http://blog.masterthemedia.com/ RSS feed of The Media Mastery Blog en-us sBLOG 0.7.3 Beta (Build 20060309) Fri, 18 May 2012 01:28:26 GMT Fri, 18 May 2012 01:28:26 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=53

By George Merlis

An e-mailed poll started with this question: “Do you think the Obama administration was wrong when it refused to grant asylum in the United States to the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng?”

The question was unanswerable; Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese human rights attorney who had escaped from house arrest and had been smuggled into the embassy by U.S. personnel, had not asked for asylum in the U.S. The question, based on a false premise, was a tipoff that this was a push poll.

Push polls are a fraudulent marketing technique disguised as a poll. A push pollster asks questions designed to plant the seed of an idea. Push polling came to prominence during the GOP presidential primaries in 2000 when callers supporting then Texas Gov. George W. Bush phoned South Carolina Republican voters and, in the guise of conducting a poll, asked them: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

McCain and his wife, Cindy, had adopted a dark-skinned Bangladeshi orphan and the child had been photographed on the campaign trail with the Arizona senator. The image of the child combined with the false premise of the poll question had a great impact with South Carolina voters and McCain’s loss of that primary scuttled his chance of winning the 2000 nomination.

(Update: On May 19, Chen boarded a flight to Newark Airport. He was on his way to the U.S. to recuperate and to study; New York University School of Law was prepared to enroll him and a student apartment had been set aside for his and his family's use. Although he was coming to the U.S., it was as a student, not as an asylum-seeking refugee, so weeks after its dissemination, the poll was still based on a false premise.)

The media interview equivalent of push polling is something I call push questioning: a query or a series of queries based on a false premise. The prototype push question is the venerable: “When did you stop beating your wife?” With a push poll you can do what I did when confronted by the Chen Guangcheng question: not answer. You can’t very well not answer a question in an interview. As the late comedian George Carlin said, “No comment IS a comment.” But you can -- and should -- use a push question to get to your interview agenda.

There is a four step process to get from an off-point, hostile or push question to your agenda. Here is the slide that I use to illustrate those four steps in media training workshops:



When a reporter poses a push question, your acknowledgement should be: “The premise of your question is wrong,” or, more bluntly: “The premise of your question is untrue.” (If a reporter repeatedly deploys push questions, I advocate going all the way to the more confrontational: “The premise of your question is a lie.”)

The bridge is: “As a matter of fact....” And then deploy your agenda point and shut up -- don’t go back and revisit the false premise.

The push poll examples I cited earlier -- the McCain illegitimate child and the Chen asylum denial questions -- were calculated gambits. Oftentimes, a reporter will have the same calculus in mind when he frames a push question; he is trying to trap you. But other reporters will base a question on a false premise because they are unaware of the error; they actually believe you did beat your wife -- or whatever other fantasy forms the premise of the question.

Regardless of a reporter’s motives, it’s essential to refute immediately the premise of a push question. If the reporter is asking the question out of ignorance and you don’t correct him, he’ll continue to believe the premise and it may wind up in his story. If the reporter is trying to trip you up, challenging the premise lets him know you are on to his game and will not fall for it.

Fundamental to using a push question -- or any media question for that matter -- is having an agenda of your own for the interview. But you knew that.

***

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]]> Fri, 18 May 2012 01:28:26 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=53#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=53 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=52

By George Merlis

Currently, the best reality show on television -- from a media trainer’s point of view -- is the irregularly scheduled but extremely frequent Republican candidates’ debates. Like any TV reality series, passions run high, conflicts abound and contestants are dropped -- voted off the island, as it were -- in primaries and caucuses.

Along the way, there have been some teachable moments for anyone interested in media mastery. Appropriately enough, many of these lessons have been taught by the candidate who has been a college professor, Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich, Ph.D., better known to voters as Newt Gingrich.


The former professor donned his academic robes for a college commencement speech.

Former House Speaker Gingrich declared himself the best debater in the bunch and while that assertion might show a modesty deficit, it was also accurate until Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, changed debate coaches last week.

(An aside: What is it with these names? Newt, Mitt? Ron? Rick? For a while there were two Ricks. Republicans used to be the party of initials: G. Gordon Liddy, H. L. Hunt, H.R. Haldeman. Now it seems to be the party of nicknames. The candidates real names, by the way, are Richard John Santorum, Ronald Ernest Paul and Willard Mitt Romney. Yes, Mitt is not a nickname.)

The general consensus is that Gingrich lost the last couple of debates in Florida to Romney, which is surprising since the history professor-turned-politician is a very effective wordsmith and a combative performer.

Words are currency in the marketplace of ideas. As with any currency, some words are worth a lot more than others. Gingrich has a knack for minting effective, often inflammatory, words. In fact, back in 1990, GOPAC, a political action committee he controlled, distributed a memo to fellow Republicans that suggested they all “speak like Newt.” (In a characteristic display of hubris, the memo was distributed under Newt’s signature.) It contained lists of "contrasting words:" negatives to be used when talking about the opposition juxtaposed with positives to be used when talking about one’s own side: "radical" vs. “opportunity,” "sick" vs. “courage,” and "traitor" vs. “principled.” Gingrich is still tossing out those words as well as others of more recent coinage.

Lesson One: Pious Baloney
For our first teachable moment, let’s look at “pious baloney.” In the January 8 debate before the New Hampshire primary, Gingrich unleashed the memorable phrase at Mitt Romney when the former Massachusetts governor went beyond his allotted time while protesting that he is not a career politician. Gingrich struck back with: “I realize the red light doesn’t mean anything to you because you are the frontrunner. But could we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?”

Gingrich has long been an advocate of focus-group testing phrases before using them, so it’s likely “pious baloney” didn’t spring spontaneously from Newt’s brain in the middle of the debate. But why is it so effective? Let’s take it apart:

Pious: The word addresses Romney’s demeanor for one -- which many find standoffish, judgmental, somewhat self-righteous. But pious also has a religious connotation and so invites attention to Romney’s Mormon faith, which is a negative for many evangelical voters and raises the specter of Romney’s “otherness” for some non-evangelicals.

Baloney: Gingrich used a third-grader’s word for a lie and that’s effective because it implies that no adult would buy the fib. It also goes to another of Romney’s weaknesses: his rationales for changing positions on a wide variety of issues. With two words -- “pious baloney” -- Gingrich managed to convey this thought: “Governor Romney is a liar -- a political insider and a religious outsider,” all without using the words “liar” “religious” and “outsider.”

What should we take away from this teachable moment? First, like Professor Newt, prepare your "grabbers" in advance. Before your interview work up your most telling phrases. They should be gems: polished gems, not ugly, raw, rock-looking unfinished stones. If you try to think them up on the fly, they'll be the latter. But insofar as using gems like "pious baloney," my advice would be: don’t try this at home. Or away from home, for that matter. When talking to the public through the media about a controversial story, I recommend NOT ridiculing and/or belittling the other side. Gingrich gets away with being sardonic and sarcastic because it's expected of him -- he long ago established himself as a gleefully bombastic politician renowned as a verbal bomb-thrower. He would disappoint us if he didn’t use sharp elbows in interviews, speeches and debates. For the rest of us, a Gingrich-like attitude will almost certainly backfire.

Lesson Two: Don’t Contradict Yourself...

... or at least allow some time to lapse between an assertion and a contradictory statement. In an appearance on the January 30 CBS This Morning show, Gingrich worked this sentence into an answer: "I know a lot about Washington having served as Speaker; I have none of the establishment ties, and I will shake the system up." Politicians contradict themselves all the time, but rarely do they manage to do it in a single sentence. How is a former Speaker of the House -- constitutionally the second in line for the Presidency if a chief executive dies or is removed from office -- not part of the establishment?

Lesson Three: Shocked, Shocked

In the movie “Casablanca,” the corrupt Captain Louis Renault shuts down Rick’s Cafe Americain because he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.” Just as he finishes the line, a waiter comes up to him, hands him a wad of bills and says, “Your winnings, sir.” “Oh, thank you very much,” Renault says. Then, raising his voice, orders, “Everybody out at once!”

In the final South Carolina debate, Gingrich was similarly “shocked, shocked” that CNN’s John King dared to ask about his second wife’s assertion in an ABC News interview that the then-Speaker of the House asked her for an open marriage so he could continue his dalliance with his now-third wife. This is how Gingrich began his response: “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for office. I’m appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.”

Debate spectators in the auditorium applauded, but Gingrich was throwing red meat to lions by demonizing the media for having the temerity to ask the question he knew full well they HAD to ask. While the in-house audience was predisposed to be anti-media, many watching at home saw the "shocked, shocked" response as political pandering. You can view it here

Attacking the questioner worked for Gingrich in South Carolina; he won that primary by a double digit margin. But would it work for most of us in ordinary interview settings? Should we turn a question into an assault on the questioner? No. In most interviews you need the media’s cooperation to get your agenda to the public. Attacking the media is worse than killing the messenger after he brings bad news. If you do it, it's likely the messenger will bring the public none of the news you want delivered.

