3 ms·

Left unsaid: whether you should trust journalists you consider your political allies.

• Spooky23 7y ago
  Only if you have them on the hook for a longer engagement. I joke that if you want to understand an issue, the local paper is great for eliminating reasons. They never tell the whole story and are rarely interested in it. Talking to a journalist is like talking to the police. They have a specific agenda and standard for publishing that doesn’t necessarily align with telling a story as you perceive it. You have to be able to manipulate them, which is best left to professionals.
  • dwater 7y ago
    That was my experience. I once talked to a newspaper reporter for 20 minutes and he used maybe a 10 word quote that I felt did not represent the point of what I had explained to him. I would not speak to a reporter unprepared again.
  • btilly 7y ago
    Talking to a journalist is like talking to the police. They have a specific agenda and standard for publishing that doesn’t necessarily align with telling a story as you perceive it. You have to be able to manipulate them, which is best left to professionals. A lesson that I have seen learned the hard way. The reason why celebrities say "No comment" is that it can't be misquoted. My favorite example of a deliberate journalistic misquote is that my mother was on a phone with a journalist and used a phrase starting with, "It is not that I..." It appeared in print as, "It is...that I..." Yes, the word "not" was replaced with "..." to reverse the meaning of what she said so that she would look bad.