In his Crisis Guru Commentaries, Jim Lukaszewski provides real answers to real questions about your most critical communications problems and issues.

To submit a question, please direct it by e-mail to crisisguru@e911.com.  Be sure to include your full name, affiliation, address, and telephone number.  All published questions will be identified by title and industry only.  Your confidentiality will be protected.

Question:
 
Dear Crisis Guru:

Since the media control what is printed and broadcast, how do we find a way to correct lax reporting and media errors?  If we respond strongly, they re-editorialize or add those awful italicized comments at the end of their article, or they go out of their way to remind the world of our last catastrophe.

Director of Communications

Answer:

Dear Director:

The media’s intentional deafness to reader and viewer feedback has led to more creative ways to fix the broken, erroneous, or increasingly fabricated record created by news coverage.  I advise my clients to skip asking media outlets for corrections or clarifications, letters to the editor, or op-eds.  Instead, I recommend using a Web site to post articles with corrections and clarifications in detail.  We are now more frequently audio recording interviews, transcribing the interviews then posting the transcripts or at least links from article content and corrections to the actual interview.

It is increasingly important for employees, regulators, shareholders, victims, and others to read the entire interview, beyond the de minimis quotes the reporter or editor chooses to use.

For a detailed discussion complete with examples, refer to my monograph Control Your Own Destiny:  Corrections and Clarifications.*

Occasionally our corrections have had “errors” brought to our attention by a reporter or editor.  When that happens we immediately and eagerly include their comments right along with ours, and the original.


This approach allows you the last word, even about your “last catastrophe.”  Odds are, your response will be more believable and more highly used than the media’s.  A recent survey by the Pew Research Center indicates that 44 percent of Americans believe reporters and editors make up about half of every news story.  An even larger percentage, 55 percent, believe that anytime an anonymous source is quoted, it is actually the reporter and/or editor sharing their own opinions in the story.

We have never received a “thoughtful letter of response” from a New York Times reporter or editor.  As one of the major sinners in the media in recent times, those at the Times are trying especially hard to appear more humble.  If received, such correspondence would be immediately posted, too.

These corrections are then provided by e-mail to the reporter who wrote the story, then to the publics we care about or who care about us.  For broadcast news, we post transcripts and the corrections to those.  Occasionally, I have had clients actually respond “live” to broadcast stories.  We always try to show both the story as it was broadcast and our corrections to specific content.  We also link our corrections text to the complete transcript of the interview.  This way audiences can make up there own minds.

This is a crucial strategy because the media relies on itself or various “sources” for validation.  Most of the time reporters and editors don’t go back and fix a story once it has been published or broadcast.  Yet once a mistake occurs, other media pick it up and the mistake or misimpression appears everywhere.


Reporters do consult the Web when doing stories and so we find that this corrections strategy helps them get it right, from the start.  And they soon find out that we care enough about what is said or written that we will correct every one.

In the end, the clients’s destiny is in their own hands, where it belongs.


The Web does provide, as you pointed out, new and creative opportunities for interaction with the subjects of news stories.  If you fail to provide it, someone else will.


Cordially,

Jim Lukaszewski


*   Note:  For an abstract, product details, and purchase information, please click on “Articles, Monographs, Books & Speeches,” open “Monographs,” and click on “Control Your Own Destiny: Corrections and Clarifications.”