Talking to journalists

A common view around me seems to be that journalists are frequently dishonorable and dangerous, and talking to them is a risk to be avoided unless you have a very specific piece of information that you seek to publicize. Then you should carefully ensure that you are as off the record as practical, and prepare to aggressively pivot the topic back to your agenda.

My own attitude is different: journalists are to be talked to as much as possible, and ideally in a relaxed fashion. If a journalist wants to observe you in some unusual circumstance, say yes. Don’t have an agenda much more than in the rest of life; basically listen to their questions and say what you think. (Note: I don’t have strong reason to believe this is safe for others or even for me.)

As evidence of the commitment with which I act in this way, this New Yorker piece describes me as ‘an oversharer’, before detailing some of my incompetent and substance-involving preparations for a dinner party at my house. (To be clear, I consider that accurate and agreeable coverage.)

I’ve talked to a lot of journalists, so how do I survive such recklessness? Well, in my experience, journalists are usually delightful: smart, sincere people trying hard to understand important topics and convey them to the public. And I’m impressed by how well they do. When I meet them, they are usually spending a tiny number of days diving into a complicated and wild situation, and while their summary isn’t perfect, I think it’s pretty good!

And what they write about me rarely feels adversarial. I can think of maybe two cases where it felt unfair or unfriendly, though there might be more I’m forgetting. And meanwhile there’s also the upside chance of them writing whole articles explaining your ideas to a large audience.

How is it that I and other people can have such divergent views here? Policies for interacting with journalists are hardly abstract philosophy—the people with the other views presumably also get to repeatedly experience talking with journalists.

One theory is that we have different expectations. What seems to me like imperfect summarization maybe seems to others like lies. What seems to me like accurate summarization maybe seems to others like ‘making me look weird’. I’ve noticed some weird-to-me expectations about the nature and constraints of journalism—like, thinking it would be better if a New Yorker article was about a technical paper and didn’t contain personal anecdotes. These expectations seems wrong about where the value of such an article comes from.

Another possibility is that we have different risk tolerances. The same low (but real) risk of a journalist writing a hit piece or randomly otherwise misusing their powers might be a deal-breaker for someone else, while I’m not very emotionally troubled by it. (My feelings: “You’re saying they could lie about me? That seems like a them problem? Can’t they lie about me anyway? Is my input that helpful? I’ll just say they lied about me, and we can have a public disagreement about it, and then maybe other journalists will come to talk to me.”) If I had more information I really needed to hide, this might be different.

Another class of theories is that we are different people, and either journalists treat us differently, or we come in contact with different journalists.

For instance, maybe people trying to learn about expert surveys of AI researchers tend to be in a cooperative mindset. But I’ve talked to journalists about my dating life, AI destroying the world, and all manner of other AI-related questions (as well as about accidentally getting into a physical altercation with nationalistically enthusiastic protesters, and probably oleander trees, and I bet some other stuff, but it’s less clear I would remember if I didn’t like the coverage in those cases.)

Someone suggested the other day that maybe I’m just a likable person, or likable to journalists. Similarly, my demeanor might just discourage being an asshole to me somehow—perhaps I seem unusually cooperative or too naive to be taken advantage of without feeling bad.

Perhaps journalists are responding to these different attitudes themselves. Probably journalists are like everyone else: they can somewhat tell if you are on their side or seeing them as an enemy to be thwarted and steered and then escaped from unscathed. And perhaps seeing the latter causes them to suspect you and find it more likely that you are weird and troubling, and shouldn’t have your words quoted without qualification or your behavior described uncritically.

If I recall, I have basically always had the attitude I have here, and it has only been strengthened by my experience talking to maybe hundreds of journalists. I think I’m also attracted to this attitude beyond pragmatism. So if journalists were responding to the attitudes, I would have had a different experience from the start.

I don’t really know what to make of this. I feel reasonably good about my policies for myself, but I don’t know if I can recommend them, because I don’t understand why they go fine for me. I can still record what I’ve experienced here, and send it out for other people to see. Which is maybe what talking to journalists is all about.