Understanding and Dealing With The Media: A Primer for Church Leaders

A Churchman’s Guide to the Press: Embargoes, Attribution, On the Record, and the Art of Not Getting Burned.

Ad Crucem News’s recent interactions with LCMS church leadership, both directly and indirectly, indicate that the Synod has a very limited understanding of journalism and journalists in an American context. It is surprising, since the Synod has been “Englishing” for over a century, and you would assume the basics of media handling and understanding America’s unique media space would be second nature by now, but that is simply not the case, and it may be due to persistent cultural tics that have survived the founding of the LCMS.

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The reporter is neither your enemy nor your friend. He is a person operating within a set of professional boundaries and conventions that were developed, refined, and occasionally abused throughout America’s modern life. Consequently, the churchman who treats a journalist as only one wing of a binary, as adversary or ally, will sooner or later find himself misquoted, misrepresented, or simply used in ways he did not intend and cannot retract. The governing principle of any engagement with the press is extremely simple and far more durable than assuming you must be either at war or buttering him up: the reporter is a professional with a job to do, and your job is to understand his job well enough to protect your own.

None of this requires paranoia, only common sense and competence. The church has real and worthwhile things to say and declare to a watching world, and the press, whatever its faults and biases, remains a legitimate mechanism by which those things reach audiences that congregational newsletters and denominational house organs will never reach. The question is not whether to engage but how to engage without surrendering control of the record, the narrative, or the institution’s integrity in the process. There will be bad press and good press, but there is no reason to fall into brooding vengefulness about how to deal with journalists or outlets you dislike because of unwanted coverage. For churchmen, the Christian overlay should come first.

Set out below is a working guide, built around the conventions of professional journalism, for church officers, pastors, elders, communications directors, and any institutional representative who may find themselves dealing with a reporter’s call or exposé.

1. Foundational Distinctions: Four Attribution Statuses

The single most important thing a churchman can understand about press engagement is that there are at least four distinct attribution statuses in professional journalism, and that they are not interchangeable, not always agreed upon in advance, and not always honored with equal fidelity by every reporter. You must know them and establish which one applies before you say anything of consequence.

Journalists are on duty all the time, and people say a great many revealing things without thinking about who is in the audience. The most important factor in determining whether a journalist can be trusted is the building of a genuine relationship, because a single phone call can deliver impressive returns, and that relationship will govern when you need to request confidentiality, provide information or background, or simply have a normal conversation. My friends and professional associates know that our conversations do not end up in stories without their permission.

On the Record

On the record means that everything you say may be quoted directly and attributed to you by name and title, and this status is the default condition of any conversation with a journalist. If you call a reporter back, respond to an email, or speak to someone who identifies himself as a member of the press at a public event, you are, absent any prior agreement to the contrary, on the record. The words you use, the phrasing you choose, the qualifications you offer or neglect to offer: all of it may appear in print with your name attached. None of this is a trap laid for the unwary; it is simply how journalism works, and the churchman who does not know it has already lost the first point of the engagement.

Operational Rule: Before you say anything substantive to a reporter, confirm whether you are on the record. If you have not had that conversation, assume that you are.

On Background

On background, sometimes called “not for attribution,” means that the information you provide may be used and reported, but not attributed to you by name. The reporter may characterize the source as “a denominational official,” “a senior pastor familiar with the matter,” or “a church spokesman speaking on condition of anonymity,” so that the information enters the story without an identity attached.

Unidentified sources are always less desirable, but sometimes the status is necessary to protect witnesses or to allow a story to reach maturity. It is a useful status for providing context that helps a reporter understand a complex institutional situation without placing you or your organization in a posture of formal institutional comment on a matter that has not yet been adjudicated internally. However, it does carry genuine risk: the characterization of the anonymous source is controlled by the reporter, not by you, and “a church official” covers considerable ground. Moreover, if you are the only person in a position to know what you are telling the reporter, the anonymity is probably thinner than it seems.

