Engaging with the media
What I have learned on both sides of the notebook/mic, and from being close to unplatformable
In the previous issue I discussed principles of messaging, and so in this I’ve decided to share some advice on the next step for many, namely how to approach engaging with the media. I’ll round this mini-series out in the next issue by talking practicalities – how to prepare for an interview and how to do well during it.
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The first thing you need to understand if you are trying to talk to journalists, place stories or get interviews is what a parlous state mainstream media is in. Thirty years ago the business plan of newspapers, magazines and commercial broadcasters was to produce content, generally at a loss, and make money by selling advertising; now search engines and social-media sites have disintermediated and stolen almost all that income. The result is that high-quality independent journalism – especially investigations and foreign coverage – is largely unsustainable.
A few outlets have survived by becoming politically monocultural and aggregating audiences that a generation ago would have paid for a variety of regional, less polarised media (the New York Times is the biggest example). Others have closed or are staggering along, relying on freelancers paid a fraction of what used to be the standard rates, coping without fact-checkers, proof-readers and sometimes sub-editors, and certainly not running stories that take any time or effort to produce or that involve any legal risk. Journalists at some well-known outlets are now expected to turn stories around in at most a couple of hours.
Obviously this is terrible for the content they produce; however, that’s not your problem. From your point of view, what’s important is to accept that any journalist you speak to has no time and no backup. They will therefore be much more likely to run stories or quotes from someone who does all the work for them.
If you want to get yourself or your point of view into the media, therefore, you need to build up trust by reliably providing journalists with timely stories that repeatedly hit the mark with their editors and audiences. And you should seek to reduce the friction between your input and the final output as much as possible.
That means providing links to sources so they don’t have to go searching for confirmation of what you say; highlighting passages they should look at in any documents you refer to; and explaining any relevant law or science with trustworthy references. It means responding quickly when asked for comment with clear, pithy and punchy quotes, and only saying No when the request is outside your knowledge base or remit. If you’re asked for comment and take too long to respond, or if you say something boring or say No three times in a row, you’re unlikely to be asked again.
Writing all this I could weep for journalism – and I should emphasise that this was not how it was at The Economist at any point I worked there, and isn’t now. But it’s what I’ve seen in the few years since leaving, as I’ve been part-in and part-outside journalism. The journalists I talk to are conscientious, very hardworking and determined to tell good stories, but they have absolutely no time.
It’s very frustrating not being able to get a hearing in outlets that you once regarded as your spiritual home. For people who loved NPR or the Guardian before the gender madness, it’s more than frustrating; it’s downright painful. It’s a Catch 22 – only right-leaning outlets are willing to talk to you or feature your viewpoints, which constitutes another excuse for left-leaning outlets to ignore you or write you off.
I feel this less acutely than many of those I mingle with because I wasn’t ever particularly left-wing (though in the 1990s and 2000s the Saturday Guardian was a highlight of my weekend). So this advice is easier for me than for many: don’t be afraid of speaking to people who weren’t formerly your fellow travellers. Alongside the very obvious increase in polarisation, with people at the political extremes retreating to their silos, many other people no longer trust sources they used to trust and have started to pick and mix whom they listen to, including voices they used to discount. As someone who has always been deliberately politically unaligned, I see this as broadly a good thing.
Remember that the large, vibrant new media developing on social media and Substack, and in podcasts, means you’re no longer at the mercy of the old-media gatekeepers. Joe Rogan is single-handedly one of the most influential media brands in America; turning down an invitation to go on his show was arguably Kamala Harris’s biggest unforced error. I suppose that in the heyday of journalism what we’ve seen recently couldn’t have happened because mainstream outlets would have done more to shine a light on the medical and societal harms of trans ideology. On the other hand, if they hadn’t we’d have had no alternative way to get the message out.
One interview or quote in an outlet that wouldn’t normally feature your opinions is much, much more valuable than dozens in outlets you’re aligned with. It’s a chance to reach a new audience and an opportunity to actually change minds, rather than simply confirm the biases of people who already agree with you. This means it’s worth battling to get even small, partial stories about gender issues into the hostile left-wing press. But it also means thinking about what you can do to bring new perspectives to outlets that wouldn’t find you at all congenial if it weren’t for the gender issue.
I’m happy to talk to people motivated by faith, or by ideas about the proper roles of men and women I don’t share, or even about the evils of feminism, because it gives me a chance to talk about topics where my analysis sharply differs from theirs, and perhaps do a bit of good.
For example, I’ve talked about the difference between excluding women from male-only spaces like universities, the polling booth and professions, and excluding men from female-only spaces like rape crisis centres and women’s sports in an interview on a channel largely watched by disaffected young men who think Matt Walsh is right that “feminism is cancer”.
More recently, in an interview on a traditionalist Catholic channel that I don’t think has appeared yet, I talked about some of the differences between “gay rights” and “trans rights”, which the host suggested were equally problematic. Quite apart from the standard liberal arguments about autonomy and harm to others, I said, the evidence suggests that there has always been a minority capable of stable, loving, sexual relationships only with people of their own sex, whereas there is no sense in which a person of one sex can “really” be of the other. I compared denying the existence and innateness of same-sex orientation to something the host thought was obviously stupid: denying the existence and innateness of male and female.
And finally, as I said last week, remember that changing public opinion takes time. Most people know nothing about any given topic, and care less. It’s really rare for a single story, no matter how big, to move the needle appreciably. So it’s a matter of plugging on, taking whatever opportunities come your way and pushing at closed doors again and again in the hope that every now and then, one of them opens.
Practicalities next week!
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