Media: Best Friend and Enemy

We all know how important the media is for PR. We were all told we needed to build good relationships with journalists. We even had a unit, Media Relations 250, on how to maintain good relationship with the media. However, we also know it is impossible to control the message; journalists publish or broadcast anything they want to.

Recently, I came across a news article in a Mauritian newspaper about a crisis of an organisation which is a client of the PR consultancy I am doing my internship with. Several employees of the company were refusing to abide by some regulations and were threatening to strike. The journalist who reported the crisis took into consideration only the point of view of the employees. It was written in the article that some employees were threatened to be sacked for some invalid reasons and the reporter did not mention the reasons he or she considered as 'invalid'. How far is that ethical? What was the aim behind it? I don’t know. I only know that the content of the article portrayed a bad image of the company.

I used that case study in a presentation last week and asked the other students how they perceived the company. They all gave positive comments. I then showed them the news article with emphasis on specific paragraphs and asked them again how they perceived the company. I received only negative comments. Some even told me that the company was unethical.

A single news article changed completely the students’ perception of the company. Even if the whole truth was not reported in the article, the readers believed what they read in the papers. This is normal because the media should normally be trustworthy and reliable. No matter what good actions the company did before and the good services it provides everyday, a single news article succeeded in affecting negatively its image.

Coming back to what really happened. The journalist did not mention anywhere in the article why these regulations were implemented. Of course, there were relevant reasons to that. The most important one: for the safety of the employees! And there were no threats of sacking, few employees were suspended for some days because they refused to abide by the rules.

How did the PR agency react to that? A media release was issued with all the reasons and benefits behind those new regulations. The release was sent to several media outlets and it was even published later in the evening on the company’s facebook account. The next day, several newspapers published articles on the reasons and benefits.

The media affected negatively the image of the company, the media itself helped in bringing back the good reputation of the company.