How to interact with potentially hostile journalists

One of the things I have started to suspect recently is that most people’s estimations of a journalist’s personal trustworthiness seem to suffer a kind of reverse Gel-Mann amnesia effect. The phenomenon was wonderfully described by Michael Crichton: 

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

In other words, there is a systematic gap between estimates of the journalist’s bare competence in things you know well, and things of which you’re ignorant. In general journalists get the benefit of the doubt, except where your personal knowledge comes in.

However, consider the perspective of the political right on the question of a journalist’s trustworthiness, rather than their competence. Here the effect is reversed.

In general, most people with any sense tend to believe that journalists are mendacious, dishonest scum, who will say almost anything to get you to talk, and then regardless of past assurances, will distort your quotes to paint you in the worst possible light. Your best strategy is to ignore them. This applies orders of magnitude more if you hold any vaguely right wing opinions, and the media wants to talk to you about them out of the blue.

But for some reason, when a particular journalist comes to talk to you, wanting to let you tell your side of the story on an article they’re planning on writing about you, people forget this. Rather, they suddenly assume that it’s somehow a good idea to talk to the person, because this specific journalist actually seems pretty reasonable, so what’s the worst that can happen? Like Crichton observed, they forget what they know. And like night follows day, the journalist was lying, and they smear you and stitch you up, and somehow the result comes as a surprise.

It’s one thing for the average normie who believes that the press is honest to get suckered like this. But this happens over and over again to people who not only ought to know better, but actually do know better.

Here’s what happened to Nick Fuentes, of “America First” fame:

“In February 2018, a production company called “Karga7” reached out and said they were interested in filming an episode of MTV True Life about me and my show. They spent a full week filming at my house but never released any of the footage until tonight, almost two years later.

Pete and a team from Karga7 came to my house and filmed for a week, doing hours of interviews, B-Roll, they filmed me doing my show and they covered my periscope of an anti-gun rally in Chicago. This is what my mother texted to Pete Ritchie at the end of the shoot:‘Same Pete, you seem like a genuine person. We are relieved. See you then! Promise Al will be in boarding school.’ “

Psych, there was no episode of MTV True Life. Instead, all the footage ended up in a documentary titled “White Supremacy Destroyed My Life”. No kidding! You don’t need to watch it to know how that turned out for Fuentes and his family.

Okay, you might say, maybe Nick Fuentes is just a naïve fool. But this happened to Curtis Yarvin! That’s right, Mencius Moldbug, the man who taught me more than anyone else about how the media operates, and its role in the power structure of the modern west. He used to have a medium post about the experience, but it seems to be gone now, so I’m paraphrasing the story from memory. It turns out that nearly all of Yarvin’s enemies are too stupid or lazy to actually read through his voluminous and meandering writings (which, to be fair, is a very polarizing writing style – I love it, but others I know and respect find it offputting). So instead, everyone relies on one leftist guy who bothered to read things and happened to find a single infelicitously-phrased remark relating to how the early Spanish in the Americas tended to prefer imported African populations as slaves, rather than the indigenous population. Anyway, one day Yarvin gets a bunch of ridiculous and obviously muck-raking questions from a journalist asking if he supports slavery (something nobody who has read his actual writings could conceivably believe). He writes back a fascinating a thoughtful paragraph exploring the concept through the lens of Robert Nozick’s disturbing and compelling “Tale of a Slave” (read that if you haven’t already, it’s very short and extremely good). The journalist ignores the whole thing, repeats the question again if he supports slavery and insists on only a yes or no response. Yarvin answers “No”. Journalist, predictably, writes article anyway accusing him of supporting slavery.

At this point, dear reader, I think we ought to take seriously the possibility that something strange is at play here, something which we don’t fully understand. How does Curtis Yarvin, of all people, end up getting stitched up by some idiot journalist?

I think the starting point of understanding is that this actually is very similar to what happens with the other major group whose profession it is to get people to talk, when it’s very much in their interests to shut up. I’m referring, of course, to the police. Your mental model of journalists ought to be able to incorporate why people regularly confess to the police, often without realizing that that’s what they’re doing.

If you haven’t already, watch all 46 minutes of James Duane’s presentation on the subject. For the general subject of why you shouldn’t talk to the police, watch the first half, with James Duane, the law professor. But to understand why people talk to the police anyway, watch the second half, which is from a police offer. It’s eye-opening stuff.