Deep Background

Deep background is the most restricted form of sourcing. Information provided on deep background may inform the reporter’s understanding and shape his inquiry, but it will not be attributed to any source at all, named or characterized, so that it enters the story, if it enters at all, as context the reporter simply appears to know. This status is appropriate for genuinely sensitive institutional matters where even a vague attribution could harm a person or an institution, but it requires the highest degree of trust in the specific reporter’s professionalism, because there is no mechanism for enforcement other than the reporter’s word.

Off the Record

Off the record is the most commonly misunderstood term in the vocabulary of press engagement, because it carries neither the meaning that the conversation is not happening nor the meaning that nothing said can be used. In its strictest professional interpretation, it means that the specific information conveyed may not be published in any form and may not be used to pursue the story through other channels. Ad Crucem News honors this interpretation rigorously, while some journalists treat off-the-record as a loose license to seek the same information elsewhere and publish it when they independently find it. You should never assume that “off the record” creates an impenetrable seal, because it creates an ethical obligation for a reporter of good faith and nothing more.

A critical point that many sources fail to grasp is that attribution status must be established before the information is conveyed, not after. A reporter who has already heard something newsworthy is under no professional obligation to honor a retroactive request to go off the record, which means that the words “can we go off the record for a moment?” must precede the information they are meant to protect.

If you are in the presence of any journalist, a category that now includes anyone with a social media account and an audience, and you are relaying potentially sensitive information, declare the information off the record before you convey it. In settings such as board meetings, there are pre-existing disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules governing information sharing, so that you will never read even a hint in Ad Crucem News of what has happened at a Concordia Seminary, St. Louis Board of Regents meeting, because I am governed by written and unwritten rules of confidentiality and mutual respect.

2. Designed Leaks and Burning Relationships

The churchman must understand how leaks function, not because he will be running them, but because he must take care never to become a distrusted source even inadvertently. A reporter is always reading approaches against the memory of every source who has tried to play him. In the course of any journalist’s career, he will encounter sources who deliberately leak sensitive information to discredit him or entrap him, as in the sharing of grand jury testimony, and he will encounter sources who aggressively mislead, misdirect, and spin a story to suit their agenda.

An experienced journalist will pick up on a false flag quickly and easily, and he will never forget it, because lying to a journalist ends a relationship, creates a permanently adversarial posture, and voids any confidentiality arrangement that preceded it. The obligation runs in both directions, so that when a journalist breaks confidence or prints information he knows to be false, he permanently forfeits trust.

3. The Embargo: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and When the Church Should Use It

An embargo is an agreement between a source and a reporter, or between an institution and a press organization, to the effect that information provided in advance will not be published until a specified date and time. It functions as a tool of information management rather than information suppression, and it is used routinely by government agencies, corporations, academic journals, and, occasionally, ecclesiastical bodies that have learned to manage press relations with something approaching professionalism.

The church has legitimate reasons to use embargoes, and it would benefit from doing so more systematically. Providing information to the press in advance, under embargo, allows reporters to do preparatory work, contact secondary sources, and produce coverage that is accurate and contextually informed rather than rushed and reactive.

The Mechanics of an Embargo

An embargo is a voluntary agreement, and reporters are not legally bound by it, so no institutional representative should proceed on the assumption that a breached embargo carries legal consequences, because in most circumstances it does not. The enforcement mechanism is reputational rather than legal: a reporter who breaks an embargo will find himself excluded from future embargo arrangements, and in a specialized beat like religion journalism, where the same reporters cover the same institutions over many years, that is a meaningful sanction. The sanction nonetheless requires that the institution actually enforce it by following through on the exclusion, and many church bodies have neither the discipline nor the institutional memory to do so, with the result that their embargoes carry no deterrent weight even against reporters who would otherwise respect them.

Operational Rule: When providing information under embargo, state the embargo terms explicitly and in writing: “This information is provided under embargo until [date and time, including timezone]. Please confirm your agreement before reading further.” Do not assume a verbal agreement is sufficient.

