The message or the media: what's really important? - Panel Discussion

What role today has the news media - a media often seen as discredited? How do communicators deal with ever-changing news values, social tastes and the evolving technology of the Internet? Are there any real answers to these dilemmas?

A Socratic dialogue dug deep into these issues during IABC's international conference in New Orleans in June. Attenders posed questions to a panel, moderated by Gloria Gordon, editor of Communication World, and led by Patrick Jackson, APR, editor of pr reporter. I was a panelist and can describe how just as many questions were raised as were answered on issues destined to challenge communicators for some time to come.

The debate was always going to be one which bred differing views based on personal experience. Its timeliness was not disputed, with considerable disillusionment surfacing on how the news media behaves ... producing a questionable mixture of news, fact, fiction and celebrity mania. With the probing, analytical journalism of Watergate a distant memory, the fifth estate is now coming under intense scrutiny as editorial standards seem to be slipping away.

Patrick Jackson mischievously opened the proceedings with a controversial thesis: "Studies show that the mainstream news media have lost touch, relevance and credibility. As a group, their believability rating is about 17 percent. Whether it's the Columbia Journalism Review, the National Journalism Review out of the University of Maryland or Steve Brill's new publication Brill's Content, the scene is the same - journalists criticising journalists over today's news media performance. If this is the case, then does this change the way public relations professionals and communicators operate? Do the news media really matter any longer to public relations practitioners, their clients and employers?"

This leading question drew a mixed response from the panel, split to a degree on whether organisations could or should ignore the media. First out of the blocks on media morals and culpability was Garland Robinette, convinced the public still believes the media more than any corporation: "If I write a story about a corporation saying 'they kill babies here,' and the corporation says they didn't kill babies, the public believes the media. In the media, we have a lot of firm convictions based on nothing." Garland's line of argument was clear: There are other ways to get your messages across without relying on the media.

The experience of Ed Marshall at the hands of the media had a familiar ring. When the bank he represents was merged, one analyst claimed 900 jobs were going to be lost immediately. Not totally the truth, and a statement too broad, according to the official line. No one mentioned that the people who would be sent home had severance packages, stock options and other attractive incentives. But for Marshall, it got worse. While in Paris, he learned a quote had been attributed to him in a major U.S. magazine under a photograph of someone else, commenting on corporate downsizing.

Inaccuracy and Bias

With such tales of inaccuracy and bias, it wouldn't be difficult to justify bypassing the media, pretending they weren't there. Yet Jinx Broussard had a slightly different view. "To a certain extent, people may see the media as being negative. However, for the most part, people understand the media are the best ways of reaching a large and diverse audience as well as small segmented audiences, so you can't really write the media off. The media definitely do matter, whether you agree with what the media write or what's presented in the media, what they give you is what you get, whether you like it or not. So are we really into a new era of the media beating up on people and running devious journalism?"

Ken Coach felt we have seen this all before. "There never was, and never has been, ethics in the media, just like there are not ethics in all of the businesses you people represent here today. John D. Rockefeller was told by his public relations people to give a nickel or a dime whenever he saw a kid and there was always a still camera around. So we've been having this battle for more than a hundred years."

My own view was based on experience of the damage a side-lined, petulant media can inflict globally. People in companies who try and bypass the media on a permanent basis do so at their peril. The media will get you one way or another. They will get their information from other sources. It may be non-governmental groups, it may be others, but you've got to deal with them, work with them, take the rough with the smooth. If they really step out of line, then go after them with the law if the issue is big enough. Don't be frightened to do that.

Patrick Jackson moved the debate on to the next stage: Research says that if a subject stays before the public for any length of time, the public tends increasingly to believe the negative. This flies in the face of those arguing that communicators need to deal with the media and suggests this dealing just prolongs the negatives.

Ed Marshall expressed no doubts about this. "There are always going to be some people who are disgruntled, but you've still got to deal with the media. You've got to put your message out there, get your side of the story across. You cannot ostracise these folks."

Patrick Jackson: If you believe you've got to get your side of the story told, who are you targeting in the mass media? They're not so mass any more?

In Jinx Broussard's view, the approach should be to assess how to reach your segmented public. "Are we talking about specialised media, about a specific radio station, about magazines, or company publications? If we want to reach and change kids' minds about listening to gangster rap, we may try to get on a programme that's on a contemporary urban radio station. It's our job as public relations professionals to identify our audience, identify the message we're trying to get across and then figure out which medium we will use. We can't just rely on the mass media to tell our story."