 Hardened criminals have no problem talking to the police. People like to tell their story. And they’ll sit in that room and think about it. There’s one chair here, there’s a desk, there’s another chair. What’s the one thing you want the most, right at that point? To get out of that room. To be out of that room. The police officer’s shift is ending in fifteen minutes. Does the police officer want to get out of that room? My overtime rate is $58 an hour, do I want to get out of that room? I have no problem, I’ll stay there for ten hours. I’ll take that six hundred dollars. So I have no motivation to want to leave, and you do, and that’s how we get you to try to talk. …

[S]ay you wanted to go into a boxing match. A hundred dollars if you win. You’ve never boxed before. You have to face somebody who’s an Olympic boxer. You’re going to lose. You’re going to face somebody who’s been interviewing people for, in my case, 28 years. You’re going to lose. Unless you’re purely innocent. Now, on the other side of it, I don’t want to put anyone who’s innocent in jail. But I try not to bring anyone into the interview room who’s innocent.…

And then I have to determine what kind of person I have. And there’s two types. There’s the one like I mentioned earlier, where I have to talk to them, talk to them about different things, get into their own skin, as it were, and try to get them to talk to me and discuss things. I had a sexual assault case. I had to talk to the guy about how hot the woman was, and I understood where he was coming from. And when I said that, we were buds, and he started talking to me. He’s still sitting in prison. …

The other type of person is the one that likes to tell a story. … I said, tell me what happened. And he told me this beautiful story about what happened. … And I didn’t even question about it, after he finished his whole story, very implausible but very beautiful story, I sat there and listened to it for fifteen minutes, and I looked at him and I said “You stole the stuff from your boss, didn’t you?”. “Yes sir, I did.” I had nothing, I really had nothing except the fact that he’d sold it. …

Just sit there, and wait for them to start talking, and they will. People want to communicate, they hate silence. “  

I am quite certain that a New York Times journalist interviewing right wring people for a story views their job in a very similar fashion. If they’re calling you, you’re already guilty in their mind. Most people don’t know this. They think it’s all a misunderstanding. The whole point of Duane’s talk is why even the innocent should never speak to the police. If you’re guilty, you absolutely shouldn’t talk to them. From the perspective of the New York Times, I have bad news. If you’re reading this, you’re guilty. Never mind what of. They’ll come up with something, just like the police when they’re sure someone is a criminal.

I think there are several things at play here. The first of them is that one should never underestimate journalists. Like the police, they are professionals at getting people to say things against their interest. You have to assume that they will have all sorts of tricks for getting you to do this. Not only this, but you don’t know what those tricks are. You can plan in advance, but there will inevitably be aspects you still don’t foresee.

Like the police officer, part of their job is to convince you of their trustworthiness. Most people do not have much experience with professional liars. We all like to think that we’re good judges of character, but most of the sample that we deal with in our everyday life is not comprised of sociopath manipulators. Even if the person isn’t completely cold and cynical, remember, they likely view you as an enemy of society. You have to expect that they will have no compunctions about trying to delude you into thinking that they are on your side, or at least might be on your side, if you just say the right things.

People also overestimate how convincing their own arguments are. I’m convinced that I’m a good person who holds reasonable views. Surely, these people who disagree just haven’t had things explained to them properly. You know what? I’m just going to go down to the station and clear this whole thing up right now.

He’s still sitting in prison.

In the case of journalists, another classic trick they pull is to increase the time pressure. They call you on the phone, and immediately start asking questions. Do you have the wherewithal, on the spot, to not answer? How strong is your presence of mind in this situation? Or they write you an email at 3pm and tell you they have a 5pm deadline, and that they want you to comment immediately, otherwise they’ll have to print that you refused to comment.

The starting point of wisdom is this – if they call you, you’re already dead. You cannot talk them out of writing the story, any more than you can talk the police officer out of arresting you. Accept that, as a base line, you will get a bad story written about you, with the extra addendum that you refused to comment. In the distribution of things, this is a good outcome. Them distorting your words to have an even more incriminating quote is much worse.