The date and time of the embargo lift should be chosen with attention to news cycles. A denomination that lifts an embargo at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon has effectively chosen not to be covered, because Friday evening is when news is buried. If the institution wants coverage, the embargo lift should be timed to give reporters maximum opportunity to file before their deadlines, which means that morning embargoes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays represent the working standard for most beat reporters. The nature of the Internet, however, means that media cycles have largely collapsed, and stories can and do break at any time on any day.

The Limits of an Embargo

An embargo cannot prevent a reporter from pursuing independently acquired information. If a reporter already knows something, or can find it through other sources, the embargo on your version of the story does not restrain him. An embargo also cannot control the story’s frame, the selection of secondary sources the reporter contacts while preparing his piece, or the headline an editor places above the copy, because these are editorial decisions that remain entirely outside the institution’s control, and the churchman who believes that providing information under embargo has purchased him favorable treatment is conflating the embargo’s function with something it was never designed for.

4. Confidentiality Agreements and Non-Disclosure

The church occupies the position between a rock and a hard place in the landscape of institutional press relations, because it routinely handles matters of discipline, personnel decisions, counseling relationships, allegations of misconduct, and doctrinal adjudications that carry both legal confidentiality considerations and pastoral confidentiality traditions that do not always align with one another, and neither of which the reporter covering the story is obligated to respect.

Non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, are used by some church bodies in the context of personnel separations and dispute settlements. The legal enforceability of these agreements varies by jurisdiction and by the specific terms of the document, and a church body that relies on an NDA to prevent a former employee from speaking to the press should understand that NDAs routinely exclude truthful statements made to law enforcement and governmental bodies, that some states have enacted specific limitations on their use in the context of sexual misconduct allegations, and that a reporter who has obtained information through legal means from someone subject to an NDA has no personal legal exposure for publishing it. The NDA constrains the signer, not the press.

Pastoral confidentiality is a distinct category entirely. In most American jurisdictions privilege belongs to the penitent, not the pastor, meaning that the pastor cannot waive it unilaterally. However, not every conversation a pastor has with a congregant constitutes a privileged communication under the law, and the question of where the line falls is one for competent legal counsel in the relevant jurisdiction rather than a church body to resolve by institutional assertion. A denomination that publicly declares that all pastoral communications to be confidential without legal review of what that claim actually covers is probably creating a liability rather than a protection.

The press is bound by its own professional ethics and by the law, but not by your confidentiality framework, and the church that confuses its internal standards with external constraints will eventually be surprised for the worse.

5. Designated Spokesmen and the Chain of Authority

One of the most consistent failures of institutional church press relations is the absence of a clear, enforced, and widely understood protocol for who speaks to the press and on what subjects. In the absence of such a protocol, reporters will talk to whoever will talk to them, which in a church context frequently means a disgruntled bishop, a recently dismissed staff member, a congregant with a grievance and a good memory, and the pastor who believes that a friendly off-the-cuff conversation with a reporter is an opportunity to set the record straight without recognizing that he is, in fact, not merely on the record, but the record.

The institution that manages press relations competently designates a spokesman. The spokesman is not necessarily the senior pastor or the denominational president, though either may serve in that role. The spokesman is the person who has been briefed on what can be said, what cannot be said, what is pending legal review, and what represents the institution’s current official position on the matter at issue. Everyone else in the institution, from the senior pastor down to the building superintendent, should be trained to respond to press inquiries with a single sentence: “I’m not the right person to speak to that, but I can refer you to our communications director.” That’s not a stonewalling tactic but a professional competence. It is also courteous to the reporter, who does not want the janitor's views any more than the janitor wants to be quoted on matters above his authority.

What the Spokesman Must Know Before He Speaks

The spokesman must know, before taking any call from the press, whether the matter under inquiry is the subject of pending litigation or legal review. If it is, he must consult with legal counsel before making any statement, because statements made by institutional spokesmen can be used as evidentiary admissions in legal proceedings, and the line between providing helpful context to a reporter and inadvertently damaging the institution’s legal position is narrower than it appears. In such a situation, the institution’s communications instincts must not be permitted to override its legal judgment, which means that legal counsel must be in the loop, and that in the absence of legal clearance, “We cannot comment on matters that are the subject of ongoing proceedings” is both sufficient and accurate.

