On speaking to journalists

The dangers of being listened-to...

Usually, the major problem for academics is that no-one listens to you. At least for many of us, you go into academia because you want to make a difference, but then for months or years on end, you are shouting into the void. You spend years researching a topic, writing papers, perhaps even writing blog posts or briefings or even more creative things - but when it comes down to it, the people who make decisions pay absolutely no attention to any of it.

Every now-and-then, though, a journalist wants to speak to you. Your initial response is excitement - someone actually wants to hear what you have to say! Alongside the human-but-harmful feelings of self-importance, this is actually a moment where you can might get to influence the world for the better, to realise the naive promises you made yourself many years ago as a fresh-faced PhD student.

Yet at least in my experience, the moment of hope so often turns sour, and the following hours are consumed by regret. Clearly the emotional states of policy academics are unimportant compared to the lived realities of people experiencing policy. But still: for those of us that do policy research, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone reflect on how to do media work in keeping with our moral sense, so I have no idea if this is just me, or something widely-felt that is normally kept behind the veil.

In this post - a bit different from my usual ones (normal service resumed next week!) - I want to reflect on this, to help my future self (and maybe in the process help other people’s thinking too).

What journalists want

My first experience of working with the media came long ago, in a past life where I worked on alcohol and public health policy at the Institute of Alcohol Studies (itself still an invaluable source of evidence on this). This was an eye-opening experience in many ways, especially as we faced some bruising lobbying from the drinks industry (which was particularly bizarre given that I was a typical drinker of my age). But one thing I remember is my otherwise-fantastic boss Andrew McNeill looking slightly sheepish after inadvertently causing a Daily Mail splash after saying to a journalist in passing, “'It is possible the latest generation will be the first not to live as long as their parents.” (Cue the Mail running a front page story on June 7th 2005 with the first line, “A GENERATION of young people are binge drinking themselves to death, experts warned yesterday.”).

This wasn’t a mis-quote, and it wasn’t a hatchet job - it was just the sort of thing that you might say in a passing moment, magnified to a level that felt uncomfortable. This is the easiest thing in the world to do when speaking to journalists about a topic that you’re immersed in, particularly when you’re chatting to them for 30-60 minutes, and they’re going to use 1-2 lines at most. They want the most sensational, unvarnished version of what you’re saying, because that makes good copy, and a quote like this might even make the story in its own right (like the alcohol example above). And because you’re trying to be helpful, and because print journalists tend to be brilliant at their job and nudge you in this direction (often by being likeable), you’re tempted to give them what they want.

To make matters worse, journalists also quite reasonably want you to tell a story about the issue of the day, rather than to stick to some isolated research findings. And telling a story often involves some inferential jumps. Sure, your story should include some things that you are 99% sure of; and probably mostly things that aren’t certain (which is a fool’s errand) but which you’re pretty sure of. But it will also include the things that you believe, that are how you make sense of the world, but which there’s no compelling evidence for. And often these are the bits of the story that are most interesting to journalists.

For example, last year I was in a Radio 4 programme that quoted me saying that the formalisation of HR in big employers is bad for disability inclusion - something that I think is true, but which was speculative. (Thankfully I’ve since checked with more knowledgeable people and found they agree, but that doesn’t change how uncomfortable I felt to have this bit of the chat quoted). Similarly, I have a clear idea in my head about what’s going on with work, welfare and health at the moment - but some of it is speculative, and it will take me a bit of time to flesh it out empirically.

And just to make matters worse - even when you think you’re saying something solidly based on the evidence, you might be wrong, or the original idea you had might be subverted into something terrible. I seem to worry about this more than most other people (judging from the interviews I did with social scientists a while back). But it clearly happens even to the best people.

Does sensationalism and overconfidence matter?

I would love to say at this point that you should avoid sensationalism and overconfidence because it will harm your career, but I simply don’t think this is true. There is a need to make sure that you maintain your credibility, and I’ve written elsewhere about the ‘credibility work’ that prominent social scientists do - things like connecting what you say to evidence regularly, demonstrating epistemic responsibility (e.g. explicitly mentioning alternatives), and managing emotional tone.

Still, the evidence suggests that the social scientists that are most (over-)confident in their opinions are the ones that are most likely to appear in the media (see p63 of Tetlock’s well-known and fabulous book). And from what I can tell, media prominence tends to either have no impact on people’s wider academic profile, or to help it, irrespective of whether these appearances are sensationalist or nuanced.

