Juliet, aviate...
Go right ahead, dudes. If and when you reach senior rank and stonewall every question because you dislike journalists as a group, don't be surprised when out-of-context, misleading stories emerge with, somewhere buried in them, the statement "the RAF had not responded to repeated enquiries".
You live in a nation where the government (to which you report) theoretically does what the people decide to do. If you want an informed decision to be made about what you do, you have to inform them. Since you can't send MoD press releases to 60 million people, that's where the media comes in (and indeed that what medium means in that context).
Disengage from the media and you disengage from the people and accept the consequences.
Now, on the other hand, if you're just having a little whine and trying to yank the chains of the journos on this forum, you're being immature and petty, and wasting our time, but on the other hand there is hope. Because if what you really mean is that you don't like some stories, and some journos, that's quite natural (see my post above).
The secret to media relations (from the institutional viewpoint) is to reward and reinforce good journalism (by answering questions promptly and responsively) and to defend against the bad.
You do the latter by addressing bad data - that is, if the journalist has been fed a line by someone else grinding their own axe - quickly, clearly and professionally, and setting clear rules for access. For instance, if a 60 Minutes or Panorama shows up and wants an interview, you insist on pre-written questions and brief the hell out of the interviewee.
Access rules also include all the variations of "off the record" that my learned colleague JN talked about. And we all know that we will never get access again if we break those rules, which leads to another principle of media relations: if the journo has a professional interest in not having that happen, you can trust them more.
Last edited by LowObservable; 24th Nov 2008 at 16:08.