Operational Rule: Establish the spokesman protocol before a crisis, not during it. The institution that identifies its spokesman only when a reporter calls has already lost at least one news cycle to disorganization and potential misrepresentation.

Communication Security

Document security is the discipline the church most consistently neglects until a reporter quotes official correspondence meant to remain unseen. The Synod, for example, was very upset that Ad Crucem News linked to and quoted the press release about the arrest of former District President Michael Mohr before it was officially released, but the document had been posted to a publicly reachable server, was retrievable by direct URL without any authentication, carried no password or credential control, bore no confidentiality or distribution notice, and was under no embargo. That is not the fault of one press officer, but of everyone in the chain, because it was incredibly lax protocol management for such a major scandal and sensitive press release. Journalists are not responsible for fixing communication security incompetence.

The governing assumption must be that any written communication may eventually be read by someone it was never intended for, whether through forwarding, screenshotting, litigation discovery, a misdirected reply-all, or the simple fact that a printed agenda left on a chair after a meeting is a document available to the whole world. Sensitive communications should never be committed to a medium or left in a location where their security depends on nothing more than the discretion of everyone who might handle the information. Privileged legal communications in particular should be segregated, marked, and circulated only to those whose participation is necessary, because the inadvertent inclusion of a non-essential recipient can waive the very privilege the communication was meant to preserve, and a church body that treats its attorney’s counsel as ordinary email traffic has converted a protection into an exhibit.

Sensitive communications should be managed exclusively through a permissions-managed interface with detailed logging, including session-replay tools that record all interactions down to screenshots. Document versions should be strictly controlled, and revisions or comments should be possible only within the secure interface, never through a downloaded PDF or Word document that can travel beyond the institution’s sight.

A confidentiality notice is a modest but worthwhile means by which a written communication announces the terms on which it may be handled. While a footer stating that a message is confidential, intended solely for the named recipient, and not to be forwarded or reproduced without authorization does not bind a third party the way a contract would, it serves the same function as a publicly stated ground rule. It establishes a record that the sender designated the material as confidential and raises the reputational and, in some contexts, legal costs of distributing it against the sender's wishes.

A confidentiality notice will not stop a determined bad actor, just as a publicly announced ground rule will not stop a blogger or anonymous account acting in bad faith, but it removes the defense of innocent misunderstanding, converts any unauthorized distribution into a conspicuous breach of stated terms, and signals to the courts, should the matter ever reach them, that the institution treated the communication as confidential rather than casual. The churchman should therefore mark sensitive documents as confidential by default, keep privileged material under the narrowest necessary circulation, and proceed at all times on the working assumption that the most damaging place a sensitive communication can end up is precisely the place where carelessness, rather than malice, will eventually land it.

6. Written Statements: When to Provide Them and How to Draft Them

A written statement is the instrument of institutional communication that the church most consistently underuses, drafts poorly when it does use it, and then fails to distribute effectively. A written statement provided to a reporter in response to an inquiry serves several functions simultaneously. It creates a record of exactly what the institution said, in the precise language the institution chose, without the risk of paraphrase or misquotation. It forces the institution’s leadership to agree internally on what position they are taking before communicating it externally, and it gives the reporter a quotable formulation that can be used directly, which means the story will include your words rather than a paraphrase of a phone conversation you may later dispute.

Written statements should be concise and must prioritize clarity above all else, which is not something the LCMS does well, because churchmen are accustomed to being praised for quantity to the point of garrulousness. A reporter does not need four paragraphs; he needs one or two sentences he can quote and a few sentences of context. The statement should be specific enough to address the matter at issue and general enough to avoid creating new angles or raising new questions that the reporter had not yet considered. It should be reviewed by legal counsel if the matter carries any legal risk, and it should be signed or issued under the name of the designated spokesman rather than attributed to a generic institutional voice, because “a church spokesman” creates the impression of institutional evasion even when the content of the statement is entirely straightforward.

