Some ideas for interacting with reporters
[Edit: This written mostly with recent examples of bad journalism in mind (including the NYT/SSC affair). Not intended for less fraught situations.]
Refuse to grant them an interview unless they agree to prominently include a link to your own side of the story.
Consider contacting competing reporters and offering them the same deal. Tell them that you are shopping around.
Get them to agree to it in writing, and require them to display the language of the agreement somewhere on the page of the final article.
Find a polite way to say, “nothing personal, but your profession carries a reputation for untrustworthiness.” Nah, the commenters changed my mind about this. It would be better to just say, “no comment.”
Screenshot everything they say.
Consider getting into the habit of giving glomar responses.
Build a reputation (or advertise an official policy) for waiting at least X days before responding to requests for comment.
Build a reputation for being a respectable, sober expert. Then, when a journalist wants to collapse your forecast into a point estimate, go ahead and give them such a point estimate...but make it absurd enough that the smart & conscientious readers might feel compelled to do a fact check.
“Top Forecasting Team Says World Population in 2050 Will be Only Six Thousand!”
“Human-Level AI in 3100-3200 Years, No Sooner, No Later!”
“Comfortable Martian Colony on June 3rd, 2079!”
“The Next Pandemic Will Occur on My Mom’s 88th birthday, According to Leading Biosecurity Researcher”
Most people should just not. Much like with police, your response should be “no comment” unless you have very specific reasons that you want to take the risk of interaction. You should start with the fundamental advice “Think about what YOU want out of the interview/article, and how you’ll ensure that you get it”.
People who DO want publicity or to get their message in print via such channels should do so, and your advice is useful at least in part as an indication that additional thought and perhaps professional training or deeper research is justified before undertaking such.
Yeah sounds right. Post edited.
It is implied in some of the things you said but to be explicit, always have your own video and audio recording of any interview.
Have you had bad experiences with reporters before? My interactions have always been great. Reporters have consistently helped me sell my products. If I had made myself hard to work with, I imagine they wouldn’t have run my stories and I would have earned less money.
It kind of feels like the thing you got from reporters is different from, and perhaps even opposed to, the thing Mike is hoping to get from reporters. If so that seems worth being explicit about. How one should interact with them will differ depending on what one wants from them.
(I have interacted with a few reporters)
To me, this advice seems to reflect the wrong mindset. It assumes way too much control you have over what the journalist will write. If you tell a journalist “Top Forecasting Team Says World Population in 2050 Will be Only Six Thousand!” there’s a good chance that they will just write “Top Forecasting Team Says World Population will massively decrease in the middle of the century”.
There’s nothing that you achieve that way. Either you find yourself in a position where you believe that it’s to your advantage to talk to a journalist and then you talk or you just don’t talk to them. You get nothing for telling them that their profession is untrustworthy.
Ok that’s probably true. This idea was meant mostly as a joke, but still...I can’t help but wonder if there might be some cool Straussian tactic to push a tiny signal through the Great Distorter.
My personal experience with reporters in 3 different countries is basically the same: half the story is completely made up, the other half is twisted to suit the desired narrative. And it’s done in a way that, unless you are familiar with the situation, looks like true and accurate reporting.
Never say “no comment” because they will twist that around.
If they ambush you in person, tell them they seem very nice, but you are very busy right now, please get back to you tomorrow. Tell them to email you at work or your official project email address. And then close the door on them.
If they drive up onto your lawn or land or block your driveway, immediately call a tow company, and have them towed away.
If they email you, either ignore their email, or post it publicly, and then ignore it.
If you work for a corporation and they want to talk about anything about that corp, forward their email to your employer’s press relations office, and again, never respond to the reporter.
One of the hard lessons of adulthood is, not only does Superman not exist, neither does Clark Kent or Perry White. And they never did.