When you are a government spokesperson, and you're trying to come up with your message, you always have to look at things from the standpoint of, what are you trying to communicate? What is the media interested in? And what do the citizens care about? You have to factor in all of those things. And the problem a lot of government spokespeople have is they don't factor in all of those. They just focus on what they want to talk about.

So, for example, if the head of your agency is under indictment, for theft, or for stealing something, and a reporter calls you up and wants to talk about that. You can't just say the number one concern of this agency is protecting the consumers right to get a good loan on. Well, you can't dodge a question like that. You can't just force what you want to talk about in a vacuum. If you have a message that you know isn't of interest to the reporter, throw it away. It's garbage, you're not going to get away with it.

So you've got to really give a lot of thought to the message. The most important part of any interview of any press statement of any press conference is, what is your message? If you have a weak message, then you can gesture the right way have the right makeup on, have great soundbites. It's not going to matter. The message is the fundamental keystone of the whole interview and the whole media exercise. So you've got to make sure you have a strong message.

I'm going to walk you through all the elements you need for any successful media message. do realize, again, as I've mentioned throughout, reporters hold you to a much higher standard. If you are someone in the private sector, you're a computer consultant. And they ask you questions about you know, who are your competitors? Let's see your quarter. results.

If you fudge that a little, they're likely just to go on. But if you're a government agency and you're taking tax dollars, and the reporter asked you exactly how much was spent on that snow cleanup last month, you've got to have an exact answer. And you can't waffle. You can't say kind of maybe sorta, you've got to be precise. So realize the standards are much higher, the media is holding you to much greater accountability than they are to someone in the private sector, someone at a nonprofit, someone an NGO, they can get a pass. Sometimes you can't.

That's why you have to really, really give thought to exactly the best message for this topic. Now, let's hop right into the exercises on messaging.