***

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]]> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:42:52 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=52#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=52 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=51

By George Merlis

It may be highly ironic -- if not downright hypocritical -- to post a blog about the dangers of blogging, but here goes....

Let me start with this warning: Don’t blog anything you don’t want the whole world to read. While we reach out to the media often, it’s important to remember that the media may be reaching out to us by reading our blog posts. So it’s incumbent on bloggers to understand their narrow-cast audience can go wide if something they post gets thrust into the media mill. These days that mill is always casting about for fresh grist.



Here’s a case in point with several layers of obfuscation added to protect identities of individuals and organizations:

Not too long ago, an individual innocently posted information about a new development at his organization on his personal blog. The blogger in question was authoritative in his field, so among the readers of his posts was at least one journalist. In this case, it only took one.

The journalist read the blog and then wrote a story based on it. The story as blogged -- and then reported on -- was incomplete. The blogger’s organization was preparing a formal release with more information in it. There were two lapses here: the blogger’s release of information not yet ready for public consumption and the journalist’s failure to follow up the blog with confirming phone calls or e-mails.

When the blogger’s organization did issue a press release with the complete story, the media treated it as old news and largely ignored it. The blogger had scooped his own organization.

Today, with so many people blogging, tweeting and posting to Facebook and other social networking sites, there is a constant danger of premature and/or incomplete information reaching the media. That sort of information can distort or misinform and, in some cases, do damage to a company or organization. News casually disseminated via blogging, social media and e-mail often lacks the necessary vetting by public relations, public affairs and executive personnel. And, unhappily, with journalists today under pressure to be more “productive” (i.e., do more stories in less time with fewer resources), there is a danger that news stories based on these cyberspace offerings will get to the public without any fact-checking.

It has never been harder to control information than it is today. Everyone is connected via e-mail and most are active on Twitter, Facebook and other networking sites. Here are some thoughts on blogging, tweeting, social networking and e-mailing:

Blogging

Many people write personal blogs that contain information from their workplace. If you are part of a large organization, check with your public relations representatives before posting new professional information. If you are part of a small organization, confer with colleagues before going public on your blog. You want to avoid disseminating to a small audience (your blog readers) information that might be compelling to a huge audience (the public at large) unless there is an organizational consensus that the information should be released. Since reporters hate being scooped, blogging news automatically scoops media outlets that don’t follow your blog. As was the case in the incident I cited, a blog post can undermine an organization's media campaign by stealing its thunder.

Twitter

As someone who takes 140 characters to say, “hello,” I’ve always been dubious about sending out any substantive information via tweet. Twitter’s compression factor forces you to leave out necessary details. There’s nothing wrong, however, with calling attention to fully vetted on-line news via Twitter. (It's one of several mechanisms I use to call attention to my new blog posts.) I recommend coordinating with your public relations professionals or colleagues before you take to the keyboard. (And please check your spelling. If you are tweeting on a smart phone, it is very easy to misspell words and sometimes misspellings can change meanings.)

Social Media

As with Twitter, there are limits on how much you can post on Facebook and other social media sites, although their allotment of characters is far greater than Twitter’s. It's best to use social media to direct attention of your friends and followers to a web site where an official news release can be read. The Facebook page Marketing for Scientists affords a good example of how to effectively use social networking for directing attention to valuable online articles.

E-mail

As virtually everyone knows -- to his or her grief -- it is entirely too easy for an e-mail recipient to forward a message to another couple of people, each of whom forward it to several more and what began as a private communication is now spread virally. E-mailing something marked “confidential,” or “eyes only,” is like standing under a billboard with an arrow sign reading, “Please don’t read the billboard.” When dealing with company or organization news, I like to use e-mail the same way I use social media -- directing attention to the website with the full media release on it. That way if your e-mail goes viral only the official, approved version is available to the media and public.

Bottom line: when you’re dealing with organization or company news, think long and hard before hitting “send,” “post” or “publish.”

***

Media Blunders, China Department

China has a growing and well-financed space program. If music is any guide, it owes a lot to the American space program. How so? Well, the Chinese state media released a video of last month's launch of its Tiangong-1 space station enhanced with animation of the spacecraft docking in low earth orbit and tracked it with the stirring strains of -- "America the Beautiful." Clearly someone had exceeded his level of incompetence in a grand way.

While a Chinese space station has nothing to do with amber waves of grain or purple mountains' majesty, maybe the beautiful and spacious skies references were enough for the hapless producer who added the music. More likely, he had no idea of the lyrics and the standing of the song as an unofficial alternate to the difficult-to-sing Star Spangled Banner. (And what was the consequence of this faux pas? Reprimand, dismissal, prison? All three?)


China could have used "Red Star Rising in the East," but did not.

The British newspaper The Guardian, spotted the gaffe (or homage, if that's what it was) and posted the video here.

***

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]]> Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:59:13 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=51#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=51 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=50
I’ve always found it ironic -- not to say downright hypocritical -- that some try to teach children to be truthful by telling them a lie: George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then ‘fessed up because he could not tell a fib.


Never happened; the lie that's supposed to inspire children to tell the truth.

Equally ironic is the teachable moment many media trainers use to warn clients about the dangers of an open microphone. The lesson involves Uncle Don, host of a 1930s kids radio show who thought he was off the air after a particularly arduous broadcast and said aloud -- into his open microphone -- “That ought to hold the little bastards.” Uncle Don, the story goes, was summarily fired, declined into alcoholism and died a pauper.


The real Uncle Don -- kid show host Don Carney.

Like Washington and the cherry tree assassination, Uncle Don’s gaffe never happened; it was totally made up. And here’s a further irony: the author of the Uncle Don fable was a newspaper columnist in Baltimore. The result: a fake news story about a blooper that never happened used to teach news interview subjects to be wary of what they say in proximity to a microphone.

I guess those who use the fable -- like parents to dispense the cherry tree story -- feel that the ends justify the means.

Years ago, when I learned the truth I stopped using Uncle Don in media training workshops. What did I need it for? With great regularity, the news supplies me with real examples of people oblivious to open microphones inadvertantly broadcasting thoughts that were better locked in their mental vaults.

Citing three or four of the most recent examples -- they ARE endless -- I tell clients to treat a microphone like a gun. Gun safety dictates treating all guns as if they are loaded. Similarly, I recommend treating all microphones as if they are on, recording or broadcasting live. My rule: “Never say anything in proximity to a microphone that you don’t want the world to hear.”

This may seem self-evident, but again and again we are treated to people who should know better -- including broadcasters -- saying stupid, embarrassing or counterproductive things in the presence of a microphone, only to have their off-the-cuff remarks become on-the-web curiosities and/or in-the-news scandals.

There is an added caution to “Treat a Microphone Like a Gun.” And that is, treat a reporter as if he is a microphone. Just because a reporter has put away his pad, pencil and digital recorder doesn’t mean he’s off-duty. He is recording you in his head.

When I was a newspaper reporter I found it useful to emulate Lieutenant Columbo, the TV detective created by the late Peter Falk. I made it a practice to toss off a casual “one more thing” question as I walked toward the door at the end of an interview. Thinking the interview over, the subject sometimes responded with far greater candor than he had during the official, formal interview.

Incidentally, encountering a reporter in a restaurant or at a bar is still encountering a reporter. When a good story is in the air, any reporter -- in any stage of relaxation and in most stages of inebriation -- will focus like a laser and begin making mental notes. The French ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Bernard, learned this the hard way. At a 2001 dinner party at the London home of Lord Black -- at the time the owner of the third-largest newspaper publishing concern in the world -- the ambassador made a particularly undiplomatic and scatological reference to Israel.

For an ambassador to do something like this anywhere is dumb. To do it in a room full of reporters is career suicide. There was no way that the many journalists at the dinner were going to ignore Bernard's comment. Knowing reporters, I suspect most of them had mentally written their stories before coffee and dessert.

So when around a microphone -- or a reporter -- emulate the real Uncle Don. Don’t say anything you don’t want the world to hear.

***

State of the Fourth Estate -- Los Angeles Times Edition

Above the fold: On September 11, the top of the LA Times’ front page featured a small headline and three 9/11 stories, including an excellent column by Steve Lopez. The only strange note: the Times used a perspective-distorting engraving to illustrate one of the most-photographed events in history.





Below the fold: The times ran this display ad across the bottom of the front page. It touts an appearance by the reality-show Kardashian sisters at a Sears store. You can’t blame the fame-grasping Kardashians for this; they will do anything, anywhere and at any time to put their faces and inflated figures before the public. But what does this ad placement say about Sears and, more importantly, about the Times? Ten years ago it was said that 9/11 changed everything. Apparently, at the Los Angeles Times, those changes included a loss of taste and judgment.

***

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To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.





]]> Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:26:26 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=50#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=50 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=49

By George Merlis

Here are three lessons I teach in media training sessions: NEVER SAY ANYTHING IN PROXIMITY TO A REPORTER THAN YOU DON’T WANT THE WHOLE WORLD TO READ, LEAVE COMEDY TO COMEDIANS and YOU ONLY THINK YOU HAVE FRIENDS IN THE MEDIA. This trio of cautions is reinforced in an anecdote recounted by Tina Fey in her hilarious best-selling memoir, Bossypants.

