What to do about a media interview gone wrong?

March 24, 2023 7:32 AM

My spouse recently gave a short interview to a media outlet, and the resulting article about our family is inaccurate, biased, and demeaning. It contains photos and identifying information. We feel embarrassed, misled, and betrayed. What can we do now?

A while ago, my family had been profiled in a tiny community publication, a friendly lifestyle puff piece with a few photos.

Then recently, my spouse was contacted by a local reporter who had seen that piece and wanted to ask a few questions. Without thinking too much about it, and since this new reporter lived nearby and seemed friendly, she answered these few questions while driving in her car. She thought it would be a similar little lifestyle article. The publication then reached out to the photographer from the previous community article, and licensed a few of the photos they had taken of us.

Readers, the resulting article was awful. Full of factual error, misrepresentations, misquotations resulting in the exact opposite meaning of what was said, etc. It represents our family inaccurately and quite poorly. It feels like the reporter had an agenda to write a political opinion piece, a somewhat repugnant one at that, and just clamped our identities and situation onto the piece as an (inaccurate) illustration.

We are embarrassed to be involved in this. The publication is a newspaper with a large online presence and a national reach, and we're hearing about it from far-flung friends and family. Our kids names and photos are attached to this nonsense.

Obviously, we should never have done this interview, and will never do an interview again. (Without, I guess, a publicist helping us? How is this my life?)

But now, what can we do? Write a letter to the publication listing the misquotations, factual errors, and mischaracterizations, and demand they take it down? Call the reporter and cry? I don't trust the publication to make anything right voluntarily; they've shown their lack of integrity.

Tactical suggestions from media professionals are much appreciated, as well as any advice about dealing with the sense of betrayal, anger, and vulnerability we're now feeling.

posted by hovey to Media & Arts (21 answers total)

there's probably not much you can do. You can send a letter to the editor to tell your side of the story, but probably the best thing to do would be to just let it blow over, and tell the people you personally know the real truth. it won't last that long, unless of course you have political or social aspirations that one could google and use against you.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:45 AM on March 24, 2023

Well if there are factual errors you can contact the reporter first, editor second, to get updates to the article made. Without contemporaneous recordings it will be hard to show you were misquoted but if there is factual errors you should be able to get those corrected.
posted by mmascolino at 7:49 AM on March 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

Sounds like you have a decent case to sue for libel if the article contains misquotes and untrue information.
posted by ananci at 8:04 AM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

As someone with a background in political journalism, is there a media outlet from the other side that you can go to and tell your side of the story? Like even if it's Daily Kos or a community along those lines. If it's a national, partisan kind of issue that the reporter was jumping on for their repugnant ends, you could potentially get traction writing your own piece about what happened.
posted by johngoren at 8:07 AM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Any publication with even a shred of credibility will correct demonstrable errors of fact. Your best bet is to contact an editor. Be clear about what’s wrong and how you know it’s wrong. As a tactical matter it might be best to avoid any emotional appeals or outright criticism of the reporter, because media outlets get a lot of mail from cranks, and crying/shouting/etc. will make you seem like one.

Try email first, then phone if you need to.

For future media interactions my advice would be to think about what’s in it for you. If you’re speaking to press, you should have an agenda. That agenda might be something noble like “people need to know about this,” or it might be something selfish like promoting a business.

If you don’t have one, just decline.
posted by AAAA at 8:11 AM on March 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

Best answer: You are dealing with a small local publication with a reporter who is probably at the same level of the publication. I have been interviewed about a dozen times by local reporters (Patch, Daily Voice, etc.). Some I get along with and some not so much. The key is to develop a working relationship with them especially the ones you don't trust.

There seems to be an assumption of malice in your post. If it were me, I would start with the assumption that it is ineptitude rather than malice or an agenda. I would call the editor and point out the items you have concerns about and see what their reaction is. I might call the reporter first and see what their reaction is to your concerns. They may be sympathetic. If not, you will learn that the call with the editor has to be more aggressive. I would follow this up with a letter/email. See if they are willing to make changes/corrections. It is my experience that no matter how much the reporter disagreed with me, they always corrected factual errors.

In my email, if it seemed like the editor was open to your concerns, I would help them out by suggesting how you would change the wording to be more accurate. If they won't do that, I would ask them if they would allow me (you) to write a response letter that can be published as written.

If they are hostile or not willing to make changes to the tone, I would post my own response on my web page or blog or somewhere where it will be part of a search on your name.

As for the future, I would ask the reporter to email you their questions and state that you will turn around the answers quickly, but you do better when you have a chance to give the thought appropriate to the question. I write much better than I speak. I try to create my own accommodations by asking. Some reporters like that better because they don't have to transcribe an interview or do much work while others won't do it because they are playing the "gotcha" game.

