This weblog attempts to shine a brighter light on the subtle role public relations plays in politics, popular culture, journalism, business/finance, entertainment, technology, social media, consumer marketing and sports.
This morning, my Twitterstream revelled in a rare, but full-throated apology from Apple CEO Tim Cook for the widely derided shortcomings in the iOS 6/iPhone 5's Maps app. In it he wrote:
"At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better."
What's more, Mr. Cook goes so far as to encourage those who have Apple's new iOS 6 mobile operating system to use his competitors' solutions:
"While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app."
No Apologies
In this day and age, we've grown accustomed to PR-driven apologies from celebrities to business executives when mistakes are made (and the news media pounces on them). While we've seen a fair share of public apologies in the political arena, the acrimony that permeates this particular election has, for some, seems to have ignored the importance of being earnest, as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow points out.
A few months back, I lamented how one prominent CEO blew his chance to establish trust with his company's key stakeholders by offering an apology as a firestorm raged. That missed opportunity to engage his company's key publics has, IMHO, plagued the company to this day.
I'm talking of course about Facebook and my post "Should Mark Zuckerberg Apologize" wherein I chastised the youthful founder/CEO for going MIA during a seminal moment in the company's short history.
Granted, Mr. Zuckerberg was in Italy enjoying his honeymoon, but I still wonder whether some words to the millions of small investors he personally encouraged to invest in his vision might have had an ameliorating effect on the troubles Facebook has to this day in building stakeholder confidence.
Did his legal and PR consiglieres thwart any such apology at the time? Or maybe his staff cowed to his "Do Not Disturb I'm on My Honeymoon" instructions. We'll probably never know.
Had Mr. Zuckerberg stepped up at that pivotal moment, he might have said:
Dear Facebook shareholders and our community,
From its very beginnings, Facebook has strived to fulfill a mission to connect and inspire people in a way that had never before been possible. We asked you to take part in this journey by joining our global community. As a soon-to-be public company, we also asked you to consider taking an equity stake. Many of you did.
For a variety of reasons, our initial public offering this week did not come off as we had planned. For this, I would like to personally apologize and pledge to work doubly hard to fulfill the vision we have for the company -- a vision I hope you still share.
We have accomplished a great deal in our short history, but there's so much more that lies ahead. I remain confident we will deliver on the promise of Facebook, and I thank you for your continued trust and support.
Sincerely,
Mark Zuckerberg
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Facebook, Inc.
Kudos to Apple CEO Tim Cook (and his PR advisors) for coming clean in the face of considerable adversity.
Queued up outside Apple's Fifth Ave store in NYC (Scott Stein/USA Today)
Taking a cue (or rather a queue) from Bloomberg BusinessWeek's new tech/multimedia reporter Sam Grobart, who himself took a stylistic cue from his former Times colleague David Pogue, I caught Sam's video clip today about the queues growing outside Apple Stores everywhere. His take: those lining up have other motives for being there than just tomorrow's purchase of the critically-acclaimed iPhone 5.
Mr. Grobart traipsed over to the iconic Apple Store on New York's Fifth Avenue to find out who in reality were these Apple fan boys (and girls) sleeping on the sidewalk for days, weeks. In his video segment "Fans Camping Out for IPhone Are Not Who You Think," he learned that:
"None of them were actually there do get an iPhone...I mean, yes, they're all there do get an iPhone but that was secondary to the publicity stunt of it all....They're all representing a company they work for, a sponsor or an app that they've made....Something as simple as base consumerism has been corrupted by corporate interests."
You watch:
As suggested in my tweet the other night, the timing of the PR embargo lift for iPhone reviews no doubt catalyzed consumers to queue up, which in turn will result is resulting in unfathomable amounts of news coverage, including this photo spread from CNN "How to Wait in an iPhone 5 Line." (Groan.)
