Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The prevailing wisdom in PR has been that you should keep hammering away at the key messages you're trying to get across in a media interview, no matter what.Is the reporter asking you a completely unrelated question? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.

Do they want to speak to you about an issue or topic your key messages don't even cover? Doesn't matter—repeat your key message.Is the interview a fairly relaxed conversation about your company's strategy, rather than a reputation-destroying crisis?

One size fits all—just repeat your key message.If you do this enough, this line of PR thinking goes, your points will stick and the reporter will repeat them. The industry even gave this approach a name of its very own: "block (the reporter's actual question) and bridge (to your key message)."

Great—except it rarely works....

We suppose it is possible for the Department of State to screw up the handling of questions about whether they lied to reporters even worse — but it is hard to figure out how.

The video below from CNN’s Jake Tapper today nicely lays out the series of offenses — but here is our quick summary:

In February 2013 Fox News correspondent James Rosen asked then State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland if there had been direct talks between the U.S. and Iran.  She essentially said “NO.”

In December 2013, Rosen points out to Nuland’s successor Jen Psaki that the correct answer would have been “YES” and asked if State routinely lied to reporters when they found it convenient. Psaki with a smirk said there are times when diplomacy needs privacy to succeed. (Translation: yes, we lied)....

Apparently, there are 4.6 of you for every one of me, and yet most of the time, I can’t get a call back from a communications person to save my life.

I am a newspaper reporter who covers county government, but my paper is fairly loose with beat restrictions, so I also write about a lot of random things that interest me (recent examples: the plight of the public-health dentist, employee retention rates in law enforcement).

Writing outside of my beat requires that I spend a healthy chunk of my daily reporting life reaching out to PR pros, the vast – vast – majority of whom refuse to communicate with me.  

It happens often enough that I cringe when I have to contact a rep I don’t know, because it almost always results in me sitting at my desk moaning, “But I’m a nice person!” while staring at the phone and hitting refresh on my inbox. (You may notice those two stories above do not quote a representative from a state or national agency. This is not for lack of trying.)...