Fey, in case you have been held captive in a Colombian jungle by Marxist guerillas for the last decade, is the writer/comedienne who got her national start doing Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, went on to create and star in her own NBC sitcom, 30 Rock, and who rocketed to great renown with her right-on-the-money impersonation of Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign. Her impression was so accurate that a confused Fox News, Palin’s parttime employer, recently aired a photo of the comedienne in a report on the former Alaska governor’s 2012 Presidential prospects.



Fox News ran the photo of Fey, above, in a report on GOP Presidential prospects for 2012. Fey-as-Palin, full screen, below.



Back in 2008, TV Guide, having no trouble telling the TV personality from the politician, decided to take advantage of the intense buzz around Fey by assigning writer Damian Holbrook to do a story about her for its fall preview issue.

In Bossypants, Fey tells the story of that interview and vividly illustrates my three edicts -- by violating all of them.

YOU ONLY THINK YOU HAVE FRIENDS IN THE MEDIA: The assignment of Damian Holbrook was great news for Fey; she and Holbrook were old friends. In fact, she named a character in her movie, Mean Girls, after him. Lulled into thinking Holbrook was a friend first and a journalist second, Fey violated the other two caveats.

NEVER SAY ANYTHING IN PROXIMITY TO A REPORTER THAN YOU DON’T WANT THE WHOLE WORLD TO READ and LEAVE COMEDY TO COMEDIANS: I’ll let Fey tell the rest of the story: “He [Damian] spent the day on the 30 Rock set and came over to my apartment for dinner afterward. Damian has a great sense of humor and we laughed a lot. After dinner - long after what I considered the ‘interview portion’ of our day to be over -- Damian asked me what I would do if McCain-Palin won the election. Would I continue to moonlight [doing the Palin impression] at Saturday Night Live? I said in a jokey, actress-y voice, ‘If they win, I will leave Earth.’ It was clearly a joke about people who say stupid things like that. No matter what your political beliefs, everyone knows some loudmouth: ‘If Bush wins, I’m moving to Canada.’ ‘If Bush wins again, I am seriously moving to Canada.’

“But Damian put ‘I’m leaving Earth’ in his article, and in print it looked sincerely idiotic. His editor leaked it in advance of the issue to generate attention for the magazine. Cable news took the bait and ran with it. I looked like a grade A dummy. I was annoyed at Damian, but mostly I just found it disconcerting. That I could get in ‘trouble’ for a half-baked joke I made in my own home was a level of scrutiny I did not enjoy.”

Fey said something in front of a reporter that she didn’t want the whole world to read and the whole world wound up reading -- or hearing -- it. Speaking of hearing, it would have helped to HEAR Fey’s delivery to know “I will leave Earth,” was a joke. Despite the fact that leaving Earth, as opposed to moving to Canada ought to be evidence that humor is involved, in cold print, the Earth-Canada nuance was too easily lost and the joke fell flat.

This is a really good object lesson about leaving comedy to the comedians. If a skilled professional like Tina Fey gets hoisted on the petard of her own joke, what chance do the rest of us have cracking wise with the media?

By the way, I always thought a petard was some sort of lance, but for this post I did some research and discovered that a petard was a small military explosive device used initially in the 16th Century. Being hoisted on one’s own petard referred to a short fuse bomb going off prematurely and “hoisting” -- or blowing up -- the bomb-handler. The very name petard is something of a joke -- given its derivation from a French verb. But I’m leaving comedy to the comedians. Or to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard.

***

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To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.






]]> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:43:48 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=49#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=49 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=48

By George Merlis

Last post I wrote about the sleazy tabloid money machine created by Rupert Murdoch. This time, I'm going to reflect on an ethical and devoted journalist -- the ying to Murdoch's yang. Elmer W. Lower, a boss who supplied me with a career’s worth of lessons. died on July 26 at age 98. I want to share one of Elmer's lessons because it is particularly relevant to anyone communicating to the public through the media.

First some background: Elmer was president of ABC News from 1963 to 1974. He hired me in 1967 as director of public relations for the division. Then he gave me the biggest break of my career, letting me become a news producer for the division’s magazine show.


Elmer W. Lower

Elmer built the foundation for the highly-competitive news operation that is generally credited to his successor, the flashy Roone Arledge. It is a popular misconception that when Arledge took over ABC News it was a second-rate shambles, a local news operation trying to cover the world and nation.

That was not true; ABC News under Elmer Lower had become competitive with the other two broadcast networks -- despite skimpier budgets. As a reflection of Elmer’s fascination with politics, on his watch ABC News set the standard for network news election night coverage. He gave a break to a lot of young journalists including Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel. And he hired some veteran print journalists, like Bill Lawrence and John Scali to give ABC News a solid news-gathering bench. Lawrence and Scali looked and sounded nothing like the youthful, handsome, milky-smooth news reporters we see today. They were downright ugly and had funny voices. But they were top-notch journalists capable of actually uncovering, as well as covering, the news. Elmer also hired network television's first African American correspondent and was at the forefront of opening network news opportunities for women.

Elmer retired from ABC News in 1974 and about a year later I left the news division to become the first producer hired at Good Morning America -- which then was under the supervision of ABC's entertainment division. I remained at GMA for seven years, five of them as the show’s executive producer and I used management and journalism lessons I learned from Elmer Lower to help GMA become the top-rated morning show.

Here is the important media lesson Elmer taught me: Always tell the truth.

On election night, 1970, when I was still director of public relations, Elmer summoned me to the control room and said, “Even though we’re working late tonight, I need you to come in early tomorrow. We’ve got a big, big story to get ready. I’m not going to tell you what it is, so you don’t have to lie to any reporters who might get hold of the it early.”

Within ten minutes, I got a call from a Chicago TV columnist. “What’s this I hear about ABC News hiring Reasoner to be the network anchor?” So that was the big secret -- ABC News was hiring Harry Reasoner away from CBS News where he had been a correspondent on 60 Minutes and the anchor of the highly-rated CBS Sunday News. I answered the columnist truthfully: “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

It is possible the Chicago columnist thought I was lying, but I knew I wasn’t and Elmer was satisfied that he hadn’t asked me to lie. Facts were more important to him than the appearances.

Elmer had been a newsman long enough to know that if you tell a reporter a lie, THAT becomes the story. Also, he knew that telling one whopper undermines your credibility with that journalist for all time.

You can’t very well go back to a reporter on a subsequent occasion and say, “Yeah, I was lying before, but this time I’m telling the truth.” Everything you say to a reporter after having lied once is received with deep skepticism.

Elmer also had a highly practical observation about being honest. He used to say: “Always tell the truth; that way you don't have to remember what you said.” Great advice from a great boss.

***

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To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.

]]> Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:58:36 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=48#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=48 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=47

By George Merlis

Scott Osborne, a TV journalist with whom I’ve worked sent me this e-mail: “Can’t wait for your take on Murdoch’s Watergate. I mean it. Seriously. Take the pencil out of those clenched teeth and let him have it!”

Okay, this one’s for you, Scott. By the way, if I had my druthers, I would not write it in pencil, I’d write it with a razor blade dipped in vitriol. But those implements are unavailable to me, so I’ll just use my iMac.

Scott was echoing Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter who, with partner Bob Woodward, broke most of the Watergate scandal’s big stories. In Newsweek, Bernstein called the unfolding phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom Murdoch’s Watergate.

I have been following the scandal with near religious devotion since it broke -- largely from British soruces online -- and much as I hate to disagree with Bernstein and Osborne, I think the comparison falls short: Murdochgate is worse than Watergate.

For one thing, Watergate was a failure. As a power grab it was pretty pitiful -- and totally unnecessary since Nixon was, after all, already the president. Murdochgate, on the other hand was a monumental success until a couple of weeks ago.

On a circulation basis, Murdoch controlled more of the news that Brits read and saw than anyone else. His tabloids The News of the World and The Sun had successfully instituted a reign of informational terror over successive British governments and Murdoch was coining money while setting the national agenda. For example in three private phone conversations he personally pressured then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to join President Bush in the Iraq war.

When confronted by the industrial scale corruption, extortion, ethical lapses and influence mongering of Murdochgate, Watergate was, indeed, as President Nixon characterized it, “a second-rate burglary.”

Through systematic bribery, Murdoch’s minions have reduced vaunted Scotland Yard to a status on a par with the New Orleans Police Department. Detectives became the Murdoch empire’s errand boys. Bought-and-paid for cops turned over records and phone numbers and aborted any serious investigation of the earliest charges against Murdoch’s snoops. Corrupt cops even supplied story subjects’ exact locations to Murdoch reporters by doing unauthorized cell phone triangulation. Some cops compromised the security of the queen and royal family by turning over to Murdoch's hacks the Green Book -- the British equivalent of the Secret Service’s guidebook for protection of the President and his family.

