Preparing the Message

How can we best communicate our message to the media and interested public? First, think about the message you want to communicate ahead of time. Generate a simple united idea that drives all your communication about this topic to every media outlet. Establish a strategy that is underscored repeatedly through each supporting message you provide so that all messages are consistent and mutually reinforcing.

What does a message look like? The best messages are limited and concise: 25 words or less. They should be accurate, clear, and convincing; an example of this might be “divorce spreads like a virus.” Under the best circumstances, they should both speak to central values that many people hold, for example, fairness, and provoke specific actions, which can be offered to those listening. Think about word choice in developing the best message. Messages should use clear, clean language using colorful metaphors. Powerful assertions are especially useful when they make sense and can be supported by the relevant facts. Contrasts and comparisons with opposing ideas can be helpful, and facts and details to support your message are essential. However, facts and details must not overwhelm your central message. Most people will not keep those facts in mind, but they will remember whether you responded to legitimate objections in a reasonable fashion. In a tendency that runs against academic training, when in doubt, choose a memorable anecdote to illustrate your point over an abstract analysis precisely because it emotionally engages the audience.

Talking to the media is not like teaching. Think about what gets through to people of different ages, backgrounds, and education levels. People like analogies. They like humor. They respond to repetition.

All these strategies and techniques require that you organize your research in advance of an interview, and choose a single central message or idea, and identify no more than three or four supporting points that all mutually reinforce the central message. In addition, although it runs counter to the best academic writing, people yield to repetition. The more times you say a simple, clear statement, the most likely it is to get through and the more likely it is that people will believe you.

Why? Because all messages that are sent must be received, and to understand how to send messages, we must understand how they are received by people who may be interested, but less knowledgeable than we are about our area of expertise. What do we know about how messages are received? People will believe what they want to believe, and they will follow their own dominant attitudes and stereotypes about any given topic. Therefore, it is very important that, as a speaker, your bring audiences along if you want to convince them of the value of you work and ideas. Start where people are and bring them to where you want them to go, rather than expect them to want to travel that road alone just because you believe they should. Narcissism will not help advance the cause of personal reputation in this domain; people will not follow you just because you think they should like you, or want to be around you. There is one significant caveat in this regard, however. People will tend to respond to the prestige of the messenger. So someone from Harvard University may get more attention and respect than someone from a local state or community college although that person’s work may surpass that of the Harvard scholar. Nothing can be done to overcome human nature, but being aware of this tendency means that speakers from high prestige institutions may not need to work as hard to gain attention, and thus should feel especially obligated to assure the veracity of their claims. Scholars from less well-known institutions may need to try harder to garner that same level of attention and credibility.

In addition, people respond to emotional connotations. If you are able to provoke strong emotional responses, especially a personal one, people are more likely to pay attention to what you have to say. This response partly operates through a contagion effect; people tend to follow the reactions and responses of their fellow listeners; this phenomenon may be more immediately apparent in lecture type settings, but Facebook and Twitter now provide an almost immediate public forum for communicating reactions. This commentary is a lot to react to and contend with, and thus be prepared to stick to your message no matter what the reaction to avoid getting caught off guard in an inadvertent contradiction or miscommunication. In the midst of this type of media environment, it is important to stay rational despite people’s emotional responses to you. This strategy may sound like a contradiction, but the key is to create heart-based messages using fact-based triggers to engage your audience without falling prey to specious counterarguments.

Specific Strategies

This point highlights another important aspect of effective communication. Effective preparation is not limited to clarifying and organizing your own message; it also involves knowing what others are saying about you or your topic. Define for yourself who constitutes your most important audience. What do they already know? What do they already think or believe about your topic? What motivates them? In this regard, rely on real research about what people in your key constituency know and do not know; do not assume you know just because your mother-in-law told you what she thinks. Use the public data to guide you about public attitudes about your research so you can generate precisely the kind of single, emotionally engaging message, with factual support, that is most likely to be effective in communicating your message. Given the wealth of expertise in public opinion research within political science, this task should be bread and butter for our colleagues when they recognize the importance of putting this kind of research into media communication, the same way they might prepare a lecture to teach or conduct research to write a paper.

