What If The Media Misrepresents Me?

If the media misrepresents you, you usually have a few avenues of recourse.

If the Press is going to print a Reader’s Letter about you, they will often send it to you first, and invite you to submit a reply, which they’ll print alongside the letter. You don’t need to use this, but if you think it would be a helpful way of balancing out what the letter writer says, it is worth doing so.

If an article misrepresents you, or an interview is cropped in such a way that your position is taken out of context, you should ask for a correction. If you are feeling bold, you can go further, and ask for a column or an interview in which you can put your side of the argument across properly, though the media aren’t obliged to agree to that.

I’d approach this area with a bit of caution – we’re all human, and the interviewer who has just been told that they misrepresented your viewpoint is likely to be a bit grumpy when they interview you again, so you might want to be confident that the harm done by the original misrepresentation is serious enough to be worth the headache of getting it corrected. The media will be reporting on you throughout your time in the States, and will often be the only bridge between you and the public, so it is worth assuming good intentions in the first instance, and maintaining a mutually respectful working relationship as far as you can manage.