What Do You Do If a Reporter Makes a Factual Mistake?

Complete Media Training Master Class - Confidence on Camera Frequently Asked Media Training Questions - I
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Transcript

What do you do if a reporter just makes a clear cut factual mistake in an article, a broadcast story about you or your organization? It's not a quote they took from you that's wrong. They just put in factual information that was factually incorrect. My advice is quickly correct. Send an email to the reporter. And let them know that hey, great story.

Thanks for speaking with me. I try to start off with something positive. And then say, Were you stated that at media training worldwide has worked in 220 countries around the world? Actually, the correct number is 191 countries around the world. I know your readers would appreciate accurate information. Thanks again.

I would send that to the reporter. Right away the second you see the story. Quickly, you hope to receive something back saying thanks so much. We've just made that Change, we've just added it. Now if they don't, what I would do within a few hours is make a post on the story on their website, correcting it and also send a letter an email to that media outlet correcting it that way you've established a record because you don't want someone else to say you fabricated things. If some reporter misses the facts and says you're a billionaire, and you're actually not, you don't want someone six months later saying that you're running around misrepresenting yourself and here's this article calling you a billionaire and you're clearly not your total assets have one or two fewer decimal points and zeros.

So you do want to be able to show that you In fact, did correct the record. If it's something minor. If a reporter says you know, TJ Walker, the dark haired good looking guy in a story my Wife might see it so well you better correct that and tell them your gray haired and not very good looking. I'm not going to go out of my way to make a correction like that. It needs to be something of material significant level before you do that, but if it is, let's get the record straight, be positive. Just stick to the facts.

Don't just say you incredible incompetent, why did you distort that? Don't learn all that into it. Just isolate what the error was and and then let the reporter the news outlet know exactly what the correct facts were. Keep in mind. You cannot do this just because the reporter quoted some facts accurately that you don't like. You can't say well, you but you left this out.

And that's not fair. It's not the reporters job to write every single fact that makes you look good. So this has to be used sparingly if you want to retain credibility.

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