TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

6 May 2015 · 2 min

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2:15

TJ Walker breaks down what makes an apology actually work: speed, clear ownership, no excuses, and matching the visibility of the mistake. He praises Fox News anchor Shep Smith for immediately correcting a false report about a Baltimore police shooting on air.

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Shep Smith of the Fox News Channel shows the right way to do an apology. On Monday, a Fox News reporter reported on the air that a Baltimore police officer had shot another black man. It turns out this was not accurate at all. Obviously, this is a highly inflammatory issue if this were to be the case, but it wasn't. Now within half an hour, Shep Smith went on the air and said literally, we screwed up. Pretty unambiguous apology. I want to share with you more of what he said because I think it's a good example of what to do in a situation like this. And now something has been created that is wrong and unnecessary. We were wrong. Our people on scene were wrong. Theirs was an error that was honest and straightforward. And our duty as journalists is to not make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, we are duty bound to correct them immediately and as clearly as possible. That's pretty clear. There's not a lot of ambiguity there. He's not seeking a lot of wiggle room. He's not blaming other sources. It's a clear cut apology. It was done swiftly and it was done in proportion. It wasn't done as a footnote in small print on the website 12 hours later. It was done right on the broadcast within the same hour. And that is the way to handle an apology. Because now anyone who wants to beat them over that looks like a crass jerk because they've already apologized over at Fox. So it's a great example. Everybody makes mistakes, folks. I make mistakes, you make mistakes. The challenge is quite often how do you react to your mistakes and do you apologize quickly in a forthcoming way? In this case, I have to give FOX News Channel A marks. Now, I understand there's a school of thought among a large percentage of America that says Fox News should be apologizing daily for all the things they get wrong. That's a topic for another day. In this particular case of the erroneously reported police officer shooting a black man on the street, Fox got it right.