My advice is to call the editor and have a discussion with them. Then, based on that discussion, follow-up with an email or letter. A lot of times, asking nicely goes a long way. Also, you have no idea if this was intentional or just poor reporting.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:23 AM on March 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

Best answer: This has happened to me. It sucks, and it can be especially hard because it’s difficult for people who haven’t gone through it to imagine how it feels; the intensity of the shame, exposure and betrayal you feel. But the bright side, I guess, is that once you’ve had the experience, you know something fundamentally true about the world, which is that most media representations— especially ones designed to make people look bad — are unreliable. You won’t read the news the same way, and when you see articles that trade in this kind of mockery and schadenfreude, you’ll recognize them for what they are, and they’re everywhere. It’s a kind of through- the - looking - glass moment, and as painful as my experience was, I wouldn’t go back. I feel more shame, now, about the times I took material like this about other people at face value than I do about the fact that it happened to me.

I don’t know what your practical situation is, but from a pure psychological standpoint, I would not engage further with this outlet, or any other. The people I know who have truly been brought down by this stuff are ones who couldn’t let go of the idea of wrestling back control of the narrative. If you let yourself believe that what they say about you has worth, you’ll always be vulnerable to a machine that couldn’t care less about you. The sooner you let it go, the sooner you can move on.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 8:32 AM on March 24, 2023 [19 favorites]

Best answer: You can write a letter to the editor pointing out the factual mistakes, and presumably they will have to update the article for corrections. I don't think you can demand that they take it down, though. You have no leverage on that one, and they can do what they like. Or you can say, create your own website, werethehoveys.com and write on there, "Hi, we had this article posted about us, if you've heard of me via Google search, this is the real truth." I think I've read that's something they do in reputation management online these days. Put out your own story if anyone looks.

Not all reporters are like that. (Disclaimer: I used to be one.) I've been interviewed a few times by reporters just for the heck of it and I've learned not to read the article if I can because usually they don't write it very well or don't put in what I would have said to or they choose to shape it in the way they want to. You said political in here, which makes me think that's where things got weird rather than a fun feature profile. I note that your original "puff piece" article went all right. It really depends on the reporter/situation, though. They aren't all evil. I don't know enough about your situation to be able to posit what was different this time, other than politics.

I got interviewed by a Big Name Paper a few months ago--you've heard of them and a lot of you actually read the article-- and fortunately for me I wasn't in it very much in the end, but that's probably because the reporter was looking for Certain Angles and I probably didn't give them to her. I didn't read the whole article, but a friend spotted it online and sent me the few paragraphs I was in. I was all, "I would have written it better than that," but what can you do, and frankly I'm just grateful I didn't get online harassment over it like I could have because I stupidly volunteered to be interviewed on a controversial topic. I also find it funny that I told ONE person I was in this article, two friends saw it online, and then literally nobody else I know IRL saw it or pointed it out to me. And it's a Big Name Paper on a Controversial Topic! I'm surprised so many of your friends and family found it all over the world.

Either way, other than via Google searches, this will probably not really follow you around the rest of your life very much. People will forget about it because unless you're SUPER memorable ("I'm that guy with one leg who makes the great Halloween costumes!" comes to mind), most people aren't going to think of you as That Family In That Article.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:54 AM on March 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have experienced something vaguely similar to this (but more of my own making). I feared the resulting minor scandal would be dangerous to my career--I was untenured and the situation got me pulled into my department chair's office for a Talk. In fact what happened was: nothing. You can probably still find the resulting articles online but it's been several years and I am pretty certain not a single person aside from me remembers what happened. Not only did it not affect my tenure case, it never even came up. No matter how unfair it seems, just wait two weeks and see if you still think you need to do something. Any kind of response just gives it more oxygen and almost never makes you look better unless you are an EXCEPTIONALLY eloquent writer.
posted by derrinyet at 8:55 AM on March 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Are you a public figure? Does anyone in your family hold elected office? Are you particularly involved in your community either because you volunteer, own a prominent local business, own a historic or prominent piece of property, or do anything else that might make you a particularly prominent person in your community?

If the answer is "yes", your options are quite limited.

However.

Why did the second reporter contact you? Was the article they wrote about your family, or was it about something else and your family was just used as an example of the overall subject of the article? (i.e. They contacted you because they had read the earlier lifestyle piece--is that because you own a blue house and they were doing an article about blue houses and they referenced your family, "here is a blue house, this is an example of a family who lives in a blue house"). Then there might be something to object to, especially the if the reporter hadn't divulged what kind of article they were writing, like if it was an article that was critical of the lifestyles of people who live in blue houses.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:00 AM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm often interviewed for my work. In order, my suggestions:

1. Contact the reporter and their editor (if you can't find their editor's name/contact info, ask the reporter). Ask for an explanation of the misrepresentations. THey may be willing to retract the story, or revise it.

