16 Tips for Speaking to the Media

How Activists can get their message across — and when getting coverage isn't everything

Media at Thacker Pass. From left to right: German journalists from DW, independent reporter Chris Ketchum, and the Associated Press. Photos by the author.

Welcome! I’m Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. This newsletter focuses on sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. You can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers get access to behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts. If you get value from this newsletter, consider a paid subscription. Thanks!

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As an organizer, getting media attention is important.

We want journalists to report on our stories, but this creates a contradiction: for our story to reach the masses, we are forced to rely on media corporations which don’t have our best interests at heart. Despite this, talking with media simply must be part of the strategy for aboveground political movements. There is no avoiding it.

While we can and should prioritize alternative media, their reach is small. This is why the corporate media and entertainment industry is so important to the ideological hegemony of capitalism: they provide a buffer between people and wisdom. Prying open the cracks in that hegemony requires engagement.

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This is part two in a two-part series. The first part can be found here:

How Journalism Protects Elites and Maintains the Status Quo

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With that in mind, here are my lessons learned over 15 years of grassroots organizing on how to effectively engage with the media.

1. Determine Your Framing

Corporate media will inevitably try to twist stories and undermine radical narratives in predictable ways. In order to sidestep these tactics, we must predict them. Therefore, one of the most important steps in talking with journalists and interacting with the media takes place well before any interviews. It consists of determining your own framing for the story or campaign, and discussing and understanding how to counter likely attacks.

For example, at Thacker Pass, one of the most predictable counter-narratives was the argument that because we have cell phones and otherwise live in the modern world, our critique of lithium mining and industrial civilization is hypocritical and therefore bunk. This is, of course, intellectually lazy and easy to debunk, but if you don't think about it in advance and practice your answers beforehand, it's easy to be tripped up.

2. Tell a Story

Once you have the key elements of your narrative, you need to craft them into a compelling story. Stories are the foundation of communication, and are essential to speaking with journalists. Stories involve people, emotions, challenges, and resolution. Don’t just regurgitate facts. Tell a story.

3. Choose a Spokesperson

If everyone shares a job, it won’t get done. Some people are more suited to public speaking than others. This is why every organization has a spokesperson, or several of them. Be strategic in choosing someone who can effectively represent your campaign or organization and give them the support and training that they need in order to do their job in the best possible way.

4. Maintain Message Discipline

Before going into interviews, get clear with your co-organizers on what your key messages are. Pick a few, no more than two or three. Then, repeat those key messages relentlessly.

This is especially important with hostile media, which will take advantage of any off-topic statements or material that can be used against you. Don't give them a large amount of material to pick and choose from. Instead, stick to your key ideas, and repeat them. If necessary, say your message five times in different ways. This is sometimes referred to as message discipline.

5. Do Your Research

Before agreeing to any interview or interacting with media, research the reporter and the outlet that they are writing for. Make sure you know the background and ask for details on how they plan to approach the story.

This point is also relevant for data. Back up your argument with facts and statistics. Back up any generalizations you make with concrete information.

6. Produce Content with the Media in Mind

Getting your story out means producing content with the media in mind. In other words, take photographs, video, and produce writing and press releases that are digestible and understandable to somebody who doesn't share your cultural background or political positions. Don't only preach to the choir. Instead, translate radical ideas so that they are understandable to average everyday people. Work to connect your broader critiques to popular narratives that are at top of mind for newsrooms, which are often operating reactively to a 24-hour news cycle.

7. Answer The Question You Want to Be Asked

When you speak to the media, you will often be asked irrelevant or silly questions. You don't have to answer them. Instead, turn the tables. Say, "What's really interesting is..." and then go into what you think is the key element of the story. If you need to, ignore their question completely. An interview is not a conversation. Get your message out regardless of what you’re being asked.

8. Be Easy to Understand

It's easy as somebody who is in the trenches of environmental struggles to overestimate how much average people follow our work. Most people don't know what NEPA is, don’t understand the details of the greenhouse effect, and couldn’t tell you much about the biodiversity crisis. It is essential that we communicate our message as clearly and simply as possible. Use accessible language that people can understand.

At one point, William Faulkner insulted [Hemingway] by saying, “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway responded, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

9. Speak with Conviction

There is nothing more frustrating than someone who has a very important political point to make but cannot muster the eloquence and tone to do justice to it. Speak with conviction. This takes practice.

10. Talk in Soundbites

Most people won't read an entire article or watch a lengthy news story. Instead, they will skim an article or watch the first 15 or 30 seconds of a story. That is why it is essential to be quotable when speaking to the media.

In television, the average soundbite is only 5 to 10 seconds long. And in print, the average quote maxes out around 20 to 25 words. That's why it's essential to get to the point quickly and be concise. Use phrasing that is memorable and makes people feel something. Don’t speak in run-on sentences.