But people love to tell their story. Give them a chance and a little prodding, and a lot of the time, they want to tell you everything. Dostoyevsky described this vividly in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has an overwhelming urge to confess to the murder he committed, and keeps engaging in self-sabotaging behavior that leads him into the hands of the police officer, Porfiry. For a long time, I viewed this as being about guilt, and thus it all seemed kind of implausible. Sometimes people really do feel guilty, and I have no idea what the guilt feels like from committing a senseless murder. But I suspect that cognitive dissonance tends to resolve the dilemma mostly the other way. I killed him, so he must have deserved it, because I’m fundamentally a good person. So why the urge to confess? Well, maybe Dostoyevsky was just wrong, and the description is implausible. But maybe people also have a general desire to tell their secrets, no matter what they are. To be understood, even if the ultimate consequence is disaster. Not all people, and not at all times. But this urge is there. And the police and journalists know it. Their job depends on them knowing it, and how to manipulate this instinct in you.

Like with the police, one central problem is that only the incriminating words get shown to the jury of readers. You come up with some very clever quips, and send them off. They just chop them to pick the worst bit.

“Sorry, I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Mr Smith, when reached for comment, accused the New York Times of being terrorists.

Now you sound both hysterical and evasive. You said almost nothing, and it was still worse than literally nothing.

But we still haven’t cracked the underlying mystery. Don’t you think Moldbug knows all this already? Of course he does.

I would wager the following, though I’ll never be able to test it. Suppose I could go back in time five years, and speak to an earlier version of Yarvin. “Curtis”, I’d ask. “In a few years time, a journalist will contact you with obviously absurd questions about whether you support slavery. Will you give them further potentially incriminating quotes, or will you sensibly choose to stay silent?”

I suspect that the earlier versions of both Yarvin and Fuentes would have been surprised at how things turned out. They would be surprised by their own future behavior.

In other words, I think to begin to understand the puzzle, we have to recognise that we’re likely dealing with some considerable time-inconsistency. To make matters worse, in the terminology of Matthew Rabin, people are unsophisticated about their biases – they are biased, but they don’t know they are biased. So they don’t even prepare properly.

To my mind, far and away the most useful all-purpose model of time-inconsistent behavior is the hot-cold empathy gap. George Loewenstein did a lot of great work on this. The Wikipedia summary is pretty good, but as always, you’re generally better off reading the original article, which is quite accessible to a general audience.

People generally have two types of states. “Hot” states are emotionally aroused states – sexual arousal, fear, jealousy, hunger, pain, whatever. “Cold” states are the general calm, background state – a regular Tuesday morning with not much going on.

The trivial insight is that people make quite different decisions in these two types of states. Everyone knows this. The bigger insight of Loewenstein’s is the empathy gap. People in each state are predictably bad at forecasting what decisions they themselves will make in the other state, and how they will feel about the matter then. On a Tuesday morning, a high school girl doesn’t think that when she’s drunk and horny on a Saturday night, she’ll have unprotected sex with Chad from the football team. And when she’s drunk and horny on a Saturday night, she can’t think about how disastrous this choice is going to seem next Tuesday morning. In every state, our future and past selves of the opposite state are like strangers to us, and strangers whose behavior we never seem to figure out. If we had, we might have taken additional precautions, like going on the pill or carrying condoms.

I’ve written about this several times before, if you’re curious.

So how does this fit in with journalists?

I am also quite sure that if you played back the language of police interviews and the language of journalists’ interviews with people they are antagonistic towards, they would sound quite similar. The Police officer is a representative of the state, with the implicit power and backing of the state to throw you in a cell. The journalist is a representative of the cathedral, with the implicit backing of the real power centers to render you socially shunned and unemployable.

In other words, the starting point of understanding is this.

Your forecast and planning must assume that when a journalist calls you to tell you they are writing a story about your crimethink, at that point you will be incredibly scared and panicking.

The press is no joke. If they want to destroy your life, they have many avenues to do it. And despite whatever braggadocio you may have now about the lamestream media, when they come calling, your monkey brain will understand immediately what’s at stake. For millions of years, social ostracism meant death, often immediately, but in any case not long afterwards if you’re a hairless ape trying to survive on your own in the wild.

So one must immediately assume, especially if you’re never had it happen to you before, that you will be under immense pressure and stress, and will likely make bad, panicked decisions at the time. Just like the person in the police station, you want nothing more than to get out of the situation, to be told that it’s all a misunderstanding and that they’re going to call off the story. You will be like a drowning man, clawing desperately at anything that might make this happen.

In other words, you have to assume that you don’t actually know how you’ll react if the New York Times comes calling. You think you do, but you don’t. Cold State Cameron is always sure that he’ll be cool and calm under pressure. Hot State Harry usually isn’t.

