Clay Travis learns why you don’t talk to the media, even if you own a media company yourself:
It’s important to note what is going on here.
1. The Washington Post published a dishonest and factually incorrect article about me.
2. When I published the actual transcript of their questions and my responses to those questions the paper changed an inaccurate quote and made a notation at the bottom of an online article that almost no one would see.
3. No one at the paper reached out to acknowledge they’d misquoted me or to apologize for their error.
4. These mistakes were made even though I told the paper I was recording our interview and would publish the transcript if their article took my quotes out of context or incorrectly quoted me.
5. The only reason any of you even know this error occurred — or about how dishonest and untrue the piece they wrote was — is because I own my own media company and can demonstrate all the dishonesty in their work by publishing a transcript and response on this site.
Put simply, the paper, which allegedly prides itself on journalistic accuracy, mischaracterized and misconstrued everything I said to them and even though they only used 94 words from me, they couldn’t even correctly quote what I said and publish it in their article.
What’s more, when they were caught publishing factually incorrect information, they made a quiet alteration and refused to even notify the person they wrote about, me, that they’d corrected the error.
If this happened in a relatively inconsequential article about me, how often does it happen in more consequential articles about people much more significant than me?
Well, I am appalled. I am aghast. Who would ever have anticipated that the media would utilize an interview for a hit piece? Notice that the reporter interviewed him for more than an hour. At 28 single-space pages, the transcript probably amounted to over 7,500 words, most of which would have been his. And from all that, they used 94 of his own words in the subsequent hit piece that proved to be factually inaccurate.
Smart Boys, please notice that Travis followed your very clever advice to tell the reporter that he was recording the interview, as well as the fact that doing so made absolutely no difference at all even though his microphone at Outkick is a lot closer to the size of the Washington Post’s than yours or mine.
Don’t. Talk. To. The. Media.
But if you want to show everyone how very important you are, just tell the reporter to feel free to email you the questions, then post them on your site, unanswered or not as you prefer, without emailing them back. They will quickly learn to stop contacting you.