On the perils of journalist interviews

In spite of my boring, depressing, isolated and small life, I nevertheless managed to get my 15 minutes of fame more than once over the years. At the 1980’s, newspaper news items appeared about the Israeli TDD project, of which I was one of the leaders. There was even a brief TV appearance. I was also interviewed at 1991 about my life as deaf. In the early 2000’s, my name was again mentioned more than once as associate of someone else, who was interviewed as a Deaf businessman.

There was even an interview, about my work in Intel as a deaf engineer, which yielded no publicized article because I insisted upon reviewing it beforehand for inaccuracies.

With the benefit of hindsight, I am startled to realize that I did not come to grief due to grave inaccuracies in those interviews and exposures. Those interviews were mostly arranged by people, who were experienced in public relations.  So the journalists probably got good coaching. One of the interviews was printed almost verbatim from the transcript of a chat I had on the computer with a journalist and then I printed and gave her at end of the interview (this was before the era of Internet chats).

Unlike me, Sarah Hornik was upset by a newspaper interview, which had serious (from her point of view) inaccuracies. She at least turned this trauma into a learning event.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities. View all posts by Omer Zak