Not ones to miss a news beat, smart PR peeps everywhere are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get their clients in on some of that action.The LA Times also picked up on this meme in its coverage of the queues. The sub-head read:
"Many of those camping out to buy Apple's iPhone 5 when it goes on sale Friday are also hawking brands, blogs and products or looking to score some easy cash."
It cited startup TaskRabbit:
"In San Francisco, Hufnagel responded to a post on TaskRabbit, a website where users can outsource household tasks and errands, and agreed to wait in line at an Apple store for five days for $1,500. Once word got to TaskRabbit, employees dropped off a bunch of company apparel and signs that read: "#SkipTheLine with TaskRabbit." Hufnagel — who set up a green REI tent, yoga mat and folding chair in front of the store — also made his own sign promoting his Twitter handle."
The same ghoes for the lines on the east coast where many people queued up to capitalize on the inherent news interest in the phenomenon:
"In New York, shoppers have been camped outside the Fifth Avenue store since Sept. 13, including Jessica Mellow, a face and body artist and model who is touting her blog, iPhoneWhatever.com, while wearing a shirt she got free of charge from Gazelle, a company that buys used electronics. Also in line: people promoting mobile banking app Refundo and Apple line regular Hazem Sayed, who is using his No. 1 spot to get publicity for his social media app Vibe."
It may be "corruptive corporate interests," as Mr. Grobart notes, but it's also enterprising and smart on the part of the communications consiglieres representing these commercial interests. I'll never forget during the Major League baseball strike, back in the day, we dressed up an agency intern as a stick of Rolaids, i.e., the Rolaids Relief Man, to pay a visit to the scores of reporters and TV news crews hanging out at the hotel awaiting news. Needless to say, our intern had his 15 minutes of fame!
As nimble and creative as some PR people are in recognizing those natural news hooks to leverage, I've never been one who bought into the strategy of dressing up like an idiot and waving signs outside the Today Show or GMA's studios. That, in my opinion, will probably require an appearance by the real Rolaids Relief Man.
(BTW - my new iPhone is coming via FedEx tomorrow courtesy of VZW online.)
UPDATE (10pm ET): The first iPhone 5s go on sale down under, but Apple PR intercedes to thwart the first people in line from making the purchase. They were a team from a mobile comparison website looking for a little publicity. Gizmodo has the story.
The executive editor of an influential technology news site recently replied to my email about a client's breakthrough new technology. He tried it, had Web connectivity issues, and quickly declared:
"Seriously, I've looked at several such services, and this is not special. In fact, it's a generic Windows DaaS service. So, please, stop pitching it to me."
Wrong. It was no such thing and nothing like it currently exists, but I guess the two minutes we learned he spent testing the service was sufficient for him to reach his erroneous conclusion. I acquiesced and cut off any further engagement.
A contributor to a prominent business publication recently interviewed a client about a new financial service. The piece was posted online, but contained several significant factual mistakes. I asked my client to write directly to the reporter pointing out the errors and asking for them to be corrected -- at least in the online version. The reporter wrote back claiming that she had fact-checked the article and refused to make the changes - even though they were clearly incorrect.
Was it laziness, sloppiness or just plain arrogance that prompted this "holier than thou" attitude? And am I the only one who has observed a dramatic rise in the number of such reporting mistakes? It's no wonder newsmakers would rather bypass the editorial filter altogether to communicate directly with their key constituencies.
Writer Michael Lewis
The latest affront to the PR profession -- as if PR pros needed more agida -- arrived in July via a column titled "Latest Word on the Trail? I Take It Back" from New York Times media industry reporter Jeremy Peters.
Mr. Peters followed it up last week with a second post in which he called out one of today's most respected non-fiction writers Michael ("Moneyball," "Liars Poker") Lewis for agreeing to let President Obama's PR team pre-approve their boss's quotes for a substantive profile in Vanity Fairmagazine:
"Like other journalists who write about Washington and presidential politics, Mr. Lewis said that he had to submit to the widespread but rarely disclosed practice of quote approval."
