One of the painful aspects of this otherwise very agreeable profession is that you sometimes have to deal with people in the government. They get the raw end of the deal, though: Sometimes they have to deal with you. The sad truth of it is that Republicans especially tend to be terrified of journos, and the more conservative they are, the less likely it is that they know how to deal with them.
This is a bit of a structural weakness. What’s the point of talking to the press? The prima facie purpose is to make sure your line gets out there. This use case doesn’t require a lot of analysis. In a non-adversarial story, refusing to talk to the writer is letting the chips fall where they may on angle and framing; in an adversarial story, it can seem tantamount to an admission. (You’ve probably heard that the mainstream press, by and large, is not a natural friend to the right; if you give it an excuse to paint you in the darkest colors possible, it will.) Those outcomes can be fine, but context is everything; sometimes, you want a little more say in the material that goes out.
One currently popular theory of press relations is that complete refusal to cooperate with the media will allow you to circumvent journalists’ wiles. You can put everything out by your own channels, whether social media or press releases. The problem is that the press is in fact still an important publicity tool, and almost everyone in the world has a smaller platform at his disposal than that of a publication or media outlet; there’s a reason PR consultancies spend tens of thousands of dollars flooding journalists’ inboxes with emails advertising things like “PITCH” and “STORY IDEA” and “EXPERT FOR INTERVIEW.” (We never read these, by the way; if your PR man is charging you for doing email blasts, insist on seeing the open/click metrics before coughing up a check.) The press is especially valuable if there is information you would like to get out unofficially—that is to say, leaking. Leaking is not usually criminal or particularly mysterious, let alone inherently hostile to the public figures or organs involved; it’s a communication tool like any other. Someone can leak in a way that is helpful to an administration just as someone can give official comment in a way that is harmful to the administration. A generic example of a “friendly” leak: If an official wishes to fight or preempt a hostile narrative in the press, he may send information to sympathetic journalists that ameliorates or explains an otherwise unpopular decision.
This is a very granular way of stating the obvious: Interacting with the press is a way of influencing the information environment, a way to shape or push narratives. But this is not the only or even the primary way in which interacting with journalists is useful. Pressmen, by the nature of the job, talk to a wide variety of people, perhaps a wider variety than an apparatchik sitting in an air-conditioned architectural blight in downtown Washington. Every once in a blue moon, journalists don’t want to take something out of you; they want to tell you something. But even if they are trying to get something out of you, they may well tell you something you don’t know; the very questions will give you a sense of what information is unsecured and ripping around outside your awareness or control. By corollary, the framing of journalists’ questions and comments can also tell you what they don’t know, which can also be useful if you are, for example, trying to assess the extent and gravity of a leak. Telling a journalist something may or may not be useful; listening to a journalist is almost always useful.
Much like firing a shotgun or performing the physical act of love, it’s more pleasant if you’re not terrified of your own shadow while you’re doing it. I’ve talked to officials and appointees who punctuate every sentence with the words “off the record.” This repetition is undignified and somewhat unwise—expressing fear in front of a professional information-trafficker and desperado like a journo will just encourage him to press harder. It also betrays a deficit of common sense. If you are telling somebody something that is a bona fide generational scoop, he’s going to burn you, no matter how many times you say the magic words. If you’re not giving him the family jewels or a promissory note for the same, he’s not going to burn you: If he does, you’ll stop telling him useful things, and, worse, he’ll lose one of his excuses to burn an afternoon on an expense-account lunch.
He’s especially not going to burn you if you are broadly aligned politically—he has to live in the same pond you do, and he will want many of the same things you want. But if you stonewall him, he may start figuring out how to take it out of you in other ways; he certainly will have no special investment in you or your agenda. It can be a tough city if you alienate your natural friends.
The post How to Stop Being Afraid and Interact With the Press appeared first on The American Conservative.