And if that were not enough, the Murdoch’s journothugs -- the only word I can think of for them -- interfered with police investigations, including the search for a 13-year-old kidnap victim who was murdered by her abductor. Over a decade, Murdoch’s morally challenged newshounds are suspected of hacking into the voicemails of as many as 4,000 British subject, including survivors of the London transport terrorism attacks and families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So pervasive and powerful was Murdoch that David Cameron, the current prime minister, appointed a Murdoch toady as his press secretary despite having been warned that as editor of News of the World, the toady had used the services of an ex-con private eye who was suspected of an axe murder! Cameron recently -- and unconvincingly -- claimed he hadn’t been told about that unsavory detail whereupon the Guardian -- which has been playing The Washington Post to Murdoch’s Nixon in this drama -- cited book, chapter and verse of the many approaches its editors had made to the newly-elected Cameron to warn him off the appointment.


Web site of The Guardian -- playing The Washington Post to Murdoch's Nixon.

Like the exploits of the Mafia, some of what went on in Murdochworld was abhorrent and some of it was downright funny:

First the abhorrent: Meet Rebekah Brooks, a Murdoch loyalist of the first order. She worked on News of the World and was editor of The Sun and now she heads Murdoch’s diminished print properties in the UK. (Murdoch's son, James, who runs the UK empire for his father, killed News of the World, the country’s largest circulation newspaper, doubtless thinking that the stink of scandal would be interred with the vile rag. That misjudgment cost 200 people their jobs.)


Gone, but not forgotten. The Sunday scandal sheet News of the World was deep sixed by the Murdochs in hopes of quelling the expanding phone hacking and police bribery scandal.

When Brooks ran The Sun, the paper somehow (likely illegally) obtained the medical records of the infant son of then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Brooks phoned Brown herself and told him the paper was going to break the story, turning a private family tragedy into a public spectacle. Brown and his wife were heartbroken, but decided they wanted to control their family's story, so they beat the Sun to the punch and released news of their son’s illness to all the media. Losing the questionably-obtained scoop infuriated The Sun and it mounted a consistent campaign of hacking into Brown’s bank, insurance, real estate and tax records. Mafiosi say revenge is a dish best served cold. In the Murdoch mob, revenge is served cold and repeatedly. (I may have maligned the Mafia by comparing it to the Murdoch gang. Traditionally, the Mafia exempts wives and children from its depredations. The disregard for families and the innocent among the Murdoch minions is more Taliban than Mafia.)

Now for the funny: News of the World private investigators spied on the chief detective investigating the axe murder charges against the News of the World’s ex-con private eye. Their goal was to prove that the cop was having an affair with a prominent woman TV anchor and use that information to intimidate or discredit him. But they neglected the first rule of journalism: ask the subject and check the public records. Had they done that they would have learned that the detective was, indeed, sleeping with the woman. He was MARRIED to her.

The Mafia analogy is limited. Murdoch is more like a character out of Dickens or Trollope than out of Mario Puzo. Even the name is Dickensian -- the first four letters are the same as the first four letters in “murder” and, in England, an accused murderer is tried in “the dock.” In the novel “The Way We Live Now,” Trollope recounts a Bernie Madoff-calibre Ponzi scheme abetted by the politically ambitious, fact-bending editor of a rag called “The Evening Pulpit.” Of the paper itself, Trollope wrote: “A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything.” He goes on with a description of the Pulpit that fits Murdoch's tabloids with its “air of wonderful omniscience... with an ignorance hardly surpassed by its arrogance. But the writing was clever, the facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.”

In the novels of Dickens and Trollope villains come to grief. The news that Murdoch has dropped his multi-billion dollar bid to take over full control of BSkyB, Britain’s largest satellite broadcaster, is grievous and financially costly to him. It is also likely the first of many chickens that will come home to roost. It’s a safe bet that people -- perhaps Murdoch’s son, James, among them -- will be jailed in the UK for bribery, perjury and other felonies and that companies will be fined. In a case of collateral damage, other British media may pay a price for Murdoch’s casual ethics; there is a danger that press freedom may be legislatively curtailed. The UK has no First Amendment, as we do, so Murdoch's lasting legacy may be censorship and/or government oversight of the British media.

There could be criminal charges on this side of the pond, too. On the face of it, bribing government officials (the Metropolitan Police) looks like a violation of the 1977 U.S. Corrupt Practices Act. The U.S. political sphere has been as spineless so far as David Cameron. As of this writing (July 13) in a sublime irony, the great grandson of one of America’s original robber barons, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is the only national politician who has called for a probe to see if Murdoch’s U.S. properties are guilty of similar high crimes and low ethics.

Much the way U.S.-owned vessels fly “flags of convenience” by registering in Panama or Liberia, the Australian-born Murdoch adopted U.S. citizenship for business reasons: only a citizen could hold the licenses of the Fox network’s owned and operated broadcast TV stations. If he were convicted of a felony here, could he -- like mobster Lucky Luciano -- be stripped of his citizenship and deported? Legally, yes. Practically, not very likely.

The Murdoch-controlled media reaction is interesting. In Britain, the police charge that his journals are leaking facts of the investigation to other outlets in order to undermine the probe. In the U.S. Murdoch’s influence has contributed to the polarization of our political dialog but has not given him anywhere near the power he enjoyed in the UK, despite the fact that a good half dozen active politicians are on his payroll -- some of them for seven-figure consulting fees others as performers on Fox News. Among his outlets here, there has been a pattern of avoidance regarding the U.K. scandal. Fox News and the New York Post have treated the story as a business yarn, granting it minimal coverage in out-of-the-way spots.


The very first edition of The Wall Street Journal, now the jewel in Murdoch’s newspaper crown. He bought the family-owned paper in 2007 for $5 billion.

The Wall Street Journal's considerable journalistic credibility is at stake in its coverage of this story. The set-up is not promising: the WSJ’s publisher is a former underboss of Murdoch's British media mob. In fact, he was once publisher of the notorious News of the World. When Murdoch bought the Journal, he complained that the stories were too long. Well, they remain long and he may think that’s a good thing now because it enables the paper to bury the fact that News of the World is owned by Murdoch three paragraphs up from the end of a twenty-paragraph story, where it will likely go unread. As the muck got deeper, a Journal editorial page columnist wrote a piece that tried to evade corporate responsibility for the scandal: “The tabloid excess on display here, we dare to suggest, is the British public's, for its acceptance of the tabloid proposition that movie stars, politicians and anybody deemed a celebrity has no rights—only supposed "real" people have rights.... Of course, as with all truly interesting phenomena, pundits now are trying to banalize the scandal by reducing it to one man, one company, one hobby- horse. Don't buy it.” Note that the one man and the one company are not even named! On another count, this is a classic dodge, like blaming a robbery victim for having had the bad judgment to buy jewelry.

The ultimate question is not what Murdoch knew and when did he know it. The buck stops at Murdoch’s desk whether he knew the nitty gritty details or just the broad strokes. And it is inconceivable he did not have at hand the broad strokes at very least; there is no way that the corruption was confined to the lower levels of the corporation. Anyone who has ever worked on a newspaper or for a TV news operation knows that low level people can’t spend the sort of money the journothugs were dispensing without getting a green light from the powers-that-be.

Case in point: Years ago I worked on an afternoon newspaper in New York where it was mandatory to get permission from the city editor to take a cab instead of a subway or bus to a story. In Murdoch's UK tabloid world, multiple private detectives were on six-figure yearly retainers and cops were being handed big payoffs to compromise investigations and reveal private details about the royals and civilians. Reporters and middle management don’t, can’t and won’t independently authorize expenditures like those.

***

The single best source for full details of this scandal is the Guardian newspaper, www.guardian.co.uk. Its coverage, especially that of reporter Nick Davies who has dug into the story for years, is Pulitzer-worthy, although that won’t happen because the Pulitzers are given only to American publications.

***

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]]> Wed, 13 Jul 2011 23:40:08 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=47#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=47 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=46

By George Merlis

I am going to write this piece without ever naming him, because some people just don’t have to be identified by name. Also, omitting his name eliminates the temptation to indulge in tasteless puns.

Now that media doesn’t have him to kick around any more they can get back to covering the real news, like Lindsay Lohan’s latest self-destructive adventures. If nothing else, the too long-running Twitter scandal has proven that the media certainly are slaves to the five F words we use in media training workshops: Fear, Fury, Fame, Fun and Fascination. The congressman's photo-sharing scandal had four of the five:

Fury -- The media love a good argument. With the Congressman trying to tough it out and most of his colleagues urging him to quit, they had one.

Fame -- While there are 435 members of Congress, too large a number for all to be famous, the fact that they hold one of those jobs means it takes only a little media attention to make any of them famous. Or, in this case, infamous.

Fun -- Even if he’d been named Smith or O’Brien, it would have been funny -- in a sad way. His name was icing on the comedic cake. And while most of the time network news anchors and reporters, when striving to be funny, fall flat on their faces, this time around it they got laughs by being straight-faced.

