What would your starting out advice be for my friend with these recent charges who's trying to figure out their media strategy? What is a media strategy? Why does it matter? And how does a well-formed media strategy fit into a broader campaign?

Even the sort of rudimentary infrastructure of forming a support crew or a support committee can be the, the seed that gives an impetus to a media strategy at some point.

But just, you know, assessing the landscape, creating a, uh, a power map of sorts, understanding who is vulnerable, uh, either in civic politics or state politics, to be able to target them in a way that either causes embarrassment or enables leverage, uh, by the defendants or the support committee or the broader community political movement or the public at large.

And you start to work towards the goals that are established out of those discussions and developing a strategy that is going to push back against the state's narrative, but also mitigate the, the legal harm for those being targeted.

And sometimes that's easier than others.

Uh, the, the Prairieland case, uh, was one that started out somewhat slowly.

The support committee came together pretty quickly and was solid and decided that they wanted to do, uh, media work to help shape a narrative that was, uh, really not in their favor, uh, not in the defendant's favor.

And the other side of that question is when should a defendant speak themself versus a support crew or movement group speak about a case?