Sneaky-
Western news thrives on sensationalism. It's not about "being informed", it's about stirring the pot. Actually, the way news works is that a news company has a variety of templates that simply get filled out with the details of the latest "current event" that fits the template:
- Latest natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, flood, fire, sinkhole)
- Latest heinous crime (murder, kidnap, rape, home invasion, pedophilia)
- Latest celebrity gaff (drunk celebrity says something stupid)
- Latest hot-button sociopolitical issue (abortion, gay marriage, education)
- Latest war update/bombing (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Kony)
- Latest end-of-the-world scenario (killer bees, HIV, Y2K, bird flu, SARS, swine flu, Mayan calendar, ebola)
- Latest fringe group says/does something wacky (fundamentalist preachers, white nationalists, pick up artists)
There are a few more, but that's the gist of it.
You need video to be a news story or it typically isn't worth reporting and won't pick up steam, thus Julien's success at causing scandal. I think it's worth noting that Julien's been actively courting scandal since before the articles on Jeffy a few years back (Tenmanet has a summary of this
here). The funny thing is Jeffy's stuff is a lot more outrageous than Julien's, but there's no video of it so it didn't make it beyond a few feminist weblogs like Jezebel.
What I hear from RSD folks is that Julien was jealous of the attention Jeffy got, felt it should've gone to him since he was more outrageous, and basically stepped up his outrageousness since then trying to catch the media's eye. He eventually succeeded, and it went even crazier than he'd expected. But he courted that whole scenario quite actively. If there weren't videos of him shoving Japanese girls' faces onto his crotch plastered on YouTube, no one would've cared.
The media's courted us before in the past - the Dr. Phil show wanted us to come on and talk about dating multiple women, which I discussed with Ricardus (it was his article that caught their eye) and we decided against since Dr. Phil had guys from another pickup company on years back (I think it was MM or Love Systems) and not only set it up as an ambush to morally shame the heck out of them, but heavily edited the show and essentially removed all the strong points the pickup guys made to make it seem like they were "beaten" by the superior logic of Dr. Phil and the moral crusaders.
Huffington Post also hounded me for an interview multiple times, always with some rushed/authoritative "We need you for an interview WITHIN 24 HOURS, RESPOND NOW!" type tone, which I usually would not see until days later because I try not to be on email too much. I told them to buzz off after they tried doing this with an article that was ripped from one of mine, uncredited - they wanted me to appear on a roundtable sharing what I thought about the concept behind "their" article... lol.
I think the things to consider behind media is who's the primary audience and is this helping you? In the case of Dr. Phil, it's a bunch of middle-aged women, which doesn't much help Girls Chase if we go on there. Same with HuffPo - similar demographics. No such thing as bad publicity, the saying goes, but bad publicity to an unrelated demographic probably doesn't help a whole lot, either. These shows aren't going to give you a fair shake because they're looking for you to be a bogeyman. I might still be able to go on there and be charming and frame control it, but I don't want to get ahead of myself - I still need more practice doing friendly interviews before I'd trust myself to go in front of a hostile crowd and win them over, Rocky IV style. And they've still got editors on their side, and a sensationalist "Evil Pick Up Artist Tries To Defend His Machiavellian Ways!" angle sells a lot more than "Pick Up Artist Comes On Show, But Surprisingly Makes Sense And Is Totally Relatable!"
Anyway, long and short of it is it's pretty hard to create a media sensation without video of some sort to go along with it. I'd have to do an interview and really muck it up, or someone else from GC would, or we'd have to start putting out video that can be construed as bad or manipulative. Never say never, but I don't expect any of that to happen any time soon (we've discussed having some GC video go up, but I'm not sure we'd do anything with approaches in it at this time; there are too many uncertainties with that kind of thing... like, guys are either unimpressed with the approach, or they think you're using models and it's all staged; if they can see the girl's face, white knights will try to figure out her identity from Facebook / Model Mayhem / etc., then contact her and harass her or ask her if she knows she was being filmed by a pick up artist... all kinds of crap like that. And learning video is learning a completely new medium / channel, which I don't have a lot of time for right now).
Chase