Splintering of the communicator's audience was not a problem for Ken Coach, who saw it as a tremendous opportunity. "As the audience splinters, you know where your target is: If you want to talk to golfers, you go to the golf channel. If you have a specific message, you have a greater opportunity now to find the audience that will hear that message."

Patrick Jackson: Most of the time, communicators feel they've got things people ought to know about. We need to get positive messages across. Yet when we go to the media, there is the "he said, she said" entertainment approach. Can communicators still use the media to really inform or educate the public?

Garland Robinette pointed out that circumventing the media didn't mean completely ignoring their presence. "We still work and talk with the media. Yet in Spain, Florida, New Orleans, Indonesia, Australia, where I was told every time 'you can't circumvent the media, this is the way it's done and you can't do that here', we did it. We've got the numbers, we showed it was successful. The problem with media coverage is that in PR we write news releases, get 10-second sound bites if we're lucky on TV, and then everyone else gets to say we kill babies. That's what we've been doing for 50 years, gang. I submit it's a miserable failure and we'd better find another way. And quite frankly, I think we've found some of them over the last eight years."

Taking up this theme, Keith Sheldon quoted the case of the former head of corporate communication at Bank of America. For the past 10 years, he's been saying as far as the bank is concerned, the media doesn't matter. If there's a bad story that affects the bank, its impact may last a few days in the media. But it's not going to impact the bank's bottom line. Behind all this is the premise of all communication: to modify behaviour and how to do it. "You have to know the media, know the issues and take it from there. Sometimes, the best way to work through the media is through editorial boards."

U.S. President Clinton

The debate then moved on to President Clinton - and whether he circumvented the media in his first electoral campaign.

My own view was that he had used a deliberate policy of bypassing the media to reach the people in state-to-state briefings of the people. The result: "The media never forgave him and have been after him for years. What we're seeing now is the result of that...the president with his pants down...they love it, they let it run. In certain situations you may be able to try and bypass the media and it may work, but they've got long memories."

For Patrick Jackson, whether it's the media or the fact that his pants are down, Clinton is the most popular president in the last 20 years. Maybe he bypassed the clubby White House media and reached more Americans that way.

This provoked a strong reaction from Jinx Broussard, who at one time was Louisiana media director for the president. "Clinton did not bypass the media, he simply knew how to use the media, the free media, to get elected. He reached people through the media in their own backyards."

Keith Sheldon considered President Clinton had bypassed the traditional print media by using television to go straight to his constituents without anybody else putting words into his mouth or interpreting them. Ken Coach followed up with some compelling statistics: One television station in Vancouver has 700,000 nightly viewers. "You can circumvent that station, not use it...that means you have to talk to 1,000 different people every night for two years."

My view was that if companies really want to get in touch with people, you take a tip from President Clinton in that you spend time communicating directly with constituents, whether it's the community or government people. Yet at the same time, keep the media informed. It comes down to how you mix and match it.

Internet and the Generation Xers

The debate then moved on to the rapidly evolving technology of the Internet, to web sites such as the Drudge Report, which first broke stories on President Clinton's alleged sex life, and to the young people under 35...the so-called "GenerationXers." How do the communicators reach them? GenXers, generation.com, said Patrick Jackson, are vastly disinterested in traditional forms of communication, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, even television. This is at a time when newspaper readership has gone from 83 percent of the American households to just below 30 percent among people under age 35. Is new media such as the Internet the way to reach them?

The panelists had mixed reactions. Jinx Broussard had grave concerns about this new medium with no controls on content, on users, nor any monitoring by federal agencies. "We don't know whether the information is factual or whether it's made up. But at the same time, as public relations practitioners, we have to use the gamut of tools, tactics and techniques to reach audiences."

The magazine that ran the incorrect story on him while he was in Paris relied, said Ed Marshall, extensively on the Internet as a source.

What the Drudge Report did with technology, was something that's never been done before, according to Garland Robinette. Using the new technology, he said, was something PR people had better consider rather than having the same ideas of "my news release works, my talking to this reporter works." It works a little bit but not a lot. Somewhere in the Internet is a mass communication device that we haven't quite hit on yet.

But the question is, Patrick Jackson continued, whether people will trust our material because it's in this new medium. Today, people say nobody reads and trusts our brochures, but somehow they all read and trust our web page, which of course is just a brochure in cyberspace.

On this, my view was that human nature doesn't change much...it moves like taste, with the times. The GenXers are into electronics, are a visual generation. They're getting their information from visual sources, from videos and the Internet, so communicators may have to start reaching them more visually or electronically. Communicators may also have to reach young people early in their life, before they start leaving college...to tune into where they're at at this stage of their lives.

At this point, real fears were expressed about how the Internet was threatening media professional standards and training.

