. It doesn’t matter what they said afterwards in the same interview, because the clip ends before they had the chance to clarify.
What people don’t think about when facing risky questions
Most people assume the danger is just in the wording. In reality, there are dozens of micro-risks:
The pause: Anything longer than two seconds gets cut to look like hesitation or guilt.
The smirk: A nervous smile can look like arrogance or amusement at a serious topic.
The “um”: When clipped, it plays as incompetence, even if the full sentence was thoughtful.
The half answer: If you start to explain and then stop, it’s recut as “admission.”
The mismatch: If your tone doesn’t match the seriousness of the subject, you look dismissive.
These small things rarely mattered pre-social media. Now, they’re all it takes to generate a narrative that spreads faster than the truth ever could.
Why journalists try to catch you out
It’s worth remembering that tricky questions don’t happen by accident. Journalists often ask them deliberately, and for good reason.
Sometimes it is about accountability. If you are a politician, CEO, or public figure with power, journalists see it as their job to test you under pressure and see how you handle scrutiny. A calm, consistent answer builds trust. A defensive outburst is seen as revealing.
But sometimes it is less about accountability and more about headlines. A sharp question that makes you stumble is valuable content. It can be clipped, quoted, and spread. The journalist gets the soundbite that defines the whole piece. And in an attention economy, that moment often becomes the story itself, even if the rest of the interview was calm and unremarkable.
That is why training matters. It teaches you to recognise the trap and step over it, without making yourself look evasive.
The golden rules of surviving a risky question
1. Don’t fill the silence too fast
Nerves make people babble. A short, steady pause makes you look measured. A rambling filler makes you look reckless.
2. Never repeat the negative phrase
“Are you dishonest?” “I’m not dishonest.” Congratulations, the headline is now I’m not dishonest. Always reframe in positive language.
3. Buy time with acknowledgement
If you need a second, acknowledge the question without answering it directly:
“That’s a fair question.”
“I can see why you’d ask that.”
It buys you a breath without looking evasive.
4. Bridge sideways, not backwards
Going defensive makes you look guilty. Dodging makes you look slippery. Side-stepping with a bridge works:
“What matters here is…”
“What people deserve to know is…”
5. Never improvise data
If you don’t know, say so. The line I give clients is:
“I don’t want to give the wrong figure, but what I can tell you is…”
6. Keep your delivery steady
The words matter less than the way you say them. Hands visible, no eye-rolling, voice calm. People remember tone longer than they remember content.
7. Practise the hostile edit
In training, I play clients their own answers back as if they’ve been maliciously cut. It’s brutal, but it forces them to see how easy it is to look guilty or arrogant in 15 seconds. Once you’ve survived that, you’re much harder to catch out.
Why TikTok has raised the stakes
Journalists used to be the main filter. If you said something stupid, you worried about how it looked in print. Now, your real problem is the teenager in their bedroom with CapCut. They can take a 45-minute interview, slice it into 20 separate clips, and frame each one as evidence of whatever story they want to tell.
Worse, TikTok’s algorithm rewards emotion over accuracy. A video saying “look at how guilty they look here” will always travel further than the full interview link. It’s outrage-as-content, and the more you defend yourself, the more raw material you provide for people to clip.
That’s why so many of my older clients, people who built careers long before TikTok, are blindsided by this. They never trained for a world where every eye movement can be turned into a meme. But that’s the world they live in now.
Examples of what goes wrong
The broadcaster undone by an old clip: I once had a client, a household name on television, who gave a light-hearted interview in the early 2000s. At the time, it was harmless banter, laughed off by the studio audience. Twenty years later, a ten-second clip was uploaded to TikTok. Stripped of its context and put against today’s cultural standards, it was framed as “problematic.” Within 48 hours, sponsors were calling. He had no memory of even saying it, yet it dominated his headlines for weeks.
The CEO with the numbers: A business leader I worked with once decided to guess a figure when asked about staff layoffs. He was only out by a few dozen, but that discrepancy was seized on as dishonesty. A single slip, clipped and repeated, became the story. What should have been a routine announcement turned into a narrative about “cover-ups” and “trust issues.”
The musician’s shrug: Another client, a musician, laughed nervously when asked about a controversial lyric. The laugh was clipped as a reaction of arrogance. The lyric wasn’t the issue anymore, it was the perception that they didn’t care. One look, replayed endlessly, became more damaging than the song itself.
These weren’t career-ending, but they show how fragile reputation is when interviews are reduced to soundbites.
Why a framework isn’t enough
The points above give you a starting structure. But real media training isn’t about memorising answers. It’s about resilience under pressure. Every industry has different risks:
A politician has to think about party lines, embargoes, and rival briefings.
A musician has label clauses, streaming contracts, and brand deals at stake.
A CEO has shareholders, compliance rules, and market reactions.
Friends, managers, or agents often underestimate these layers. They see an interview as “just talking.” But behind the scenes, one off-the-cuff comment can tank a stock price, breach a contract, or open the door to litigation.
The real cost of untrained answers
Most reputations don’t collapse because of the first mistake. They collapse because of the response. And most bad responses happen when people are untrained.
The wrong sentence, clipped into 15 seconds, can live online forever. You don’t just need the right words, you need the composure to deliver them in a way that cannot be twisted.
That’s why PR training matters. Not because it teaches you to lie, but because it teaches you to survive a world where truth alone isn’t enough.