Why you should never ask a journalist for a retraction
Seeking a correction about wrong or garbled information is perfectly fine. How you go about it, though, makes all the difference in the ongoing relationship with your media contact.
Yet, when you see the story—the story you worked so hard to facilitate for your client or company—you see a mistake. So, what do you do now?
It’s a problem explored recently by Shelley Pringle on her Polaris blog in a post titled, “When to ask for a media retraction.”
If you really want the answer, it’s quite simple: You never ask for a retraction.
However, you can ask for a correction.
What’s the difference? Isn’t it just semantics? Not to the journalist you’re going to be calling.
A common mistake that PR pros and many others make is not understanding that a retraction and a correction are different.
A retraction is an admission that a media outlet got a story completely wrong. With extremely rare exceptions—and those happen only under the most egregious circumstances—media outlets do not issue retractions. Don’t ask for them.
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