Keith Sheldon felt the most frightening thing was that anybody could set up a home page on the web, write anything with no worries about peer review or accuracy. The danger was that people open up an article and think it's gospel, with no idea how accurate it is. "We need to be in front of [the new technology] rather than in the middle or behind, because if we don't tell our story to the audiences, other people are going to be doing it for us."

A note of caution was sounded by Ken Coach. "Let's be really careful. Radio did not kill newspapers, television did not kill radio. Newspapers written a hundred years ago were full of outrageous opinions that had no basis in fact. They've grown up, they've become respectable. The same thing is going to happen with the Internet. It's just another tool that we have to use. The news is not the truth, it's information and if you're not out there presenting your information, letting someone else have the agenda, you're in deep trouble."

Time for Questions

At this point in the debate, the audience began to express their points and questions, with panelists responding at will.

Questioner: The Internet is the growing source of information for journalists. The Columbia School of Journalism reports 80 percent of the media go to the web for their information before they call a PR person. There is little difference between what Matt Drudge [on the Drudge Report] is doing and what newspapers were doing in the 1800s, and there was nobody questioning whether the facts were true or false. Neither is there a difference between what's on the Internet and a TV host show slandering or libeling a celebrity on air.

Patrick Jackson: People are damn sceptical, whether they see things in the Drudge Report or on some TV celebrity show. What do you find on that?

Keith Sheldon: People believe what they read because they will not take the initiative to do their own research, their own homework and the follow up with other resources.

Garland Robinette: When I got into the corporate side I was horrified when I found out how bad I was as a news person, so I figured that as a PR guy, I'd better find people who know what . they're doing. So I got mathematicians, media polis people. I didn't say anything about not working with the media. Of course you can do your 10-second interview and hope somebody will lunch with you or whatever. But if I want to say I didn't kill the baby, I don't want the media to do it for me - and certainly not in 10 seconds. When the media writes it, the public believes it.

At this point, I saw the debate taking an overly negative view of the media and felt a balance was needed. So I related the story of how Shell, under attack in Nigeria from allegations over environmental practices and involvement in human rights abuses, took on a heavily biased German media. Shell flew a bunch of German journalists down to the Niger Delta and said, "go where you like, have a look, see how bad it is. See how good it is." Gradually, over time, you could see the change in the German media coverage. It become more favourable. They had been getting their information from other sources.

Questioner: Daily newspapers have less reach because fewer people read them today - the reason why every major news network has a web site. You have to take that into consideration when you're working for your organisation. The other thing is that people "perceived" as journalists are often talk-show hosts who people tune into religeously and believe anything that comes out their mouths. Twenty years ago you had news people like Walter Cronkite whose professionalism and integrity was unquestioned. Nowadays, who do you have out there who is in the same category?

Ken Coach: When Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, he made about as much money as a midwestern U.S. fire chief. Now, the TV anchors make more money than hockey stars. Basically, it's the call for celebrity in news and that's why it's changed.

Garland Robinette: I don't think there's a newspaper any more with small distribution or readership. We have seen newspapers in areas one foot away from the Stone Age write something so incredibly wrong and it goes straight into Internet chat rooms and ends up in the Wall Street Journal. When we call with undeniable proof that this was not just bad reporting, it was just scandalous, we couldn't get a retraction.

Patrick Jackson: So what you're saying is for control on this, go directly to your key stakeholders, and whatever the media does, at least you've got a chance.

Garland Robinette: There's no way you can allow a second or third party to deliver your message.

Questioner: Having come from a high-tech industry, I do know that in working with a PR agency, I have had trouble with them understanding the high-tech world press releases are different. Second, as one who recently graduated from journalism school, all my professors constantly told me: "Check your facts, check your facts." What is wrong with today's journalists...not checking their facts. Where is our responsibility?

Ed Marshall: It's because the lousy TV, radio stations, don't want to pay any money. They get people fresh out of school who have no experience and put them out there. And they come back and say, "hey, I met my budget," That's what's going on. And in defence of young people, when we were young, you had someone in that newsroom who checked your script and said, "this is wrong, this is right, do it again."

Questioner: As a GenerationXer, I have a unique perspective on this. Back in the early 1900s, maybe the 1800s, anybody could get a printing press, publish a newsletter and send it out. How does that differ from me going back to my computer or printing press, publishing my own newsletter without checking the facts, without checking credibility? What you see here is a fear emanating from the broadcast networks that have this monopoly on the licences to use the airwaves. Now, all of a sudden, the millions of dollars that they've invested in these licences are no longer as valuable because they've been circumvented by people such as myself, or anybody else with a computer and a modem.