A written statement should never be a paternalistic exercise in theological catechesis. The reporter who has asked about the circumstances surrounding a pastor’s scandal does not need three paragraphs on Lutheran ecclesiology before the institution gets to the point. The theology can inform the institutional action; it need not preface that action in communications with the secular or even the niche religious press, where it will either be cut by an editor or misrepresented by a reporter who does not know Walther from Wesley.

7. The Social Media Dimension: What Is Always On the Record

Every public post on every platform is on the record, permanently, and available without any request to the institution, so that the pastor who posts a statement on his congregation’s Facebook page in the heat of a controversy has issued a press release, the elder who fires off a comment-thread response at 11:30 p.m. has given a statement, and the church staff member who live-tweets the congregational meeting has created a contemporaneous record that is indistinguishable, for journalistic purposes, from a document obtained through formal request. None of this is a new problem, though it is one that church leadership has been slow to integrate into its institutional press protocols, and the consequences of that slowness appear in print with regularity.

The institution that has a written statement policy, a designated spokesman protocol, and a clear embargo and attribution framework must explicitly extend that framework to social media. Staff members and officers should be informed in writing that institutional matters under press inquiry are not appropriate subjects for personal social media commentary until the institution has issued its formal statement. This constitutes not censorship, but the same discipline that any competent organization applies to its communications, and the church has no principled reason to exempt itself from it.

8. After the Story Runs: Corrections, Responses, and the Long Memory of the Record

When a story runs, and it contains errors, the institution must pursue a correction through the outlet’s formal correction process. This seems obvious, but a surprising number of church bodies respond to inaccurate coverage by issuing their own counter-statement in their own publications rather than demanding a correction from the outlet that ran the error, with the result that the erroneous version of events persists in the outlet’s archive and in any subsequent coverage that pulls from it, while the correction circulates only among people who were already reading the institution’s own materials. A correction issued by the outlet reaches the outlet’s audience, whereas a counter-statement issued by the church reaches only the church’s audience, and these two audiences intersect without being the same, so that in a media environment where a search engine is the primary method by which reporters research background, the distinction is critical.

The correction request should be made in writing, identifying the specific factual error with specificity and providing the accurate information with documentary support where possible. If an outlet declines to run a correction, that refusal should be documented, because it may be relevant in subsequent engagement with the same outlet or in any legal proceedings. The documentation of a declined correction request is itself evidentiary, in that it establishes that the institution identified the error, communicated it to the responsible parties, and was ignored or refused, which is a different record than silence.

9. What the Church Actually Owes the Press, and What It Does Not

The church owes the press accurate information, provided through appropriate channels, on matters that are properly the subject of public interest. It does not owe the press access to its internal deliberations, its privileged communications, its personnel files, its legal strategy, its disciplinary hearings, or the manner in which its theological questions are ruminated upon and resolved. The distinction between these categories is not always self-evident in the moment of a reporter’s inquiry, which is precisely why the protocols described above must be established in advance rather than improvised under deadline pressure.

There is a strain of thinking in some church circles, informed by an earnest but undisciplined commitment to transparency, to the effect that the church should have nothing to hide and therefore should accommodate all press inquiries as fully and as openly as possible. This is a misunderstanding of what institutional transparency actually requires, because transparency means that the institution is accountable for its decisions and that its processes are subject to review, and it does not mean that the institution has surrendered its right to manage how, when, and in what form information enters the public record. Every institution with any competence manages this, including those with exemplary transparency records, because record management is not about falsification or suppression of records.

The press, including the most niche outlets, consists of individuals and institutions with their own interests, their own incentives, and their own blind spots, and understanding and knowing those things does not make you a cynic, but a competent professional who is prepared to engage the press with Christian witness and truth as his motivation.

Words spoken or written to a reporter cannot be recalled. The churchman who grasps that before contact is in a far better position than the one who learns it the hard way from a published story.

Cover Photo by Quilia on Unsplash