11. Don’t Be Charmed

Journalists are professionals. They spend their entire working life speaking to people that they don't know. This often involves cajoling or convincing people to speak who may otherwise not want to. Journalists therefore become professionals in charm. They understand how to use friendliness, smiles, jokes, and numerous other techniques to make people relax and feel comfortable in their presence.

Usually this is no problem, but journalists who don't have your best interests at heart know and use these techniques as well. And sometimes they will use them to your disadvantage. They will try to catch you off-guard. They will lure you in and then blindside you.

Remember that journalists are not our friends. They are there to do a job. We need to do ours as well, which means maintaining a professional distance and not mistaking charm for true friendship.

12. What To Do When You Don’t Know the Answer

“No comment” is a classic admission of guilt. Instead say, "I don't know the answer to that," or, "I'll have to look into it and get back to you." Don't lie or make things up.

13. Be Ready to Walk Away

Remember that you can always end an interview at any time. You don't have to speak to any journalist. If you see warning signs, leave.

14. Don’t Just Speak to the Journalist

(This is a bonus tip added after this article was first published)

The media is not your audience. When you speak to journalists, you are using them as a conduit to access people. Consider those people, their beliefs, their values, and so on. In addition, remember that your audience also includes your opponents in any campaign or fight you're involved in, as well as your allies. When you talk to the media, you’re not just talking to faceless people far away. You’re addressing everyone involved in the campaign, too. Understanding this is critical to understanding your audience.

15. Claim the Mainstream

(This is another bonus tip added after this article was first published)

It is essential when talking to the media that we claim the mainstream. In other words, we need to continually assert and defend the idea that biocentrism is not “radical” (in the sense of extreme or fringe). As I wrote over a decade ago:

Withdrawing from political engagement can take many different forms: self isolation is, unfortunately, one of the most common in radical groups. If we wish to succeed, we must buck this trend. We must remain engaged with society. We must claim that political space for ourselves.

WE are the normal ones. WE are the mainstream. The capitalists, the bankers, the CEOs, the businesspeople, and those who follow them blindly - they are the crazy ones. They are ones who occupy the political fringe, measured in both historical and commonsense terms.

This may seem like a purely rhetorical change, but when we change our attitude in this way, but by changing the narratives we act within, we take an important step toward expanding the effectiveness and scope of our work.

16. Question Your Own Strategy

This final point may be the most important. As I stated earlier — and explained in Part 1 of this series — mass media builds cultural hegemony to support the status quo. This is an active process. Our enemies are not standing still.

In other words, whenever we are working to educate for sustainability and justice, other forces are actively working to counter these narratives, and their resources (in terms of manpower, capital, law, and infrastructure) are far greater than our own.

This conclusion is inescapable: education is necessary, but not enough on its own to change the world. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Most relevant to the ecological crisis is this: we’ve had a modern environmental movement in the west since the early 1960’s. But despite 60 years of environmental education led by very intelligent and dedicated people — despite millions of articles, books, documentary films, workshops, and so on — essentially every major indicator of ecological health is worse than it was when the movement began.

We can’t rely on education, journalism, or mass media to lead to a utopia. It’s not enough to “get some press!” Rather, we must build concrete cultures of resistance: organizations and movements that grow and wield political power to halt the destruction of the planet.

This is my work, and I invite you to join me in it.

PS

After I published the last article in this series, someone brought this piece to my attention. It explains the pervasive influence of foundation funding from the Walton’s (the owners of Wal-Mart) on non-profit journalism and large environmental groups. It’s worth reading if you’re interested in more on these topics.

“Observers of the industry, however, are concerned about a new era in journalism in which a limited class of grantmakers is defining narratives and the flow of information…

Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly, said reporting on the Waltons’ influence on the future of the Colorado River is the most important story in the region. He said Walton philanthropy supports efforts to convert water rights into a market-based system and he believes Walton funding in journalism chills reporting on their initiatives. The effect is that it’s compromising newsrooms and journalists in the same manner that agribusiness dollars, such as from Monsanto, have compromised ag science and undermined academic research, he said.

“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.” He points to Imperial Valley farmers, crops grown along the river, and cities like Las Vegas that depend on Colorado River water as among those that will be impacted if water markets take hold.

While Walton money flows to journalism, “the journalists who say it’s not influencing their work aren’t lying in a sense. It’s not influencing the good work they’re doing on whatever tiny part of the Colorado River problem they’re doing,” Dyer said. “I have friends who are getting money from the Water Desk. Good lord, they are doing great work and they wouldn’t be surviving if they weren’t getting it. But none of them can do the story on the Waltons.”

“They’re just not addressing the biggest threat to the river,” he said, “which is turning it into a commercial stream of water. That’s the story that can’t be told.”