2. Contact the ombudsman. You're presumably a member of the public, not a public professional, and you feel (insert how you feel here, i.e. you have been misrepresented, your children have been put at risk, you have no clear recourse, etc.).

3, possibly but not definitely. Is there a high profile advocacy organization that may be relevant to the issue that's being politicized? If so, you can contact them and see if they have any advice. Sometimes a well-placed call/letter from an org suggests a kind of negative attention that can really grease the wheels here. But note that you need to be clear here that your intention is not to raise the profile of this bad article any further).

4. In light of the last detail, there is sometimes merit to trusting that the news cycle is vicious for six minutes and then forgets entirely. Sometimes efforts to correct the record inadvertently reinforce the bad story through a horrible combination of the Streisand effect and the internet's preservation of information.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 9:01 AM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Something similar happened to a writer and his response may bring you some comfort and/or schadenfreude. ("I respect him for trying his best to write what he obviously found a difficult article", in context, is a brilliant use of the "well bless his heart" tone with all its claws out.)
posted by restless_nomad at 9:40 AM on March 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

Sounds like you have a decent case to sue for libel

Only if the OP wants to go to court to prove that the reporter was negligent; that is, that a reasonable person would have known that what they were reporting about OP and OP's family was false.

This means court dates, handing over money to attorneys, and, to add insult to injury, media coverage of the lawsuit. (I can only imagine how reporters for other media outlets will try to summarize the badly bungled story over which OP is suing.) The embarrassment will drag on and on, and the only people who would benefit unconditionally are the lawyers.

As a journalist, I would advise taking a different route. OP should go through the article with a fine-tooth comb and find every factual error therein. (It sounds like there are a lot of them.) Then ask to sit down with the reporter and their editor face to face and call for a correction of every factual error, in print as well as online.

Print corrections are important because (at least where I work) they are appended to the archived version of the print story, so when the reporter is consulting past clips, they don't repeat previous errors.

Good luck, OP. I'm sorry that you're going through this.
posted by virago at 10:09 AM on March 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Okay it's hard to know exactly what you should do, without more context. But here's a crack at some advice. (My credentials: I was a working journalist for a long time and have done hundreds of media interviews, including crisis stuff.)

FWIW I am assuming the story was something in the nature of portraying your family as gentrifiers/NIMBY people, or making you seem ridiculous/bad in some similar way.

The most important question is whether you think the journalist was acting in good faith and just being clueless, versus whether you think they were deliberately trapping your spouse to make a political point. The truth may be somewhere in the middle and also sometimes a reporter's motivations will be different from their editor's. Also journalists and editors will sometimes play good cop bad cop on purpose.

If the journalist was young, working quickly, and/or working for a low-quality publication, that would argue for the former. An experienced journalist and a high-quality publication (e.g., NYT, WSJ) unfortunately argues for the latter.

If the latter, then I wouldn't do anything. You can't win. Just accept that it sucked and move on.

But if it was the former, you have some options.

1) You could write the journalist and say you are getting all kinds of blowback from family members and friends who are misinterpreting the story, and then ask the journalist to make some changes to make things more clear. Don’t accuse them of misrepresenting what you said or making factual errors: that will put them on the defensive. (Journalists hate admitting they were wrong.) Just tell them people are understanding the story as meaning X, which is not true, and so it would be awesome if they could revise to make it clear that the reality is Y. This is the softest possible approach and probably won't work, but it might be worth a shot.

2) If you think the journalist is at all empathetic, you could plead privacy issues. You could tell the journalist that you and your family have been getting weird phone calls / emails / something, since the story was published. You could say or imply that there is a stalker who appears to have been activated by this story. (If you do this, don’t make it too interesting, or it could become its own story.) You would basically be saying that the story seems to have accidentally provoked some kind of harassment/abuse, and asking if they would take it down on that basis. This is more likely to work than #1, because #1 implies the journalist didn't do a great job, whereas #2 lets the journalist entirely off the hook. High-quality publications will basically never take down a story, but mid-to-low quality ones do it all the time. They might do it to placate you / shut you up, if you seem very motivated and concerned, and if they feel like they have already gotten most of the value they're gonna get out of the story, and so they don't care too much if it stays up on their site. For this to work, you need to make it the 'easy' option for them: like, the alternative is that you will write them worried emails forever, and they will be blamed if things escalate.

3) If neither of those things work, you could make a list of factual errors in the story, and send it to the journalist, or their boss. But you would need to be able to prove they’re mistakes. You probably won’t be able to do that with misquotes, because it sounds like your spouse didn’t record the interview. If you take this path, the journalist will get defensive and start to fight you: they will fight you on every error, and only make changes where what they wrote is provably wrong. This probably won't achieve a very satisfying result, but it might clean up the story a little bit. Also a good publication will note that errors have been fixed, which serves as a signal to future readers that the story's accuracy has been questioned.