My problem, though, isn’t that I’m worried about the harmful effects on my career - instead, I feel that this isn’t the sort of academic I want to be. The world is complicated; social issues are complicated; the current debates about health/disability, work and welfare are complicated. More than anything, what I want to get across is this nuance - that the easy headlines and easy solutions are wrong, and that actually making the world better involves dealing with this complexity. I do partly worry about being quoted totally out-of-context, with my words being used to give credence to a viewpoint that I think is wrong or even harmful. But mostly I worry about saying something too strongly, about filling in the gaps in the evidence base with my own prejudices, and then making an academic power play to get this treated as ‘expert opinion’.

Some advice for my future self

I’ve been sporadically speaking to the media for two decades, and I still nearly always feel terrible afterwards - so I’m probably not the best person to give advice. But sometimes you have more insight in the moment after getting something wrong. This blog post is an attempt to bottle that essence, to be opened next time it’s needed…

To be clear - if you haven’t done media training, then it’s definitely worth doing a good course. But while media training helps make you more effective, it doesn’t necessarily help you feel any better afterwards (or at least, mine didn’t). So on top of media training, my future self needs to:

1. Accept you don’t have control

This is the hardest part of speaking to journalists - you feel like you want to ask to see their copy before they publish it. This isn’t possible, so don’t ask. Just embrace the risk, particularly when speaking to media outlets that usually tell a different story to the one you want to tell - it’s essential to go beyond the usual suspects where you can, even though the risk is higher. But if you follow a good process beforehand, then this help reassure you that you didn’t do anything wrong (even if the actual media piece turns out to be a disaster).

2. Prepare your story

Never speak to a journalist unprepared. (If time is tight, then you should still carve out at least 5-10mins). Think about the broad topic that they want to talk to you about, and carve out 3-5 key messages that you want to get across to them. I find this helpful, but it’s what I did this morning and it only partially helped - so as well as this you need to:

3. Ensure that you maintain your credibility (including with yourself)

As I said, I’ve written elsewhere about ‘credibility work’ - and actually it’s quite useful to remind yourself of what this involves (even if most credibility work is intuitive, not calculated). For me, I want to particularly make sure that I talk about uncertainty, and to draw attention to where I’m being more speculative, and to where other people might disagree. And also to maintain a sensible emotional tone (either detachment or ‘cold fury’, as Alex Stevens put it in my paper).

To be clear - you will often want to go beyond the evidence in telling your story, because evidence is slow to produce, and there’s always going to be gaps between the evidence and the story. But you need to be clear about which parts of the story are speculative, both to yourself, and in communicating this to the journalist. They might ignore this, but then that’s on them, not you. And if you don’t want any risk of them doing it, then don’t mention it.

As an aside, there was loads of unpublished material about uncertainty in the interviews I did for the ‘credibility work’ paper. I was struck by the prominent communicators who emphasised that policymakers are happy to hear about uncertainty - you just need to put some thought into making your message about uncertainty clear, and not just unhelpfully saying ‘we don’t know anything’. Still, this is trickier with journalists (whose aim is to get readers) than with policymakers (who on some level are focused on the policy).

4. Think about what not to say

It’s helpful to think in advance about your red lines - the statements you want to avoid like the plague. I spent a lot of time today avoiding saying ‘people are making up disabilities in order to get benefits’ (which is one of my red lines, because it’s both false and harmful). I do think that it’s important to consider the categories that administrative systems put people in. But equally, it’s crucial to emphasise that the people who are increasingly describing themselves as ‘disabled’ in surveys do have genuine health conditions and disabilities - it’s just that they might not have labelled themselves as ‘disabled’ at a different time or place. Whatever your red line is, you’ll feel better if you make it clear.

5. Carve out time to respond to the piece

Your response won’t usually reach the same audience that the original piece did. But one of the nice things about blogging is that you have a space that’s entirely under your control - so if you want to correct the record, then do this quickly. Some of the people that know you and read your blog might be reassured. And you’ll sure as hell feel better after doing it.

Finally, I can’t help wondering if a feeling of sourness after speaking to the media may itself be something to accept. Any moments where you become closer to power (even a tiny bit closer to a tiny bit of power) have the capacity to make you act more self-importantly, more self-interestedly, with more self-deception and less willingness to listen. Maybe the sourness is a welcome reminder that speaking to journalists is not a pleasure, nor a validation, but rather an unenjoyable duty for academics as part of their public role.

This is a strange blog post I know, being mostly addressed to my future self - but do let me know in the comments what it made you think of, whether that’s things that make you feel uncomfortable, or tips for behaving with more integrity. And for my part I will return to this list after each encounter with journalists.