This revelation, which (uncomfortably) broadens the long-standing practice of entertainment PR types leveraging access to their celebrity clientele to gain more control over the end editorial product, set outraged media pundits' tongues-a-waggin: Here's a sampling:
Vanity Fair's Michael Lewis gave WH quote approval for piece in which he had amazing access to Obama, staff for 8 mos. thebea.st/OnOPOX
— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) September 11, 2012
Access porn. Read about the White House letting Michael Lewis all the way in for his Vanity Fair piece. nyti.ms/QhkJsw With a catch.
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) September 11, 2012
Michael Lewis is a fantastic writer, but in giving White House quotes veto, he failed basic journalism nyti.ms/U6pki7 (as so many do)
— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) September 11, 2012
Last night, the Times's David Carr fueled the ire with a piece titled "The Puppetry of Quotation Approval," which instantly prompted a whole new round of PR bashing and journalistic hand-wringing. In it, Felix Salmon of Reuters said:
"Requests for quote approval rise in direct proportion to the involvement of P.R. people. As he flack-to-hack ratio continues to rise, the number of requests for quote-approval will continue to rise as well."
(Hmmm. I wonder if Felix's quote was procured via email?)
Others:
@carr2n: good piece, David -- keep fighting the good fight :-)
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 17, 2012
"The quotation is the last refuge of spontaneity in an age of endlessly managed messages" @carr2n on a hated PR habit nyti.ms/QiS6Ol
— A Edgecliffe-Johnson (@Edgecliffe) September 17, 2012
Listen, I'm a huge fan of @Carr2n's, and a big booster of quality journalism. I've publicly lamented the degradation of this noble and essential profession. But, does anyone realistically believe that the shortcomings in journalism can be laid at the feet of PR "puppets" who mostly seek to have their clients POVs recorded and reported accurately? Doesn't advance fact-checking and quote review actually make for more accurate reporting?
Ferguson's Discredited Piece
Who wasn't surprised when it was learned that Newsweek, in defense of its much-maligned Niall Ferguson take down of Pres. Obama's economic policies, hadn't fact-checked articles for years. (Maybe it wasn't so surprising given Mr. Ferguson's many dubious assertions.) And hasn't a site like the Huffington Post taken this concept to a new level by turning over its editortial real estate to "experts" who enjoy seeing their views published completely absent a journalistic filter?
Even Mr. Carr acknowledges:
"Reporters don’t generally record most interviews and can’t always type or write as quickly as a subject is speaking. I have been written about enough to know that what appears in quotation marks is sometimes an approximation of what is actually said. Sources want to protect themselves from routine distortion."
Some parts of the practice, I believe, do fall into a black-and-white realm. The idea that a reporter must send a written version of a quotation to a source or his press representation for approval or tweaking is the extreme version of the “quote approval” practice and it ought to be banned in a written rule.
In fact, I strongly urge all news organizations to forbid this practice, and, if they do, they will surely find strength in numbers. News sources – particularly those in the political sphere – do want to get their message out. They will not stop speaking to The Times or The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post because of such a policy.
She's right. The Times, The Journal and the Washington Post carry too much weight (and social influence) for political newsmakers (and their PR consiglieres) to bypass altogether. Yet, the goal for reporters should be to get it right...not to publish the most inflammatory spur-of-the-moment link bait that may or may not be captured verbatim.
If this means working more closely with newsmakers and their designated PR reps, I'm all for it. However, should PR people with high in-demand clients have the right to pre-approve the content of a story, quotes included? Mostly no, but if it helps ensure a story's accuracy by moe closely reflecting a newsmaker's POV, yes. It's not black & white.
This wrenching news just in: a startup called YourMechanic has won the much-hyped TechCrunch Disrupt startup showcase in San Francisco this week. The problem it solves: "getting your car fixed or serviced without having to leave home." Geesh. The new techonomy is even sticking it to the local auto repair shop! Frankly, this doesn't bother me given my painful personal experiences with car mechanics.
