My Glittering Media Career – Source: securityboulevard.com

I was overjoyed to hear from Doctor Xand on Morning Live today, on how I can improve my lifestyle so that I can count on my knees. On the whole, though, I think I’ll carry on counting on my fingers.*

But what is this thing about people on TV who have to be addressed all the time as Dr Whatsit or the Reverend Oojamaflip, even when they’ve retired or moved on to a career as a celebrity. Or, even worse, insist on wearing their dog-collars or other occupational insignia even when they’re appearing on quiz shows (a prompt for divine inspiration, perhaps).

When I next appear on television, I certainly expect to be addressed as ‘Author David’.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you gasp, “so when were you on television?”

Well, there was the school trip to Paris that found me in the Bois de Boulogne when they were filming an episode of Maigret, so I may well have been in the background there. And sometime in the 80s there was a brief vox pop interview on Cricklewood Broadway from a journalist who wanted my opinion on something political. I have no idea if it was ever shown. Very much more recently, while looking for something completely different I found a reference to an interview for Slovenian television in one of my blogs for ESET. Since I have absolutely no recollection of any cameras (and barely remember the interview), I suspect that it was audio-only.

I suppose that was nearer to radio, which I did do from time to time when my opinions on security issues were sought: on one occasion, memorably, in St. Helena. And no, I didn’t make the difficult journey to that far-off spot in the South Atlantic: Craig mailed me his questions, I sent him my responses as MP3s, which he inserted between his recordings of his own questions, I suppose. Well, that’s how I would have done it, and it sounded fine.

Well, it was certainly better than my very first radio interview, for the BBC. At the time I was still working for a medical research charity in London, though evidently my alleged extra-curricular expertise in the field of computer virus management – yes, in those days, most malware did still consist mostly of true viruses – had started to percolate through to the media long before I was assimilated into the mainstream security industry. In this case, I think, via the newsgroup alt.comp.virus, where I learned a lot, made many friends and contacts in the industry, and was eventually pretty active.

Again, the producer/interviewer sent me a list of the issues he wanted to cover, so I wandered down to Bush House with some more-or-less scripted material. A tidied version of that interview may turn up in a blog in due course: while it’s basically only of historical interest, today’s threatscape being notably different, some people do seem to find such reminiscences worth reading. However, I’ve been handicapped all my life by a tendency to stammer. As I crept deeper into the security industry, I learned some techniques that didn’t overcome the problem but to some extent bypassed it. These eventually made my presentations almost bearable to listen to, but this interview was right at the start of my public-facing career, and there were certainly lots of uncomfortable gaps and repetitions in there. The interviewer reassured me that the uncomfortable bits could be edited out (and perhaps aggregated into some therapeutic form, like Dr Murke’s collected silences** in the short story by Heinrich Böll). Clearly, though, he decided not to bother. When I heard the broadcast, it turned out that my segment had been replaced with a BBC person who knew less about viruses but spoke much more fluently.

By the way, I eventually collated my thoughts on polishing a tu improving a poor speaker’s performance into a series of blogs for ESET called ‘The Occasional Orator’:

• Part 1 
• Part 2
• Part 3

I can’t re-use those articles, of course, but somewhere I have the earlier (pre-ESET) magazine article on which they were based, and that might see the light of day at some point.

Far and away the most common form of torture I experienced outside the conference hall, though, was the interview for web sites, blogs, magazines etc. Where these were done face-to-face, there was sometimes the annoyance of having a PR drone from the company that paid my invoices sitting in, directing the conversation away from ‘dangerous’ topics and making sure the product got mentioned, appropriately or otherwise. I often had trouble persuading people who weren’t my bosses that they weren’t my bosses, and that I regarded myself as an independent commentator as well as a researcher, and not a product evangelist.

However, away from the supervisory eyes of PR and marketing, there was nearly always the frustration of knowing that your very best insights would not make the cut, and that when you were quoted, the chances were that the quote would be selective enough to ensure that you seemed to be either:

• Disagreeing violently with another maven whose opinion you did, in fact, respect. Manufacturing arguments is a favourite journalistic trait.
• In complete agreement with the journalist, who was often keen to present as the real expert.

On one occasion, I was asked for a quote by the Daily Mail. Fortunately, that particular request came and went through another consultant writer who insisted on seeing what they were going to print. It turned out that they’d simply made up a quote more suited to their preconceptions, a process apparently known as creative journalism or something of the sort, and he blocked it. Thanks again, Rob!

Even after retirement, I still get asked occasionally for commentary on some allegedly vital issue, and sometimes I even give it. However, I no longer comment on security in the NHS, which stopped being my problem in 2006. And I also resisted the request to comment on whether Ivanka Trump’s laptop was fit for purpose for use in government. (That request was for this article.) I declined on the grounds that I couldn’t see why anyone in the US would be interested in the opinion of a retired researcher/author in England, but actually I’m just allergic to the name Trump.

*A tip of the hat to my friend and former colleague Nora Lucke, who pointed out that “If you used both knees and toes you could count up to 22. Or add head and shoulder and make it 25 while singing the song. (Although the fingers are quite difficult to fit into the tune…)”

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Check Chain Mail and Hoaxes authored by David Harley. Read the original post at: https://chainmailcheck.wordpress.com/2025/03/22/my-glittering-media-career/