Fascination -- The fascination of a slowly-evolving car crash was at play here.


A fascinating question: How does a busy congressman find enough gym time to develop this ripped physique?

While the media must now find a new dead horse to beat, we can use the scandal as a teachable moment with two basic lessons.

Lesson One: Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. Okay, history is what happened far enough in the past for scholars to put events into perspective. How about a new twist on that: those who fail to study the news are doomed to repeat it?

It was slightly more than three months ago that New York Rep. Chris Lee resigned after he was outed for posting a shirtless photo of himself on Craig’s List, seeking whatever it is one seeks on Craig’s List with a shirtless photo. To Lee’s credit, he got out of town immediately after being exposed (first and last pun -- I promise). Lee didn’t try to lie his way out. Not 100 days later that lesson was lost on his fellow New York congressman, the boxer brief-wearing Twitterer.

(Let me digress here and note that boxer briefs are pointless, combining the worst features of both types of underwear. But they are just the sort of thing a politician would wear -- presumably inoffensive to both fans of boxers and fans of briefs.)

Lesson Two: The last of our Five Commandments of Media Training is: “Thou shalt not lie, evade, speculate nor cop an attitude.” The now ex-Congressman from New York lied, evaded, speculated and copped an attitude. His action prove once again -- as if proof were needed -- that the cover-up is worse than the original offense.

What might he have done? Again, studying the news would have given him clues. Our undie-Twitterer might, like Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, have ‘fessed up, apologized and saved his career.


Sen. Vitter. Telling the embarrassing truth saved his career.

In 2007, Vitter’s phone number was found in the records of a Washington, DC prostitution ring. Vitter did not say someone else had used his phone, as in “my Twitter account was hacked.” Instead, the senator apologized immediately: “This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible.” Vitter went on to win a 2010 primary and reelection to the Senate.

The public -- and the media -- love a comeback story as much as they hate a lie. So the boxer brief wearer might have announced at the outset: “I have a problem, I did a stupid, compulsive thing, and I've done it more than once. I’m sorry and I’m going get rehab and come back a better person.” That would have been better than the hacking lie, followed by the inability to identify the underwear and its contents, followed by the water torture drip-drip-drip of revelations, confessions, tears and the request for a leave of absence to seek unspecified professional help.

The "somebody hacked my Twitter account" lie was the first step down the road to inevitable resignation. After that egregious fib, the congressman’s career was doomed and all the evasions and attitude copping gained him nothing but three weeks of continual ridicule.

The main lessons of this teachable moment transcend sexual situations, of course. Any time there is a potentially embarrassing story, it’s best to get out in front of it and control the arc of the narrative with the truth.

One More Lesson

In media training, I tell clients to treat a microphone like a gun. Safety dictates that you treat a gun as if it’s always loaded. Treat a microphone as if it is always on, recording or broadcasting live; never say anything in proximity to a microphone that you don’t want the whole world to hear. Similarly, the internet is like a microphone. Never put anything out there than you don’t want the whole world to read or see. Remember, that WWW stands for World Wide Web, as in the whole wide world can see it.

***

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]]> Fri, 17 Jun 2011 02:56:00 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=46#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=46 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=45

By George Merlis

In January I posted a blog that advised against using the phrase "no comment" in an interview. And last month, I posted a story about two sad developments in local TV news.

Here's some follow-up on both posts:

NEVER SAY, “NO COMMENT.”

I am pretty sure I can state with certainty that NY Senator Charles Schumer does not read the Master the Media blog.

Maybe he should.

Back in January, I posted a blog: “Never Say, ‘No Comment.’” You can read it here.

It explained why it’s a dumb idea to use the phrase in an interview. (Short form explanation: I teach clients to use a hostile question by giving a short-form answer and then bridging to their agenda. If you say no comment, you’ve closed the door on using the question. You can’t very well say, “No comment, but let me tell you this.” No comment means you’re not going to say ANYTHING.)

Now every viewer of national TV news knows Sen. Schumer is drawn to cameras and microphones the way moths are drawn to light. (We used to call it Jessie Jackson Tropism). Someone with Schumer’s level of experience ought to know better than to use the dreaded “no comment.”

Ought to, but.....

At a Queens, NY news conference about the census, the senator was asked about a suit seeking elimination of a bike lane along the street he lives on, Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. On one hand, the groups filing the suit have close connections to Sen. Schumer’s wife. On the other, the senator is an enthusiastic biker. So it was only natural for a reporter to ask him where he stood on the suit.

“I am not commenting,” Schumer said. And, just in case there was any ambiguity in that response, he said it again, apparently with some heat: “I am not commenting.”

Asked the next day about his position, the senator repeated, “I am not commenting.” (This, the gerundial form of “no comment,” is as bad an answer as the unvarnished “no comment.”)


Ordinarily, Sen. Schumer has a lot to say to the media.

There was an iota of hope when one of Schumer’s aides advised a New York Times reporter to call the senator’s office to learn more about his position on the bike lane. The reporter did just that. The response from Sen. Schumer’s spokesperson: “The only thing I can say on the record is no comment.”

As the late comedian George Carlin said, “No comment IS a comment.”

LOCAL TV NEWS DISASTERS

Last month, I told of two local TV news developments that would have been funny if not for the fact that most people get most of their news from television:

1. Journalistically-challenged NewsFix, an anchorless newscast, made its debut on Tribune company’s Channel 39 KIAH in Houston, TX, replacing facts with sarcasm.

2. Bankrupt Providence, RI station WLNE preempted its 7 p.m. newscast for a Genie bra infomercial.

You can see the original story here.

Here’s a followup on those items:

KIAH continues its witless anchorless newscast, still voiced off-camera by a former radio shock jock. A headline on a Houston Chronicle story about NewsFix read, “Attitude trumps tradition on NewsFix.” After reading the story, it might just as easily have been headlined, “Attitude trumps journalism on NewsFix.” You can read the Chronicle story here.

Maybe all you need to know about NewsFix’s orientation is the title KIAH gives the man performing the role of news director: “Imaginer.” The article quotes NewsFix’s “Imaginer,” Gary Jaffe, as saying: "This newscast does have a point of view. It boils down to the individual personalities of the preditors (producers/editors). We try to keep it all factual."

TRY to keep it factual? Isn’t that the first job of TV news?

On a more positive note, WLNE was bought at auction by Citadel Communications for the bargain basement price of $4 million ($10 million less than it had sold for in 2007). Citadel has bold plans for the station, including switching over to high definition broadcasting. More importantly, though, Philip Lombardo, the CEO of Citadel, was quoted as having told the staff: “We don’t preempt the news for infomercials.”


Citadel CEO Philip Lombardo: It won't happen again.

PEABODY AWARDS FOR LOCAL NEWS EXCELLENCE

Continuing with positive news about local TV, three stations were recognized with this year’s Peabody Awards from the University of Georgia. The Peabody is known as broadcasting’s most prestigious honor.

Interestingly, with the exception of Dallas’ WFAA, none of those local station winners were in top ten markets. (Dallas is market number 6.)

WFAA won for an expose on government-funded career schools which failed to prepare students for careers. Other winners were WTHR in Indianapolis for an investigation of inflated job-creation statistics by state agencies and KSTP (Minneapolis-St. Paul) for an investigation into a Minnesota sailor’s accidental electrocution in Iraq.

To anyone who watches what passes for news on the network-owned stations in Los Angeles and New York, it will come as no surprise that none of the Peabody winners are owned and operated by the big four networks. All are affiliated: WFAA and KSTP with ABC, WTHR with NBC. In days gone by the networks showed the affiliates how news was done. Today it’s the other way around, but judging by the Peabody awards, the networks aren’t paying attention; the broadcast network news divisions were shut out. The only national TV news outlet that earned a Peabody was CNN for its coverage of the BP oil spill.

***

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]]> Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:43:01 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=45#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=45 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=42
Today two giants of the English language contest the usefulness of the phrase, “no comment.” The adversaries are Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, and the late George Carlin, a gifted comedian. More on them later. First a little background:

I tell participants in media training workshops avoid the phrase “no comment.”

The press spokesperson for one congressman clearly didn’t get the message. Here’s part of a story from ABC News online: “Rep. Dennis Kucinich is suing four vendors that supply the Congressional cafeteria because he bit into a sandwich wrap containing an unpitted olive, resulting in a cracked tooth for the Ohio Democrat. 

“When asked whether he could confirm or comment on the suit, a spokesman with Kucinich told ABC News ‘no comment, sorry’ and abruptly ended the phone call.” 

At least Kucinich’s spokesperson said he was sorry as he violated one of the fundamental rules of media mastery.

Why is “no comment” a bad idea? Because it eliminates the opportunity to get out a message. We teach a four-step process to get from a question you can’t or don’t want to answer to an agenda point you do want to make. The four steps are:
Acknowledge the question with a short form answer.
Bridge to your point using a phrase like, “on the other hand,” or “as a matter of fact.”
Deliver your agenda point.
And, finally, shut up: don’t revisit the off-point question.

