Talking to the Press Considered Harmful

[Doobee R. Tzeck]

Tim May <tcmay at got.net> writes:
> On Tuesday, October 9, 2001, at 09:12 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> > A large portion was B-roll of me typing dummy entries into
> > Microsoft Passport, [...]  They used about 7 seconds of what
> > I said.
> 
> About right. Four hours of your time for 7 seconds of commentary.
> 
> No wonder the networks are gradually going broke.
> 
> "Typing dummy entries." Typical. Faking the news.
> 
> (I had a sort of similar experience in '95 when the BBC wanted
> to interview me. [...])

I share Tims experience regarding the impact of interviews. I was
doing some presswork for the chaos computer club -
http://www.ccc.de/ and found out that especially TV costs you a
hell of time and often thorow away everything substantial or even
the whole interview at all. TV wants to "visualize", but crypto
or hacking can't be visualized in a TV compatible way.

While TV is worest the same is true for 98% of the journalists I
have met: They don't try to understand the komplex things you are
talking about and if they finnally might understand you they
still misquote you. This shouldn't supprise you. This shouldn't
supprise me because journalists are information dealers trying to
get maximum value from minimum effort. Since "trouth" doesn't
really attribute to value of an information they sell, why should
they care about?

The problem is that they are used to people beeing proud to be
interviewed. If you consider an interview as buiseness they are
totally set up. "Sure I can explain tis DDOS thing to you, my
consulting fee is 1000E per day" makes them really angry.

On the other hand talking to journalists may help sometimes to
influence actions of the goverment. E.g. the Chaos Computer Club
got a lot of press coverage in the 80s which lead to involvment
of the hacker community in the law-making process for cybercrime
and to an 'hacking is not a crime per se' legistation which i
consider a good thing.

So between writing code and talking to journalists, what are the
other choices?

drt