A Public Sighting at TechCrunch Disrupt SF
As my Twitterstream filled with breathless reports from TC Disrupt, not the least of which was Mark Zuckerberg's first public appearance since getting married...oops, I mean Facebook's calamitous IPO and the subsequent death spiral of its stock price, I welcomed a return to the cocoon of New York's buoyant tech scene and specifically, the September New York Tech Meetup. It was a good one.
No crowd-sourced auto repair solutions here. (Must be a California thing.) Rather, the sold-out audience of 800+/- at NYU's Skirball Auditorium, plus a couple hundred more watching the live video stream from New Work City (courtesy of new NYTM sponsor: Major League Baseball Advanced Media), and scores more at Foursquare's New York headquarters, witnessed an eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, each with 3-5 minutes to win the hearts and minds of this most discerning audience of New York's tech cognoscenti. And they didn't fail to please.
Like the myriad showcase/demo events that abound, tech entrepreneurs identify a shared problem and deploy their coding and social media acumen to try to resolve it. One of the evening's early presenters was Jeanne Pinder who spent more than a decade covering healthcare for The New York Times. Unlike her former Times colleague Steve Labaton who took his buyout and joined "the dark side," Ms. Pinder took her buyout and joined the light side.
Specifically, she created a company aptly called ClearHealthCosts.com, which uses crowd-sourcing and other techniques to shine light on the shadowy world of health care provider costs. The disparity in prices for medical procedures and prescription drugs from one provider to the next astounded the audience. $1200 for a drug prescription versus $2.50, $400 for an MRI versus $2300...you get the scandalous picture. It was a noble and important undertaking succinctly presented with a quiet confidence by Ms. Pinder.
Along a similar vein (forgive), we heard Katy Peters present TurboVote, which pushes electronically or via snail mail up-to-date who, what, where and when for exercising your most important civic duty. While the free (or postage only) service will not neutralize the GOP's insidious efforts to disenfranchise millions of Democratic-leaning voters in this country, it will let you know what form of ID you will need to cast your vote.
As the election approaches, I was also glad to see other tech-driven apps and initiatives to spur wider voter participation or cut through the candidates' specious advertising claims. If the FTC can regulate dubious consumer product advertising, why can't it do the same for uber-dubious political advertising? And what happened to the TV industry's standards & practices departments? But I digress.
Brewster's Steve Greenwood
No Tech Meetup would be complete without some novel new approaches to better organizing one's work or private life. There were several that struck a resonant chord with this PR person/blogger/Dad/husband (but not in that order). Brewster (love the unorthodox name) seeks to organize your disparate address books and social contacts into a single, searchable and visual database via an intuitive interface on your iPhone (iOS-only for now).
The startup was founded by Steve Greenwood whom I met in Dumbo eons ago when his last company Drop.io sought to reinvent how newsmakers presented their media assets for public and journalist consumption. That company was purchased in 2010 by Facebook. The Times's Jenna Wortham recently noted: Steve is betting "that the average person is juggling at least a thousand contacts and could use a little help." You bet.
Matt Hall of Docracy
I also enjoyed hearing Matt Hall take the audience through the underlying premise of Docracy, which has open-sourced the challenge small businesses and entrepreneurs face in obtaining quality legal documents. (He noted that the current online offerings for such legal documents and those hawking them suck.) He showed how Docracy allows for collaboration between an employer and prospective employee in the case of a job offer letter. In a follow-up conversation, Matt assured me that the documents themselves will remain free, and that Docracy will provide premium tools to enhance the user's experience with the service.
The Biebs in a Movable Ink-Created Email
Not unrelated was a company called CM.PLY, which offers "social media disclosure" that companies can readily deploy when mounting sweepstakes, promotions and other public-facing endeavors that require legally vetted language. And for the email set, a company called Movable Ink demo'd one of its apps that lets you grab rich media content from anywhere on the web, convert it to HTML and insert it effortlessly into the body of an email. Very cool.