For example, let’s take a question you can’t answer:
Acknowledge: “I don’t know, it’s outside my area of expertise.
Bridge: “But what I can tell you is...."
Deliver your agenda point.
Shut up.

Or, a question you just don’t want to answer:
Acknowledge: “I can’t answer that because..... (it’s a matter under litigation, I don’t have the relevant information, I can’t give out proprietary information.)
Bridge: “But what I can tell you is...."
Deliver your agenda point.
Shut up.

If your acknowledgement to a question is, “no comment,” you’ve slammed the door on the two most important steps: bridging and delivering your message. You can’t very well say, “No comment, but let me tell you this.” That doesn’t work; you’ve said you are not going to comment, meaning you are clamming up and not communicating.

Churchill vs. Carlin


The prime minister once said, “‘No comment' is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again." Maybe back in the 1940s it WAS a splendid expression. But not today. To quote George Carlin: "'No comment' IS a comment."


A Case in Point -- Sort Of

This would have been an terrible gaffe on the part of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs -- if it had been true. A recent Washington Post headline read: “White House: ‘No comment’ on Palin ‘Blood Libel' Debate.” That gave the clear impression that Gibbs had used the dreaded phrase. Here are the facts: At a press briefing, Gibbs was asked about ex-Gov. Sarah Palin’s speech condemning commentators who linked her rifle scope Congressional districts map to the Tucson shooting spree that killed six and wounded 14, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Did Gibbs reply, "No comment?" Quite the contrary, he bridged from the question to a point about his role as President Obama’s spokesperson. Here’s the verbatim exchange:

Question: “What is your view on Sarah Palin’s choice of words?”
Gibbs: “You know, I think there are plenty of people who can render opinions about that. I’m not going to do that. And I’m happy to talk about what the President said last night. I think that’s the role I’d best play.”

Neither the word “no” nor the word “comment” is in that answer. At very least, the Post headline was a careless distortion. At worst, it was unfair and slanted journalism. You can see it for yourself here.

“No comment” is the journalistic equivalent of invoking the Fifth Amendment in Congress or in court: you’re within your rights to use it, but it doesn’t look good.

Perhaps the best quote about “no comment” came from the Martha Mitchell, the wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, who spilled many beans to the media about the Watergate cover-up. Said Ms. Mitchell: "I don't believe in that 'no comment' business. I always have a comment."

***

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]]> Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:06:55 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=42#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=42 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=41

By George Merlis

Today's teachable moment brings together a false quote attributed to a Civil War general and a thoughtful column about Leo Tolstoy. Quite a stretch.

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest is often quoted as having said his successful battlefield doctrine was "to git thar fustest with the mostest."



What Gen. Forrest (above) actually said was "git thar fustest with the most men;" the more poetic version of the quote was invented by the New York Times in 1917 -- long after Forrest was dead and buried.

The tinkered-with version of the quote is a good strategy for winning media debates on controversial issues. Getting to the media "fustest" with the "mostest" frames the issue and defines the argument.

As David Brooks wrote on November 26th of this year (also in the New York Times): "Description is prescription. If you can get people to see the world as you do, you have unwittingly framed every subsequent choice."

Brooks was writing about Leo Tolstoy, who died exactly 100 years earlier. But the columnist and the general might just as well have been writing primers on communications in the modern media age.

Case in point: the much-discussed TSA enhanced screening practices put into effect at U.S. airports over the last several weeks.

To its collective discredit, the media -- in search of a juicy controversy -- promoted the salacious and invasive aspects of the TSA's new policy of subjecting random and not-so-random travelers to the choice between a backscatter X-ray (which enables a TSA operative to peer beneath a passenger's clothing) or a thorough frisking by a same-gender TSA agent. At the same time the media largely ignored the efficacy -- or lack thereof -- of those techniques in finding would-be terrorists.

A bed full of strange fellows protested the TSA practices from the start. Seizing on the irresistible-to-the-media sexual angle, the ACLU called the X-ray a "virtual strip search." A California man became a folk hero by telling a TSA agent poised to frisk him: “If you touch my junk I’ll have you arrested.” Once the screening practices were more widely put into effect, the internet came alive with protest. Politicians and media bloviators happily piled on.

It was curious to see pols and pundits who only last year cited as an unforgivable security lapse the unsuccessful Christmas Eve underwear bomber now protesting steps designed to stop that very sort of attempt. The irony appeared to be lost on both the hypocritical politicians and the memory-challenged media. (In the original instance, last year, these newly-minted privacy advocates conveniently ignored the fact that the underwear bomber slipped by Dutch, not TSA, security.)

Not to take up the cudgels of the TSA, the federal agency everybody loves to hate. Where, one might ask, was TSA in the privacy invasion controversy? It was playing a particularly lame game of defense. Emerging from a bubble and looking stunned that people would actually protest having their genitals viewed or probed by strangers, TSA spokespersons were perpetually a day late and an argument short in defense of the new policy.

Meanwhile, the media focused on a handful of disorganized and uncoordinated efforts to create a mass protest on the day before Thanksgiving, spreading enough fear about potential delays that some people stayed home and others arrived at the airport so early you'd have thought they were lining up outside a Target store for Black Friday sales.

The disruptions did not materialize. Of course, the media should have known better than to grant credence to disparate, disorganized internet mischief-makers. But, in the wake of the coverage granted every whimsical twist by the fringe minister who announced he would burn the Koran, why should we expect the media to judiciously weigh of the authority of any advocate or the merits of any argument?

The Teachable Moment

The teachable moment here is not for the media but for the TSA and any other government agency, company or other entity that may face a controversy. TSA should have taken two simple steps to gain control of the debate:

1. Recognize early on that its new policies would cause embarrassment to many travelers and so would be the subject of great controversy.
2. Produce its side of the argument and get "thar fustest with the mostest."

I mean “produce” in the television sense of the word: visually create the narrative. How? By filling a TSA operative's underwear with inert explosives and inviting the media to videotape him going though a conventional airport metal detector and boarding a plane. Then repeating the exercise for the cameras using the same operative wearing the same mock explosive-laden underwear and getting "caught" by the X-ray and/or the frisk.

This does not mean the TSA should have created a fake video story -- i.e. a video news release. It should have invited the media to tape its own coverage of a demonstration, a demonstration where inspectors were not forewarned. Going a step further, TSA could have permitted a few reporters to go through the process as would-be underwear bombers. The VNR option seriously lacks the credibility that the participatory option has in spades.

Paraphrasing David Brooks, "if TSA had gotten people to see the world as it does, it would have framed every subsequent choice."



Revealing: What the TSA Backscatter X-Ray Shows. It appears that prior to releasing these images to the media TSA rendered the faces totally unidentifiable using blunt-force Photoshop techniques. I've done some prudish cropping to the original as well.

Polls show that the flying public is more concerned with safety than with modesty, so had TSA gotten there "fustest with the mostest," it would have had control over the debate and not been on the defensive. Quoting yet another general, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, "The best defense is a good offense."

In any controversy, it's important to frame the debate, to get thar fustest and to remember that getting people to see the world as you do defines every subsequent choice. If you don't take the initiative, the other side will.

Now my TSA scenario works ONLY if X-ray and/or frisk actually identify suspect materials. There are serious critics who contend they do not. In fact, I had a first-hand experience that raised questions about the frisking for me. I was subjected to BOTH X-ray and frisking on November 15 at Orlando International Airport. Due to incomplete and garbled instructions from a TSA inspector, I failed to take my wallet out of my pocket for the X-ray, triggering the frisking. The frisk was insufficiently intrusive so that had I taped small amounts of plastic explosive to any or all of three exterior body locations, the frisker would have missed them. The bottom line on that score: if you’re going to be intrusive, be inclusive as well.

And, finally, a non-media observation: my combination X-ray and frisking kept me away from and out of line-of-sight of the plastic bins holding my property for a good five minutes. Nothing happened to my belongings, but I overheard one TSA agent telling another that an earlier passenger complained his watch had been stolen out of the bin while he was being subjected to enhanced screening. So if you're singled out for the X-ray or frisk experience, you'd be well advised to stash inside your carry-on luggage anything easily grabbed out of a bin.

***

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]]> Sat, 27 Nov 2010 04:50:31 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=41#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=41 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=40

By George Merlis

Thank goodness the election is finally over so local TV stations can go back to a steady diet of Toyota and Hyundai commercials squeezed between breathless reports on who has been bounced from “Dancing with the Stars.” We will not have to put up endless and mindless political attack ads that would have you believe that every Republican congressional candidate in the country was running against Nancy Pelosi and every Democrat was running against George W. Bush. (As an aside, I think it would be appropriate for the California Broadcasters Association to give Meg Whitman their Person of the Year award for single-handedly staving off television’s economic ruin by dropping more than $140 million of her own money into her unsuccessful Golden State gubernatorial run.)

Two recent stories -- one election related, the other not -- speak to the State of the Fourth Estate. In media training workshops, I label the five most fundamental rules of interviews as the Five Commandments.

