Lessons I Learned — and You Can, Too — From My ‘Today’ Show Appearance

NBC’s Today show was criticized this week for a segment on how white nationalists are trying to infiltrate college campuses. Scholars and journalists scathingly critiqued it as a “white-supremacist infomercial” and “swastikas in gift wrap” that helped to sanitize racism. Two people were interviewed in the five-minute segment. One was Patrick Casey, the leader of the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. The other was me.

In the 24 hours after the show aired, on Wednesday, I received more than two dozen messages from colleagues, friends, and strangers who had seen it. Most expressed horror about the group itself. Some echoed concerns about media responsibility and whether the segment would help white nationalists recruit new members.

I worried about this myself, especially because my sound bite featured me calling a white-nationalist group “smart” and “savvy” without the context of my larger points about why the mainstreaming of extremism in the United States is so dangerous.

But others wrote to me to question whether scholars should engage with the media at all. Television journalists, one colleague wrote to me on Twitter, will “eat up massive amounts of your time for a 30-second to one-minute sound bite, which rarely truly reflects your point.”

Is he right?

I’d been a professor for 15 years before my previously niche subcultural research on far-right youth overseas suddenly became much more mainstream at home. After the American presidential election of 2016 and the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, I started to field regular media inquiries for the first time. Since then, I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to public engagement, speaking with dozens of journalists across the world, by phone, by Skype, and on camera.

Some colleagues would say this is a waste of my time. They would be wrong.

One reason to engage the media is personal and strategic. Media interviews and op-eds are opportunities to promote new books and publications. It’s also clear that public engagement can enhance scholars’ broader reputations and academic careers. I saw a significant uptick in invitations for talks, seats on advisory boards, consultancies, and more as I began engaging with the media.

But for scholars working on issues key to the public interest, engaging the media is more than utilitarian. It’s also a chance to shape public discourse on issues about which academics care deeply. I came to see public engagement as a sort of ethical and moral obligation — sharing what I had learned about youth radicalization with policy makers and the public in ways that I hope will make a difference.

Such engagement will always carry risks. It’s hard to know which sound bite from an interview will be used. It’s harder still to know what the overall framing of a segment will be, who else is being interviewed, and how much time they will get. Media engagement can also be very time consuming. Before major interviews, I prepare talking points that help summarize the most important takeaways from my research.

The NBC News journalist probably selected that sound bite because it was the most natural and unscripted thing I said during the on-camera interview — it was not one of my prepped points. It’s a lesson for me on what can happen when academics veer off message even a little bit. That’s because, in the end, journalists will choose the points they prefer to use.

Media outlets can help the situation by providing more time for expert voices in segments like this one. Television moves fast, of course, and editorial calls often have to be made on the fly. But in this case, and with this topic, it’s crucial that context and expert voices be considered carefully.

Colleges can help faculty members by offering specific, skills-based media training on how to make scholarly work more digestible. Academics are not always natural communicators in on-camera settings, and scholarly expertise can come across as dry or overly technical.

Such training — and tried and true practice — can also help academics learn to avoid classic pitfalls, like saying something on the record that they didn’t mean to say. As I’ve come to learn, I don’t have to give everything I’m asked for in an interview. Instead, I try to pivot to prepared responses when questions come up that I’m not ready to answer.

“Well,” I might say in response to a question aimed at soliciting a controversial sound bite, “I’m not really an expert on political parties, but what I do know is …" Instead of taking the bait, I return again and again to my prepped points, trying to control the message I am sending.

When an interview goes well, it feels like a careful but pleasant conversation from which both parties get something they want: A journalist gains key insights or quotes to help ground a story, and I get the chance to shape public discourse on issues I care about.

Academics can also do more to engage journalists in advance with questions about the overall framing of their work. The Today show segment may well have helped a fringe extremist group recruit new members, and in retrospect perhaps I could have done more to push the journalist in order to better understand how the overall story would be framed.

With so many pressing issues on the nation’s agenda, it is vital that academic expertise plays a role in helping journalists report their stories, and I plan to continue to engage with them and the public. Academic experts will never have control over the final product, but if I decline interviews, I know that someone else down the line will do it instead.

Saying yes means I get the chance to influence stories and shape public narratives about critically important issues. But in so doing, academics still need to push as strongly as possible to make sure the media understand what harm can be done and where the fine line is drawn between exposing and glorifying dangerous groups.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor of education and sociology at American University. Her most recent book is The Extreme Gone Mainstream (Princeton University Press, 2017).