Two of the more buzzworthy startups were VoiceBunny and Condition One. VoiceBunny is a platform that uses crowdsourcing and an algorithm to help anyone find just the right person to record and deliver a voice-over. Just put out the request to VoiceBunny's community of John Cameron Swayzes and within 30 seconds you have a professional voice-over...at a tiny fraction of the professional cost.
VoiceBunny was mildly reminiscent of Project Noah (August NYTM), a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere. Anyone can geo-post a sighting in nature, and within a few minutes, the global community would identify it.
The evening ended with a demo I've seen before as a judge in another mini-showcase co-sponsored by NYTM. It was for Condition One, which call itself "the next generation of powerful, immersive video experiences." Hyperbolic? Hardly, judging from the reaction of the crowd. I grabbed some video:
Oh, and btw, the inimitable Mark Cuban also thinks Condition One is the future of video. He put a half mill into the company. Good enough for me.
Back in the day, I had the good fortune to work on the introduction of Brand Asset Valuator, Y&R's seminal study that turned conventional wisdom on its head about how brands are built. Through thousands of interviews across dozens of countries, Y&R concluded that a brand's "Esteem" is derived through "Relevance" and "Differentiation," and amplified with "Familiarity" (Knowledge). The acronym FRED surfaced in the study's first iteration.
Rolls Royce, for example, is highly differentiated but not all that relevant to people's lives, whereas Kodak is/was highly relevant, but not all that differentiated. A then-ascendant Starbucks was both relevant and differentiated.
I always felt that the study fell short on its promise for not addressing the distinct roles each marketing discipline - advertising, PR, direct and brand identity - played in the brand-building equation. PR's ability to generate third-party (editorial) validation, for example, could create differentiation, while advertising's ability to amplify bolstered familiarity.
As much as Y&R Inc. touted the "whole egg" approach, which it pioneered and cultivated among its agencies, I rarely saw how this synergistic methodology created something bigger than any of its unilateral parts. We did however advise our clients that news outreach should always pre-date any advertising campaign. We also saw how compelling advertising creative could in and of itself generate news coverage.
In the last week or so, two thought leaders (and friends) plying roday's changed marketing paradigm -- Shift's Todd Defren and Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang -- weighed in with posts that attempt to sort out the relationship between the different kinds of media plays now at a marketer's disposal, i.e., "earned," "paid," "owned," and "shared." I'll let you figure out which corresponds to those of yesteryear. Hint: shared and owned were not yet in the picture.
Their posts take the conversation that Forrester started in December 2009 (and I revisited in 18 months later) to the next logical place. This past summer Jeremiah and his colleague Rebecca Lieb took the lead to develop an Altimeter Group white paper on the earned, paid, and owned media equation. This past weekend, Jeremiah built on that in his post that by focused on "converged workflows" in an environment when the lines between the disparate marketing disciplines have intractably blurred:
"As the industry starts to combine these often disparate channels, we’ll see new forms of workflows emerge that coordinate all these channels.
Converged Media Workflow via Altimeter Group
He defined a "Converged Media Workflow" as:
"...a simple yet comprehensive diagram that represent complex streams that coordinate paid, owned, and earned channels in a holistic manner across an entire customer experience –beyond a siloed approach. As a result, the entire customer experience has a greater net benefit to customers and brands than individual deployments."
Earned Media Hub Strategy (via Shift Communications)
Giving props to Jeremiah, Todd Defren also looked at the integration of earned, owned and paid, but clearly gives more credence to PR and its grounding in the earned media space. He also bucketed "shared" media, i.e., those RTs, Likes, Pins, and Shares, into the "earned" category:
"...the value of Earned Media is only growing, especially if by “earned media” you include in your definition the unbiased, 3rd party citations of consumers themselves, a.k.a. Word of Mouth. And why wouldn’t you include “Social” under the “Earned Media” banner?"