The Fifth of those Commandments is: “Thou shalt not lie, evade, speculate nor cop an attitude.” Today we’ll look at a lie and an attitude.

The Lie
A very moving scene in the highly-praised theatrically-released documentary “Waiting for Superman” was staged for the cameras. It unspooled without being labeled as a staged scene so in my book it’s a lie, albeit a lie of omission.




Here’s the background:
“Waiting for Superman,” written and directed by Davis Guggenheim, is a look at the sorry state of public education in the United States. It focuses on a number of families trying to enroll children in charter schools, their only hope for a decent education.

Because there are many more applicants than there are spaces, the charter schools use lotteries to select their students. The climax of the film is a montage of anxious kids and parents, waiting as balls drop from spinners or names pop up randomly on computer screens. By this time we’ve gotten to know these kids and their their stories and we root for them to get accepted. We also know the schools they’ve applied to; we’ve seen their families visiting them or had tours by the dedicated educators running them.

Only a few of the kids in the film make it (the odds in some schools are worse than 30 to one!). The staged scene shows a mom, Maria, touring the Harlem Success Academy. She is so impressed that she tells Guggenheim, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45. Then that’s what we’ll do.” The problem is that Maria knew when she spoke those words that there would be no 5 a.m. risings; the scene was shot AFTER the lottery left her son, Francisco, out in the cold. Moreover, the Harlem Success Academy doesn’t even do solo parent tours of the facility. Guggenheim set it all up.

In justification, the documentarian told the New York Times: “We met her at the school but the cameras weren’t there, so we asked her to go back and tour the school. And as a filmmaker, I wanted to see her reaction to the school, and her genuine emotion. So that scene is real; her reaction, her talking to kids touring the school, is how she would play it.” Note the the mutually exclusive “is real” and “would play.” Just using the word “play” -- as in “play acting” -- is telling.

Everyone understands that the scenes of a doctor examining a patient and an office worker clacking away at his computer in documentaries are more or less staged. But in those cases they are reenactments of real activities, not scenes staged for emotional impact. The scene in “Waiting” was the reenactment of something that was never enacted in the first place.

Guggenheim was also the executive producer and director of the Academy Award-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.” The exposure of his lapse in “Waiting for Superman” not only undermines the credibility of that film, it also open up to challenge his earlier film and, along with it, the film’s assertions about global climate change.

In workshops I tell participants, “If you lie, the story becomes about the lie, not about your agenda.” Guggenheim’s visual lie in “Waiting for Superman” has now become the story and calls into doubt everything else in his film.

Copping an Attitude:
Katie Couric and the Great Unwashed



If anyone ought to know how to behave in an interview, it’s a professional who has conducted thousands of them. How, then, do we explain Katie Couric copping an attitude by telling Howard Kurtz, the Daily Beast’s Washington Bureau Chief, she enjoyed spending weeks on the campaign train, “touring what she calls ‘this great unwashed middle of the country’ in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.”

It’s clear from Kurtz’s construction that he’s picked apart a Couric statement, but “great unwashed” is directly quoted and Couric not only didn’t deny saying it, she confirmed and justified it with a Tweet. She (or whoever Tweets for her) wrote: “Dictionary.com ‘Great unwashed: the general public, populace or masses. Referring to overlooked people who r politically in the middle!”

That’s playing a little fast and loose with Dictionary.com. Its definition is “the general public, populace or masses.” It says nothing about “overlooked people” or people are “politically in the middle.” (An i.e. between “masses” and “referring” might have helped -- justas saying the school tour scene was staged would have taken the curse off Guggenheim’s lapse.)

While it may have been convenient for Couric to consult Dictionary.com, the definitive authority on the English language, The Oxford English Dictionary, characterizes “the great unwashed” differently. The OED defines it as a DEROGATORY reference to “the mass or ordinary people.”

In fact, the term was coined in the 19th Century by British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton who also created the cliche, “It was a dark and stormy night.” But Great Unwashed came to prominence when Victorian-era journalist Thomas Wright appropriated it as the title of his portrait of the denizens of London’s slums, a populace whose criminal instincts, Wright believed, had to be controlled by harsh punishment.

Couric earns $14 or $15 million a year; published reports have given both figures. (What's another million when you're in that pay range? Well, for one thing, it would hire, equip and dispatch between five and eight experienced producers who would actually COVER the news.) For someone atop the news pyramid, especially at a network that has just shed well over 100 news jobs, using the language of a 19th Century elite snob to characterize.... well, to characterize the rest of us, is copping an attitude on a grand scale.

***

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]]> Thu, 04 Nov 2010 23:52:08 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=40#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=40 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=37
The philosopher George Santayana is widely credited with the phrase, “Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” What he actually wrote was “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Perhaps history teachers and historians massaged the quote to enhance their discipline. In any case, in either formulation it is a recommendation for avoiding past mistakes.


Santayana on the cover of Time Magazine. When was the last time you saw a philosopher on the cover of ANY magazine?

The admirable crisis response and crisis communications by Johnson & Johnson’s in the 1982 Tylenol scare is studied in journalism, public relations and business courses. In that classic case, J & J recalled 31 million bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol after seven deaths in the Chicago area were linked to the drug. It turned out the deaths were part of a murder or extortion scheme and were in no way J & J’s responsibility. Someone stole packages of the drug from shelves in Chicago area supermarkets and drugstores, adulterated the tablets with cyanide and then replaced the bottles on the shelves. Despite an intensive federal and local investigation no one has ever been charged with the murders. A man named James W. Lewis was convicted of extortion when he demanded $1 million from J & J to stop the killings.

Johnson & Johnson won high praise for its swift action -- which cost it well in excess of $100 million, which was real money in 1982. At the time, the Washington Post wrote, “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster.” J & J won further widespread praise for being open and honest with the public as well as a place in crisis response textbooks.


A Johnson & Johnson news conference during the 1982 Tylenol crisis. The company won near-universal praise for its cooperative attitude toward authorities, customers and the media.


Fast forwarding to our own time, the New York Times ran a lengthy story on its business pages on August 21 headlined “In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do.” The story told of the public relations pratfalls taken over the last several months by BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs. Clearly the top brass of these companies had a Ferris Beuller day off when crisis communications was taught during their MBA programs, so they missed the lesson about Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 Tylenol response.

The Times might have added another corporate public relations pratfaller to that story: Johnson & Johnson. Apparently, the current top brass of J & J joined the BP, Toyota and Goldman execs-to-be and played hooky when the Tylenol case was taught. How do we know this? By J & J’s sluggish response to current crises. (Yes, crises; plural!) This year, after 20 months of consumer complaints, J & J recalled batches of Benadryl, Motrin, Rolaids, Simply Sleep, St. Joseph Aspirin and, ironically, Tylenol because of a sickening smell suspected to be caused by contamination with a chemical bearing the tongue-tripping name 2,3,6-tribromoanisole.

But wait, there’s more. J & J has multiple state attorneys general probing a series of other recalls of over-the-counter medications, the most serious being the firm’s reluctant April recall of 136 million bottles of liquid children’s medicines which had overly-high dosages of the active ingredient as well as contamination from metal particles.

The Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson is William Weldon, who may have missed the Tylenol class when they taught it at his alma mater, Quinnipiac University, but apparently made it to the class on executive compensation. J & J pays him $25.6 million a year, triple the average CEO compensation for big U.S. firms. Mr. Weldon appears to have been in class when cost-cutting was taught; he has slashed Johnson & Johnson’s work force by 9,000 employees.

After a pounding in the media and the threat of multiple investigations, J & J announced a restructuring of its manufacturing procedures and the creation of a new executive position charged with product quality. This begs two questions which were answered in no media account I read:

1. Was no one in charge of product quality at Johnson & Johnson before this?
2. If someone was in charge, was he among the 9,000 people who were laid off?

Which begs a third question: Why didn't the media ask the first two questions?

If nothing else, the Johnson & Johnson response gives this new twist to George Santayana’s observation: “Those who cannot remember the glorious past are condemned to fail to repeat it.”

***

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]]> Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:37:32 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=37#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=37 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=35
On June 4, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of allied forces in Europe, gave the go-ahead for the largest military operation in history, the June 6 amphibious assault by 170,000 men at arms against the German-held beaches of Normandy.

D-Day was a high-stakes, high-risk massive military operation and there were no guarantees it would succeed. So the day before the assault Ike prepared a crisis communications plan in case of failure. Here it is, in its entirety:



On that single piece of paper (which he misdated July 5 instead of June 5), Ike used a mere 66 words to set the responsibility and integrity bar high for all authority figures who would follow him: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.  My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available.  The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do.  If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” Ike then folded the piece of paper, put it in his pocket and waited to see if it would be needed.


June 5 -- the afternoon before D-Day. Ike chats with members of the 101st Airborne who will parachute behind German lines in a few hours. In his jacket pocket, neatly folded, is his note taking responsibility for failure should the mission end in disaster.