Keith Sheldon: In the past, whether it was the New York Sun or the Penny Press, they were only reaching several dozen, several hundred people at a time. You put one piece of erroneous information on the Internet and that is going to hit millions of people, not locally, not regionally, not statewide, not nationwide, but worldwide. Once it's out, you can't get it back.

Gloria Gordon: The reports of Bob Hope's death were greatly exaggerated. One person picked up something erroneously, put it on the Internet, it got to Congress and it became breaking news in every major news channel.

Questioner: That originated from the Associated Press.

Gloria Gordon: But it was drawn off the Net by a member of Congress.

Questioner: The Associated Press is a reputable organisation; whether it was on the web site or not is irrelevant.

Patrick Jackson: And so you feel that's what made it believable?

Questioner: What's the difference between what the Associated Press did or Matt Drudge saying that a celebrity beats his wife? There's no difference?

Keith Sheldon: Yes, there is a difference. Associated Press is a news organisation...the Drudge Report is an opinion organisation.

Questioner: One way of circumventing the media is to take advertising space to tell the truth. You can have boldness to take out a full-page ad and go to the editors of the newspapers and say, "See this ad? We're running this in your paper on Sunday because you got 21 errors in your story. Now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to put in a front page correction or will we do it?" You are taking your story straight to the public, which I always felt was a bold thing to do, because people look at that and say, "these guys have guts if they're going to go this way to straighten out the facts."

Patrick Jackson: Do they believe in the ad, do you think, Jinx?

Jinx Broussard: What do you do if you are representing a small client with no money? How do you get that message across? How do you get your truth across? I need to address the questioner, because I think he may think that we're up here saying that the mainstream media are perfect. I have tremendous problems with the way minorities, the way females are covered in the media, the kinds of teases the media use to get attention. Right now, I don't know the difference between tabloid journalism and pure journalism, if there is any such thing as pure journalism.

Patrick Jackson: As a public relations counsel to three of the major national media organisations, I have to tell you the way they decide what news is: They do market research on what the audience wants to read. Suddenly, there are stories, would you believe it, in this area.

Questioner: Part of this whole debate is that there are previous generations who see a crisis in something which they have a very strong belief in...which is the media...and don't know how to deal with it. I think people like Bill Clinton have done it very well because they've said: "I don't have to simply deal with the New York Times if it's not going to give me my story, I'm going to go on "60 Minutes" [U.S.] national television programme or on David Letterman's talk show. You just need to realise that the media is not that icon of credibility, and we need to stop debating it and start debating all of the things you do to make sure you target all of your audiences.

Alan Lane: ... an interesting thing about the death of Princess Diana was the way the public was driving the agenda. The media weren't, they were actually behind the public. The public pulled the media along, they didn't think the media were covering their grief enough. Now, if we as communicators can tap into what the public is really feeling, you'll beat the media anyway. You're ahead in some ways.

Ken Coach: The Internet is a new frontier for news. A hundred years ago, a small newspaper in a small town had tremendous influence on that town. The numbers didn't count so much. What we have to do is start thinking about is what the community is. There's going to be gatekeepers, a different kind of journalist. People aren't going to search around on the Internet, just like they don't go through records of Congress to find out what really happened.

Patrick Jackson: Who do you think these gatekeepers might be?

Ken Coach: There needs to be a GenXer brand of journalist, if there isn't already. We need to use them because they may have target audiences that they're reaching that we need to talk to.

Patrick Jackson: You are mainly describing the journalism of the future. Until now, reporters gathered data, went out and talked to people. Now, there may not be the time to surf around on the Net, so these new journalists are the ones who broadcast the news. Is it all going to be the Matt Drudges, or is it going to be more systematized?

Garland Robinette: That's already happening. I talk to reporters on a regular basis that say "I found two feet of information on you polluting the environment and killing people." They get it all, so it's already there, but the gatekeeper is the media.

Keith Sheldon: The next decade is going to be fascinating. Just look at the Intel Pentium chip situation where you had consumers becoming reporters overnight in terms of what they found did or didn't work. That got on the Internet. The one thing that's the big part of the strategic puzzle is reputation management. What is our reputation in the community with our publics? That would be a big factor in terms of how we would handle our media relations.

Patrick Jackson: This raises some interesting questions. If all of this is so instantaneous, I wonder if democracy can survive this. Are we going to end up with instant democracy? The Romans had a word for this, they called it mob rule, the passion of the moment.

Questioner: Sometimes, as PR people, we give too much power to the media. There are people out there who are actually smart in thinking, "I was at that meeting and I don't know how the reporter got that story out of the meeting." The other thing is, if on the weekends the media ran 30 minutes saying, "this is how we screwed up this week folks, and in order to keep our credibility we just want to let you know." That's never going to happen, but one day there's going to come a point where the accountability for the broadcast media especially is going to force them to do that.