And when you understand this, you realize why smart people can get themselves badly led astray, because they’re preparing for the wrong set of failure modes. The more you’re sure you understand how the media works, the more likely you’re probably overestimating how calm and collected you’ll be in the heat of the moment.

It’s like the difference between learning Tae Kwon Do and getting in your first street fight. Same problem. Things will be unexpected. And no amount of training in the dojo will replicate the gut-level panic you feel, and how that will make all your old training disappear, unless you’ve drilled and drilled. And even then, it still may not work.

We can, however, train to revert to autopilot. But it has to be the right autopilot.

What’s a bad but plausible autopilot? “If a journalist calls me, I immediately hang up.”

This would be a good plan, if you implemented it. But here’s a test. When telemarketers call you, do you immediately hang up, or do you feel some social pressure to first say that you’re not interested, or listen to their spiel, or what not? If you do, imagine this cranked up to 11. Hanging up the phone is physically easy, but psychologically sometimes hard. It’s not as hard as staring someone eye to eye in silence for five minutes in a police room. But it’s not easy when you’re panicking. You’ll want to talk your way out.

So the autopilots we train for must be those that work on a psychological basis. And what is the single, cardinal rule we’re aiming for?

Get yourself out of the situation of communicating with the journalist while in a hot state panic as soon as possible, before you make any irreversibly bad choices.

Hanging up the phone immediately is hard. So what do you say instead?

“I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t answer any questions by phone. I’ll only communicate by email. My email address is blah. (Give them time to take it down). You can email me there, and if a response is warranted, I’ll send it to you. Goodbye.”

Repeat this sentence to yourself, right now, fifty times, word for word. You must know it by heart, the same way you’re only going to have any hope of throwing an effective punch in a fight if you’ve drilled it thousands of times.

You’ve already given them something. You acknowledge they exist, and now they have an email address for you (ideally, use a throwaway one, though it’s hard to have the presence of mind to remember this). This is not ideal, but that’s not the point. The point is to delay. It now takes them some time to type up their questions. More importantly, when you get them, you’ve got time to ponder the question for longer of exactly what you want to say. You can think about every single word choice, and whether that sentence is really a good idea. You’ve got time to calm down, at least a little. And most importantly, you’ve ended the conversation before you’ve said anything stupid. This is key, key, key. As part of this, you’ve ended the conversation without even a minor breach of social decorum! This sounds stupid, but it’s really important. Social decorum dictates behavior all the time, and so you must have your default response be psychologically easy.

The next step, after you hang up the phone (and again when you finally get their questions), is to phone somebody whose opinion you trust (ideally someone as close as possible to the cold state, well-informed version of you), and tell them what happened. You may be panicking, but the other person will be in a cold state. They will help calm you down, at least somewhat. A second opinion from a trusted cold state source is incredibly valuable. They’ll likely know what cold state you knows – the best response is usually to shut up.

Then the journalist emails you questions. What next?

The only response they should get is this:

“I wish to enter a binding legal contract with you, your editors and your publication. I will only answer your questions on the condition that you either print my answer in its entirety, or not at all.  If you and your editor agree to these terms, please both let me know.”

This may be surprising, but journalists will mostly stick to these agreements. This immediately disarms one of their most powerful weapons, namely cutting and pasting your quotes to make you look bad. Secondly, even if they don’t print your answer, this makes it much harder to say that you refused to comment. You did comment, they just refused to print it. Journalists can smear, and distort, and omit, and deceive by suggestion. But outright lies about bare facts (did he respond or not?) are more apt to get them in professional trouble, so are taken more seriously. 

And now, you can decide what, if any, very carefully worded and brief answer is appropriate. Run this by multiple people. If you have someone you trust a lot, but who doesn't share your political views, they are especially valuable to include. If the journalist says they have a 5pm deadline, say that won’t be enough time, but you should (not "will") be able to give them an answer by 5pm the next day.

The more you delay, the more you talk to other people, the more likely it is that you’ll make the right choice. The more you do anything on the spur of the moment, the more likely it is that it will be rash, foolish, and ill-advised, and you will spend years regretting it. If in doubt, try to condition your panic response to be silence and delay.

It’s not for nothing that the header image at Overcoming Bias is Ulysses tied to the mast, while his mariners have their ears stopped up. We don’t have anything quite that foolproof. But the principle is the same.

When the sirens seduce you with their song of promises that you can talk your way out of this, you must know that you’ll be enormously tempted, in ways you can’t fathom now.

And you must plan accordingly.