Ike’s lessons -- prepare a crisis communications plan and accept responsibility for your actions -- appear to have been lost in the mists of history. Today the typical response to crises is blame-shifting, finger-pointing and responsibility-shirking.

Which brings us to BP and the Gulf oil spill. Last time, I wrote about the company’s top brass and their unfailing knack for inserting their feet in their mouths almost every time they opened them to speak. This time I’d like to address BP’s crisis communications plan; if there was such a plan. BP seems not to have had a crisis management plan in the first place and you need a crisis management plan before you can create a crisis communications plan. If any company in the oil industry should have had such plans, it is BP.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” author George Santayana wrote in 1905. BP appears to suffer from severe near-term memory loss. Only five years ago an explosion at the company’s Texas City, TX refinery killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more. OSHA fined the company $87 million for failing to correct safety violations which had been called to BP’s attention by government inspectors. Four years ago, BP’s Alaska pipeline sprung a major leak, forcing the shutdown of one of the country’s largest oil fields. A criminal probe of the pipeline disaster resulted in BP paying a $20 million fine for allowing the pipeline to fall into a state of dangerous disrepair.

These incidents had me wondering whether it would not have cost less than the $107 million BP paid in fines to take the safety steps that would have avoided those catastrophes. Also, it made me wonder why a company hit with such fines and bad publicity would be anything but totally assiduous about safety compliance going forward. And why a company with such a history would not have robust crisis management and communications plans on the shelf and ready to deploy in the event of a new disaster.

In addition to a crisis management plan and a crisis communications plan, BP needed spokespersons attuned to the public. Instead it offered the media a CEO who told the Today Show he wanted his life back and a chairman who talked about the “small people” impacted by the spill.



Unempathetic spokesperson: BP's Tony Hayward


In “How to Master the Media” I devote a chapter to crisis communications plans. Here, in outline form is what a spokesperson needs to explain in a crisis:

I. How dangerous is this situation to the public, the economy, the environment.
A. If there is a direct danger, what individual steps should the public take
to mitigate the threat.
B. If there is no direct threat to individuals, how can they help others who may be threatened.
II. What steps are we -- the responsible entity -- taking to mitigate the situation and to see that it never happens again.
A. Does the public play any role in these steps?
III. How will the response allocate mitigation and recovery resources equitably and fairly.
IV. How will the response avoid squandering resources, including recovery personnel, material and funds.

In addition to those three points, there are four steps that go a long way toward making the crisis communications plan work and toward gaining public understanding of the disaster management plan:

I. Early response to the crisis.
II. Frequent, forthright and uncomplicated media accessibility to spokespersons and to mitigation efforts.
III. Consistent candor.
IV. Empathy.

BP's media communications were less-than-forthright and it tried to limit access to cleanup areas, sometimes using a heavy hand to do so. It was less than candid with the media and with Congress and we've already seen how its top people lacked empathy for the tens of thousands impacted by the spill. So the company failed with the last three steps and its evasions, denials, and finger-pointing went a long way toward nullifying the fact that it was on the scene and communicating very soon after the blast, fire and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon and the world record oil spill that followed.

What would the company’s response would have been if someone of General Eisenhower’s integrity had been Supreme Commander of BP? Ike’s D-Day invasion, although one of history’s bloodiest and most violent battles, was a success. The general and his staff had crafted a massive plan, scrupulously oversaw its details, cut no corners, spared no expense and suffered no fools. So had an Eisenhower been at the helm of BP, perhaps there would have been no crisis to respond to. But if there had been, it’s likely that the soundbite we would be discussing would have been, “If any blame or fault attaches, it is mine alone,” and not BP President Tony Hayward’s, “You know, I’d like my life back.”

***

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]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:39:39 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=35#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=35 http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=33

By George Merlis

Television news at both the network and local levels is in a state of flux -- and the flow seems to be to be going in the direction of less news. News managers are desperately chasing a dwindling audience and that chase, thus far totally fruitless, is exacting a grievous price on coverage of real news.

Two cases in point, one national the other local: The Stars vs. the Grunts and
Real Housewives of KNBC News.

Stars vs. Grunts

I was doing a media training workshop for an executive in a Euro zone country and learned from him that in the zone it is considered bad form for a CEO to earn more than 20 times the average wage of his workers. Here in the U.S. CEOs typically earn 100 to 200 times the salary of the average worker.

In the world of television news, the earnings disparity between the stars who read the news and the grunts who actually commit journalism and gather it has been growing for a very long time and has reached 100-to-one in the most egregious case: Katie Couric’s $15 million contract to anchor the CBS Evening News.


CBS's Couric has a lot to smile about

When I joined CBS News in 1982 I was stunned to find that the so-called Tiffany network was outgunned and outmanned on every front by my alma mater, ABC News. ABC devoted more and more advanced resources to news coverage than CBS. Soon after I got there CBS underwent an economic contraction and the already-skimpy news division suffered large cuts. I was told to slash the budget of the CBS Morning News by ten percent; I could cut anything except the multi-million dollar salaries of my two anchors. I managed shave ten percent out of the budget without firing anybody by cutting back on the number of field stories I would do and booking more in-studio interviews, reducing satellite time and eliminating some studio time and tape facilities. But the president of CBS News, referring to the famous CBS skyscraper headquarters building, told me: “Black Rock wants to see blood -- fire somebody.” I fired someone bearing the name of a famous media company, figuring she would find new employment in one of her family’s many outlets. She did. But I could have achieved the ten percent saving without losing a soul and without compromising the journalism of my show if I had been able to shave a million or so from the anchors’ salaries. The way I see it, after your first two or three million in salary, do your really need more? Especially if you come to work at 4:30 a.m. and leave at 4:30 p.m. You don’t have time to spend your money.

The epidemic of inflated anchor salaries began when ABC News lured Barbara Walters from NBC News in 1976, paying her network news’ very first million-dollar salary. At the time, I was at ABC, producing Good Morning America, and was stunned that Walters was being paid about as much money as my entire on-air team combined and twice the salary then paid the President of the United States. I asked myself how could someone reading news about the President be worth twice as much as the President? Walters was also paid about three times the salary of her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner. Up until the Walters deal, network news stars generally earned about seven or eight times the salary of the news-gathering grunts. Walters’ seven-figure salary put an end to all that.

CBS’s Couric, is the highest-paid newscaster in history. Her salary sucks the journalistic oxygen out of CBS News. While she continues collecting her full paycheck for anchoring a news show that has been consistently mired in third place, CBS is firing about 120 news staffers.

Over at ABC no one makes that kind of money, but there is a bench full of high-priced anchor talents -- Good Morning America, the Evening News, Nightline -- and ABC is firing some 400 real news-gatherers, a quarter of its staff. Adding insult to injury, shortly after announcing its newsroom massacre, ABC News hired yet another costly star for its stable: Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s globe-trotting foreign correspondent.


Christiane Amanpour: Out of the cold and into ABC's fold.

Amanpour signed on to replace George Stephanopoulos as the host of the Sunday morning “This Week” program. So the network is taking a real reporter, paying her much more money and then having her NOT report. Instead she will preside over ABC’s weekly presentation of politicians delivering well-rehearsed talking points. Talk is cheaper than journalism. And as long as the networks pay a disproportionate amount of money to their anchors, we’re probably going to be getting a lot more talk and a lot less news.

***

The Real Housewives of KNBC

KNBC, the NBC owned and operated station in Los Angeles, produces a dismal newscast. In the past, I’ve devoted a blog entry to one lapse and written to the FCC to (fruitlessly) complain about its shoddy journalism. Finally I stopped watching, which is probably a good thing for my blood pressure because it meant I missed a recent miscarriage of journalism. It seems the station, had one of the women from the Bravo network's “reality” show “Real Housewives of Orange County” “report” a story about credit cards.


"Real" housewife Vicki Gunvalson, KNBC's reporter in a staged news segment on credit card regulations.

This high jink had consequences. (I’m assuming jink is the singular of jinx, although I can’t find justification for that usage in the dictionary.) Steve Lange, Vice President for Content, the minor-mind of the misadventure, was sacked for not living up to KNBC’s journalistic standards. KNBC’s journalistic standards are a joke; the bar is set so low the disgraced Jayson Blair, the New York Times faker of news stories, could meet KNBC’s standards. The Los Angeles Times ran an excellent account about Lange’s lapse.

Did you notice Lange’s former title? “Vice President, Content.” Used to be, the person who ran the news operation at a TV station was called a news director. Now he’s a content provider. Just the title speaks reams about the state of the fourth estate at NBC’s owned and operated stations. Maybe KNBC’s next “content provider” can add some news to the “content” mix. Don’t hold your breath for that.

Final note: Jayson Blair is now a “life coach.” His web site promotes his credentials but conveniently omits his embarrassing New York Times career. Bottom line: He still can’t report the facts!

***

For more on Experience Media Consulting's services, click here.WWW.MasterTheMedia.com

To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.

]]> Fri, 28 May 2010 04:55:59 GMT http://blog.masterthemedia.com/comments.php?id=33#comments http://blog.masterthemedia.com/blog.php?id=33