Questioner: I'm in charge of communication for UPS in Lousiana and Mississippi. We had a big media event; it was a strike. Most of the media did not want to talk to me. So I used the new media to circumvent that through electronic mail. I used a clipping service on Compuserve. I now have an electronic mail newsletter...don't even print to hard copy. During the strike, I hooked into an unmoderated online discussion group in an Internet chat room. Then I found one on the Washington Post, so I started participating in that one too. There's a trade industry magazine called Traffic World. They also had a discussion group, so now I'm in on that one, too, and participating in these discussion groups in my capacity as a communication professional for a corporation. These are some of the ways the new media is going to impact our lives. I didn't send a press release out and even if I did, I don't think they'd pick it up.

Alan Lane: Just to pick up on that point about changes and new media...politicians worldwide are being ignored by the people. They don't trust politicians so they're going to the non-governmental groups, they're going to pressure groups to do their job for them. Democracy is shifting from governments to the people, so if we can anticipate that and work with it as communicators, we can be getting our messages through.

Questioner: If we are talking about the GenerationXers, they care about the environment, about families, about people. They have compassion. These kids that are graduating from college, especially in journalism and public relations, actually have care inside them. We have also ignored who is actually using the new media, who has the computers, what is the salary range? In every survey the salary range is almost $40,000 and over. Does that include all of the GenerationXers? No, that includes a lot of people who are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, who are mid-to-senior management levels. That's who we're reaching right now because those are the ones who can afford it.

Questioner: I've heard a lot of bashing of young journalists today who feel very frustrated. They want to report fairly and objectively and they're being told they have to skew stories to meet a certain objective that their publication has. Many of the media outlets today are really big money, they're really big businesses, part of a conglomerate that's also involved with a nuclear plant or television station.

Conclusion

After an hour and a half of debate, it was clear there were many differing views on the role of the media. Yes, the news media can be irresponsible and damaging to private and corporate reputations. Yet to totally ignore and bypass them could be playing a dangerous game. No Holy Grail or final solutions had been found, but there was agreement on one thing: Communicators need to reassess current ways of getting their messages across to their many audiences - taking into account the complex and relentless revolution in technology.

In summing up, Patrick Jackson laid out the choices. "As far as I know, there's so much of this media going on out there that if I can go direct to the opinion leaders, the third parties, then to hell with the media. Think about that when you are still relying on just the media. Clearly, it's our agreement that you can't just ignore them as much as you'd like to, but sometimes you can, and the question for us as professionals is, what are the alternatives? Are we building third-party relationships with the opinion leaders, and if we aren't, maybe we're all going to be stuck with what the new media and the old media say about us and we won't have much to say about it."

RELATED ARTICLE: The Panelists

Jinx Broussard heads Broussard Consulting, New Orleans, a minority woman-owned agency specialising in PR, governmental relations and special events production.

Ken Coach, former TV newsman and producer, has his own company, Damn Good Productions, Ltd., Vancouver, B.C., that produces video news releases and conducts media training seminars.

Alan Lane is principal of Alan Lane & Associates, a U.K.-based company that advises organizations on communication trends and policies.

Ed Marshall is senior vice president and director of corporate relations, First Commerce Corp., New Orleans, and for 11 years worked as a journalist at CBS affiliate KLFY-TV.

Garland Robinette is vice president, communication, Freeport McMoRan, New Orleans, and a former TV anchor and Emmy award winner.

Keith Sheldon, ABC, APR, is president of Aztec Productions, a Las Vegas-based PR firm specializing in media relations training, presentation skills and strategic planning.

Patrick Jackson, APR, founder of Jackson Jackson & Wagner, and editor of pr reporter, led the panel discussion.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Issues

Does the media really matter any longer?

Given the 'he-said, she-said' entertainment approach of nearly all journalists today, what role can the media play in informing or educating the public?

Do media give a hoot - since most are bottom-line driven and held in huge conglomerates or non-journalistic corporations?

Can public relations be the public educator and informer, going around-the media? Should we? Must we?

How about the enhanced tendency of media to try to "frame" everything -issues, personalities, organisations?-Should public relations be concerned? How can we combat this?

The GenerationXers are reported to be vastly disinterested in news, information, civic enlightenment. How can public relations bring them into the mainstream, since they use media for entertainment?

Will our democracy survive if they remain uninvolved?

Alan Lane is principal of Alan Lane & Associates, a U.K.-based firm.

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