Live interviews are, indeed, better than recorded interviews. This may be counterintuitive: most people, especially novices, erroneously believe that they would be too nervous doing a live interview and a recorded one would be much better.
Here is the problem with that: with a recorded interview, you can be great for an hour and say something stupid for 10 seconds, and that latter part is the only sound bite that will get on the news or played again and again. In a recorded interview, you actually give the reporter and the producer a lot of power to edit the interview in order to cut out every smart thing you said and make you look like a fool.
I am not saying that you should turn down every recorded interview opportunity you get but whenever you are given the choice of going live or edited, I believe you should always opt for the former option as you will have a much greater degree of control over what people see about you.
It also gives you a much greater ability to weave back messages that you care about and are perhaps not as important to the reporter. So it is one of those options where people feel it is riskier but it is actually much more safe.
Make it a rule of thumb that anytime you have the option to choose, you will go with the live one because it will give you more control as well as more time to make an impression- a good one!