How Not To Reply To A Bad Press Story
The hot new trend among conservative candidates is dumb
Nicole Shanahan, RFK JR’s VP candidate and human ATM, recently tweeted out something interesting:
Shanahan shares screenshots of an NBC News reporter’s email to discuss an upcoming piece. The email is fairly anodyne. The reporter opens by describing the scope of the story and giving the context that the campaign has previously refused to offer comment, then lists some of the facts her reporting has uncovered to offer Shanahan the chance to respond. She closes with a few outstanding questions that she’d like answers to. Nothing about it is sinister, or particularly out of the ordinary. The topics are all well within the scope of what you would expect a vice presidential candidate to be asked about.
Emails like this are often called no surprises letters — they represent a last ditch effort to get comment for an upcoming story from a person who has thus far refused to participate in interviews or taken questions. They are a courtesy to the recepient, to give them one final chance to share their side of the story before publication.
Shanahan spins the letter as a nefarious invasion of privacy and a waste of her time. She calls it “The Making of a Hit Piece” and complains that reporters “seem less and less focused on the issues facing the American people” despite the majority of the questions dealing with public policy issues that the next President and Vice President will have influence over.
Trend Alert
This letter is part of a growing trend of conservative1 politicians ‘prebutting’ stories that are about to break.
Last month, Tim Sheehy, the presumtive GOP nominee for senate in Montana, similarly screenshotted a Washington Post reporter’s inquiry into his military history. The eventual story dealt with inconsisties about the injuries that Sheehy received while serving in combat, and whether he lied about receiving a bullet wound in a National Park. Sheehy’s post follows the same pattern as Shanahan’s: question the motivations and bias of the reporter, then ask “how dare they ask questions about my military service and history of combat wounds” despite the degree to which he has repeatedly told conflicting accounts in public about them.
Dave McCormick, the presumtive GOP nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, followed the same playbook to preemptively discredit a New York Times story in April about his childhood. The reporter’s screenshotted email is polite and provides clear sourcing for her assertions, while seeking comment on perceived inconsistencies. The final story is fairminded, if critical of the way that McCormick has stretched the truth about some pieces of his upbringing.
This Is Such A Dumb Way To Respond To A Story
Eight reasons it’s a bad idea to put a reporter on blast to try to preemptively discredit a story:
It will royally piss off the reporter in question, their colleagues at the outlet, and other reporters on the beat. Most reporters at mainstream outlets are fairminded folks trying to call balls and strikes. They really don’t have it out to get you. But if you stonewall them, leak their emails, and try to embarrass them professionally, you can bet that it will make them marginally less favorable to you. Acting in bad faith will make it less likely that reporters will cooperate with you on future stories when you want them to write about something more favorable because they don’t trust you as a source.
If you get incredibly defensive, you are showing your hand and letting reporters know that you’re worried. This is a giant flashing red light to every reporter who covers you that they should be looking into this specific subject. It also puts them on a timer, because they know that their colleagues at other outlets are looking into the issue, so it will accelerate the timeline for any stories currently in production. Suddenly, one story can multiply into many more stories, including process stories.
It ensures that other reporters will give you the least information they need to, and the shortest deadlines to reply. Within basic journalistic standards, there is a certain amount of flexibility in how much room reporters give the subejcts of a story. If reporters are worried about you screenshotting their emails and trying to publicly blow up their work, you are likely to get less time to respond to inquiries and shorter deadlines during fact checking.
It will clue in the opposition about the upcoming story. I am certain that McCormick’s opponent Senator Bob Casey immediately started using this information to prepare a response. Getting a few days head start on a damning story may not sound like much, but there’s a lot you can do: line up surrogates who can speak to the scandal at hand, prepare a rapid response ad, or share any relevant opposition research with the reporter in question to make the story worse. You may not know the exact details of the story, but knowing that a Times reporter is looking into whether McCormick exaggerated being a farmer lets you easily tee up a couple of actual farmers to speak on the record.