It is important to undertake this kind of research prior to participating in an interview because it is critical to manage any objections to your ideas with your central message always in mind. Anticipate objections and have prepared responses that stay true to the central message you are trying to communicate. When you get mired in objections, it almost always legitimates those objections in the audience’s mind. If your message is positive and the objections are true, then affirm and amplify those comments. If the objections are negative, recast or explain your central message. If your message is negative and objections are true, it is best not to respond at all. If objections are false, then work to change the impression using the facts and details you have available or, better yet, using a carefully selected anecdote.

This advice may seem harsh and technical but it basically amounts to the old adage: “If you get in a fight with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.” Often opponents try to distract presenters from their central message by presenting false objections or irrelevant issues. Stay on point to get your central message across. For example, think of the climate change debate. More than 99% of the scientific evidence shows support for the reality of climate change. But opponents, led largely by Republican supporters of the fossil-fuel industry, have learned to “teach the debate.” They rely on commonly held values of “fair and balanced” presentation to make it appear that there is more controversy than actually there is regarding the science of climate change. When scientists get mired in specific refutations of particular studies, the larger point of the reality and danger of climate change can get lost on the public, especially if the problem seems so large that any one individual’s actions can do little to ameliorate the problem. A similar dynamic occurs in school board discussion around the country regarding teaching evolution versus creationism. Rather than engage in objections, it behooves presenters to simply state the credibility of their own position by demonstrating the overwhelming evidence in support of climate change, or the careful documentation of evolutionary processes, rather than seek to refute specifics the opposition might raise. Regarding true objections of a positive message, sometimes the best way to defuse opponents is to agree with them; admitting that we do not know everything about how climate change works does not negate the reality of the effects we have demonstrated. And while it can be important to call out false accusations, proving a negative, as Sherlock Holmes famously illustrated by the dog that didn’t bark in the night, can constitute little more than an exercise in futility.

If these political examples fail to resonate with readers, although we have seen more salient and lurid examples of these attempts at public deflection among those accused of sexual misconduct in office, most academics have run across similar cases either trying to defend their own reputation against defamation, or perhaps attempting to attack the reputation of an intellectual or professional opponent. Rather than get mired in endless he said-she said fights about who did or didn’t do certain things, the best strategy, as in football or combat, is often a strong defense. Working to lengthen one’s own line, as they say in martial arts, builds an impenetrable wall brick by brick, or publication by publication, so that when others come to attack, you can sit safely behind the fortress of your reputation, which becomes increasingly hard to impugn by those of lesser accomplishment. Yet such actions are not destructive but rather constructive by nature; you work on your own message and do not deign to get involved in lesser battles, or you lose sight of the overall strategy for victory. In other words, create your own forest and leave the tree gazing to others.

Two central strategies exist for responding to objections in the moment: blocking and bridging. Blocking occurs when someone tries to avoid an unwelcome or unproductive line of questioning. You should only block for good reason; it may be better to just say “no comment.” In bridging, you try to take a discussion from unfriendly to friendly territory using a hopefully smooth transition.

It is best to understand every question, no matter how hostile, as an opportunity to deliver your central message, and if you stick to that message, you can accomplish that goal. In working with journalists and other people in the media, a few simple strategies work best:

• • Be nice.

• • Be helpful.

• • Be responsive to deadlines.

• • Reach out and cultivate reporters who are interested in your area and can influence the course of your field in the wider public debates.

As we, as scholars, learn to be better at this, we can help mitigate the impact of negative stories because reporters may reach out to us for responses.

The bottom line in communicating content to the media is that as a scholar you can shape your message, you do not simply have to react to the journalist’s questions. The following basic list provides dos and don’ts for communicating with the media and the wider interested public.

Do:

• • Stay on message.

• • Speak in easily understood terms.

• • Be yourself. Do not feel you need to reinvent yourself or you won’t be natural.

• • Be sensitive to a journalist’s important deadlines. If you respect them, they will be more likely to respect you.

• • Keep cool.

Don’t:

• • Over answer.

• • Adapt the language of the question in your answer like you are writing an exam.

• • Be provoked or lose your composure.

• • Say anything off-hand or sarcastic.

• • Fake an answer.

• • Lie.

• • Assume the microphone is off.

• • Write anything in an e-mail that you don’t want seen on television or in print. If you don’t say it, they can’t quote it.

• • Say anything to a journalist you do not want to see on the front page of the New York Times the next day.

In the end, scholars do best in dealing with the media and the wider interested public when they remain vigilant about sticking to a well-crafted message that allows them to frame as much information as possible in a creative way that offers new information in the context of that message. In this way, scholars can begin to trade control for influence.