When a reporter asks something outside your lane, do not deflect by org chart. To the public, the organization is the organization, so that is another agency reads as evasion. Say instead: I am not the person who was put out to speak on that, and here is what I can tell you.
In a two-day session with a federal agency in Washington DC this month, the sharpest line of the two days did not come from me. It came from a scientist sitting near the back, who had been quiet most of the morning.
We were working through questions that land on the wrong person, and someone offered the standard answer. "That is another agency." That is handled by a different part of the organization. The scientist shook his head and said, roughly, that it is too much in the weeds. To the public, the organization is the organization.
He was right, and it is the kind of correction that only comes from someone who has actually stood in front of a camera rather than someone who has drawn the reporting lines.
Why does that is another agency backfire?
Because the audience does not carry your org chart around with them.
You know that the question belongs to a different office with a different budget, a different mandate and a different set of scientists. The person watching knows none of that, and has no reason to. They see a serious person, in a serious setting, representing a serious institution, and that person has just said the thing they asked about is somebody else's problem.
Three interpretations are available to them, and all three are bad for you.
- You are avoiding it. The most common read, and the most damaging. A structural answer to a substantive question always looks like a shield.
- You do not know. Which undercuts you on the things you do know, including the ones you came to say.
- Nobody is responsible. The worst of the three. If your answer points at a body that is not in the room, the audience concludes there is no accountable adult anywhere.
There is a fourth cost that shows up later. You have transferred your credibility to an entity that cannot use it. The other office is not going to appear and confirm your answer. You gave away authority and got nothing back.
What is wrong with I cannot really talk about that?
It is the same failure wearing different clothes, and it has an extra problem: it is usually not true.
When people say I cannot really talk about that, they almost never mean there is a legal bar. They mean one of these things, all of which are smaller and all of which are sayable:
- I am not the designated speaker on that subject.
- I do not have the number yet.
- It is still under review and anything I say today could be wrong next week.
- I know the answer but I am not confident enough to say it on camera.
Each of those is a real reason. Each one, spoken plainly, is more credible than the vague version. And the vague version leaves the audience to choose between two readings, ignorance or stonewalling, when the truth was neither.
I spent thirteen years producing at ABC, NBC and Fox, and I can tell you what happens to I cannot really talk about that in an edit bay. It survives. It is short, it is clean, and it needs no context. That is exactly what makes it dangerous.
What should you say instead?
Here is the construction that came out of the room, and it has held up every time I have used it since.
I am not the person who was put out to speak on that. What I can tell you is...
Take it apart and you can see why it works where the org-chart answer fails.
It is true. Somebody decided who would speak today, and it was not you on that subject. You are describing a fact about an assignment rather than erecting a wall.
It is human, not structural. It refers to a person, which is you, and a decision, which somebody made. It does not require the audience to understand an institution.
It blames nobody. No division is thrown under the bus, no colleague is implied to be hiding.
It ends pointing at content. The sentence is built to run into something useful. That is the part most spokespeople drop, and dropping it converts the whole thing back into a dodge. The move after the full stop is not optional. This is the same hinge I write about in short answer, long answer.
Two variants worth having in your pocket:
- I am not the one who does that work, so I would be guessing. What I do know is...
- Someone else is handling that side of it and will have better detail. The part I can be useful on is...
What if you genuinely do not know?
Say so. I do not know is a perfectly respectable answer and audiences forgive it easily. It has exactly one rule attached.
Never let I do not know be the last thing in the sentence. Follow it immediately with something you do know. An unfinished I do not know is a complete, usable clip on its own. Add the follow-through and it stops working in isolation.
So: I do not have that figure in front of me. What I can tell you is that we publish it monthly and the last one is on the site today.
Then do the other half. If you promise to get the number, get the number, and get it that day. Reporters keep score, quietly and for years, and being the person who calls back is worth more to your organization than any single good answer. The wider set of these habits is in how to answer tough media interview questions.
Does this only apply to government?
Not remotely. The org-chart deflection is one of the most common answers I hear in corporate rooms, and the mechanics are identical because the audience problem is identical.
A divisional president gets asked about a recall in a different business unit and says that sits with another division. A hospital system spokesperson gets asked about an incident at a different campus. A finance chief gets asked about a product decision and says that is a question for the product team. In sessions with organizations from AIG to Gartner to the Social Security Administration, the same instinct shows up in the same shape.
The customer does not know your reporting lines. They know the logo. When a person sees one brand on the building, one brand on the invoice and one brand on the badge, telling them the answer lives in a different box on a chart they have never seen is not a clarification. It is a refusal with extra steps.
The test I give executives is simple. Would this answer make sense to someone who has never heard of your internal structure? If it needs the chart, it is not an answer.
What if the reporter asks again?
They will, and that is their job, not an attack.
Answer it the second time with different words and the same substance, and make it shorter. Do not escalate, do not add irritation, and above all do not upgrade your language. The temptation on the second pass is to sound firmer, which usually means sounding defensive, and a defensive sentence is far more quotable than a calm one.
If it comes a third time, go shorter again and add the forward motion out loud. I have given you what I have on that. Here is the thing I think your readers will actually use. Reporters generally accept a third refusal that comes with an offer. What they do not accept is a third refusal that comes with an edge. Where the question is genuinely nowhere near anything you prepared, what to do when the question is not on your message map covers the recovery.
What did the room not settle?
One thing, and I would rather say so than tidy it up.
We could not agree on whether you should ever name the other office at all. One group argued that naming it is basic transparency and genuinely helps a reporter working on a deadline, and that withholding it looks like gamesmanship. The other group argued that naming it invites a follow-up you cannot control, and that you have now made news about a colleague who did not agree to be in the story.
Where we landed, without full agreement, was this: name the other office only if the reporter would otherwise be stuck, never as the whole answer, and never in your first sentence. That is a compromise rather than a resolution, and I suspect the right answer depends more on the reporter than on the rule.
If your subject matter experts are being asked questions that belong to somebody else, that is a training problem and it is a solvable one. Call (646) 233-1424 or tell us what is coming up.
Drawn from a two-day media training session with a federal agency in Washington DC on 13 and 14 August 2026. The line about the organization being the organization is paraphrased from a scientist in the room. The agency, the subject matter and all participants are withheld.