Even if the story was initiated by your opposition, it can still clue in different parts of the opposition. Maybe the story was initially sparked by a pitch from American Bridge2 but when you publicize it with a tweet you give the campaign advance warning. Due to federal election law, many parts of your opposition can’t coordinate, but when you preemptively rebutt the story you level the playing field and let everyone know what one group is doing.
Leaking reporter emails over twitter gives them an easy chance to quote tweet you and respond. Brandy Zadrozny, the NBC News reporter that Shanahan called out, quote tweeted Shanahan’s comments with a thoughtful explanation of the reporting process to defend her work:
Predictably, the reporter’s response was intensely more viral than the initial tweet. The reporter’s response drew 800k impressions, meaning that of the 941k people who saw Shanahan’s tweet, 85% of them saw the tweet because of Zadrozny’s response. Not every reporter will respond this way, but especially when the story is a fairly standard story, you look awful when they do respond.
You look like a whiny baby. I’m being flippant here, but I think there’s a good argument to be made that tactics like this can only be executed from a place of weakness, and you reinforce that weakness when you complain to the non-existent refs about how unfair things are.
It draws more attention to a story that is bad for you. The Streisand Effect is covered in Press Secretary 101. Anytime that you tweet about a story that is bad for you, you are letting all of your followers know about it. Even if you are trying to innoculate yourself with a preemptive rebuttal, to do so you have to expose your audience to the virus of the bad story in the first place. How many Montana Republicans read the Washington Post regularly enough to catch this specific article? How many will only see this story because you drew attention to it? How many local outlets wouldn’t have covered the Post story, but now decide to cover it only because you’ve dignified it with a response? It’s very easy for a story to just pass by without fanfare in the current era, which is defined by a rapid changing news cycle and extremely fragmented media environment. Spending your limited time and energy elevating a bad story is counterproductive.
The best argument for why conservatives keep doing this is that a) they are already convinced that the mainstream media is out to get them so there’s no risk to outright hostility, and that b) it is advantageous to convince their supporters not to trust the mainstream media.3 These are both weak arguments.
The mainstream media is not out to get conservatives. Broadly, the folks doing these sorts of investigative pieces (in these three examples: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News) are fairminded reporters who cover their beats in a balanced and thorough manner. Being on the receiving end of reporter scrutiny can feel uncomfortable, but it’s part of the package deal when you run for office. There simply is no left wing version of FOX that is dedicated to running interference for Democrats and attacking Republicans. Explicitly left wing outlets broadly have smaller audiences and less ability to shape the national discourse. Republican candidates aren’t exactly using this tactic with Meidas Touch or Crooked Media, they’re going after straightforwardly centrist outlets.
On the other hand, it’s certainly true that conservatives have benefited from convincing their base not to trust the mainstream media. But it doesn’t follow from this that a campaign ought to use this specific tactic. If you want to reinforce the distrust, just reply after a story goes out that it’s fake news. There’s no need for any given downballot campaign to preemptively rebut a story that your base won’t trust anyway. You incur severe costs for preemptively rebtutting the story, in a way that a normal after-the-fact response wouldn’t. In economic terms, there’s a freeloader problem here: all conservatives benefit from Trump’s war with the media, whether they participate or not. Better to maintain good ties to local reporters and let other campaigns do the dirty work of convincing the base not to trust reporters.
Please stop doing this very dumb tactic (unless you’re a GOP comms staffer, at which point, uh…keep going I guess?).
Housekeeping
If you see a conservative candidate prebutting a story live in the wild, make sure to let me know! Also, if you’re a GOP comms staffer who wants to present the other side of the case, get in touch! I’m very curious to hear from you…
Herdmentality posts every Friday at 10am ET. If you like what you’ve read, tell a friend or share this on social media!
Last Week: The Definitive Take on Joe Biden's Age
I’m calling Shanahan conservative here because she’s an antivaxxer who supports allowing state level abortion bans. But some of her views are quite heterodox and don’t fit neatly into a conservative/liberal box.
Bridge is the Democratic Super PAC focused on opposition research and pitching damaging stories about Republicans.
That the two best arguments for using this tactic only apply to Republican candidates both explains why you never see Democrats using this tactic and says a lot about the differences between the two parties.