You didn't ask about how to talk with other people about this, but I'll advise you on that anyway :) Just be openly incredulous. Say stuff like "I guess I used to mostly trust reporters to operate in good faith. But wow. That story bears basically zero resemblance to reality. It was a confusing and kind of bizarre experience. If a journalist ever comes knocking at your door, wow, I advise you to just say no, haha." Try to do this as lightly as you can, because other people will take their cue from you. If you dismiss the story as nonsense, they will too.

I am really sorry this happened to you and your family. To feel better, consider reading this by the brilliant Janet Malcom. Here are the opening words, to give you a taste: Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. It should make you feel better :)
posted by Susan PG at 10:37 AM on March 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

Make a numbered list of the factual errors and send an email asking them to fix them. For the quotes, did they ask you if they could record the interview? (If they recorded without asking and you happen to be in a state that requires all parties to consent to recording, that's another problem). You could ask them for a copy of the recording, though they might not share it. If they didn't record it, you can try arguing that you said something different, though that may not succeed.
posted by pinochiette at 10:58 AM on March 24, 2023

This has also happened to me and Merricat Blackwood has it. Writing to the outlet/reporter will do you no good.

In my instance, it was a national paper that interviewed me about a writing project that consisted of love letters I'd written that went viral in pre-social media days. Begrudgingly, I agreed to an interview. The writer's piece could be boiled down to, "I don't get it. This isn't romantic and he's not even handsome. What do people see in this?!" Many of my subscribers told me they'd written the editor of the paper to point out what wasn't being "got" and I sent my own query asking why they thought it relevant to leave in the ad hominem attacks and pointed out that the writer also asked me out and wanted me to write one of the letters to her, which I declined. The paper printed no corrections, caveats, or addressed the issues in any way. Obviously this just caused more frustration.

So: walk away; forget about it; don't engage in the future even with outlets you imagine sympathetic.
posted by dobbs at 11:54 AM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

In high school I was on a trivia team that won a national championship. A reporter from the Toronto Star, which is both our local paper and the biggest one in the country, came to interview us at school. The sole "quote" from me that ended up in the article totally mischaracterized what I was saying. It wasn't a big deal, and I don't think the journalist was out to get me or anything, but it still happened and annoyed me.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:57 AM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had a similarly eye-opening experience with the media (though not at all as emotionally hurtful and bewildering as yours) when my wedding was profiled in a national publication. The "interview" with the writer was conducted 100% in writing and we were given a chance to fact-check the piece before it went to press and provide any necessarily clarifications... and yet I was absolutely amazed by just how many things in the final product were misrepresented or misconstrued or just plain wrong. It didn't smear my character or anything so it wasn't a huge deal, but it really did change how I thought about news representation and their commitment and reliability to always providing the objective truth or whatever, given how many chances they'd been given to get it right and still missed by quite a bit.
posted by anderjen at 12:19 PM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am so sorry this happened to you. My current job requires many press releases and interviews and I can't tell you how many times the reporter hasn't even bothered to write things down and then produces an article with countless misprints, wrong assumptions, etc. The only way I've found to counter is to have accurate information (and sometimes a statement) on your website or public social media. It sucks. There are good reporters out there, and I'm sorry you got one of the bad ones.
posted by haplesschild at 12:36 PM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Maybe it's because I'm in the UK and not the US so my first thought of journalists is: "tabloid rats" and not "muh fourth estate woodward bois" but having known numerous people who have been extensively written about in the press and having worked on projects that attracted substantial media attention, just means accepting that most of what you read is total bullshit.

It's at best produced to fit a particular agenda that the writer genuinely believes in (but that doesn't mean that they will feel obliged to respect every little fact) and at worst a total fabrication by a third rate hack who just produces content by the line. Congratulations, you've joined the club - if you want to know why so many cities have old private members clubs called the "press club" or something similar it's because nobody in their right mind would let these people into anywhere decent.
posted by atrazine at 12:39 PM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone, for the advice and support. All answers were helpful, just marked a few 'best' that especially resonated.

On reflection and rereading, the article is not nearly so bad as it initially seemed. It wasn't that political or even really insulting -- it just missed the point of our story entirely to make us fit into their trend story, while also putting forward some embarrassing personal details, some of which were wrong, but which would not be helped by trying to correct. As many of you suggested, I would attribute it to inept and rushed reporting, rather than any kind of malice.

It did get a lot of attention though. Local TV even picked it up and re-reported it, fortunately omitting the sketchy details in their summary.

It turns out our young kids' first names were not included, so perhaps at least their google results are safe for now. Their privacy was my biggest concern. For now we'll sort of laugh it off when friends inquire, and take a few days to think about it, but probably take no other action and consider it a lesson learned.
posted by hovey at 2:17 PM on March 24, 2023 [6 favorites]