I think in a sense he's right. First, studies have shown that most of the dominant online conversations we stumble across in our social networks originated from a traditional media sources. Today, IMHO, these extend beyond The New York Times and Reuters to include TechCrunch, Politico, The Daily Beast and countless others. With regard to "social" falling into the "earned" category, one could say that catalyzing a community to share content is indeed an earned achievement.
Both posts provide graphically rendered sequences to demonstrate how a story meme might unfold across all media channels (and spur action) - the goal for all digital marketers, right? Todd's example started with an earned mainstream news story, which he called:
"the most valuable component of a client’s communications strategy."
He described that it's no longer enough to let a single news story -- in this case in USA Today -- find a voice on its own. There are actions that communications professionals can take to amplify and extend the digital footprint of that story that accrues to the client's benefit. Jeremiah, on the other hand, looks at varied "convergent workflows:"
"Re-purposing the same content on each channel is not s recipe for success, as each provides a unique opportunity, challenge, and therefore approach. Converged Media utilizes two or more channels of paid, earned, and owned media. It is characterized by a consistent storyline, look, and feel."
I agree with Jeremiah that there is not a single template for workflow convergence that applies to every campaign, and that content should be relatively consistent from channel to channel:
"Although we expect many workflows to emerge...we frequently heard that analysis of social content was often a precursor to content creation by the brand."
I also believe that while shared media may be earned, it is actually a desired bi-product of an effective workflow of paid, earned and owned media. More often than not, it starts with a compelling news story, but not always since earned editorial coverage is hardly a given. A cool advertising execution -- posted freely on YouTube -- can have the same reverberating effect. So can a paid TV spot or sponsored story on Twitter or Buzzfeed, which Richard Edelman recently called "Going in the Back Door."
Courtesy of Gini Dietrich & Geoff Livingston
As someone who has devoted his career to understanding the mechanisms by which a "story" catches fire in an impossibly fragmented media environment, I am buoyed by the fact that this conversation has really ramped up. I also recognize that traditional organizational structures continue to prevent (still) siloed marketing professionals from playing nicely together in the sandbox.
Hopefully these two posts and the others to which Jeremiah linked on his site will accelerate the organizational changes needed to empower a new breed of digitally smart and versatile marketers. For PR pros, it's no longer sufficient to rely on earned media coverage to drive action. A good catalyst, yes, but it's how you merchandise that coverage that matters today -- even if it means paying (God forbid) for amplification in the mediaspheres.
Of the hundreds of clients and client projects on which I've worked over a fairly lengthy career, there are but a handful that I can say remain indelibly etched in my memory.
They include the Broadway opening of David Merrick's "42nd Street," Michael Jackson's TV spots for Pepsi, the privacy fight for Dale Earnhardt's family following his untimely death, the 100th anniversary of the Ochs-Sulzberger family ownership of The New York Times and the newspaper's first color edition, the 150th anniversary of The Associated Press, the redesign of the U.S. currency, the U.S. Presidential Debates, the September 11th Fund, and a few others.
There was one campaign that perhaps stands above them all for both the duration of my involvement (eight years) and its historic permanence. It was the public relations work to support the site, design, construction and dedication of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
That memorial almost never came to be, or at least not in its current location nestled between the edifices that stood for the two previous centuries: the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The potential derailment of this now cherished memorial was in part due to an aberrant journalistic practice that lingers to this day, but may finally be getting its comeuppance.
It's the notion of "false equivalency" or as The New York Times's new public editor Margaret Sullivan called it in her piece posted yesterday: "false balance:"
"...the equal and ultimately meaningless quoting of both sides in every story, on every subject."
If you're a PR person trying to sway public opinion, false balance can be a very good thing if the balance happens to be tipped in favor of your client's POV. If it's not, it can be a very frustrating exercise to try to inject counter-balancing facts into an often pre-determined story angle. It's all the more difficult in today's media ecosystem where many traditional news organizations have been supplanted by commentary posing as journalism.
World War II Memorial Dedication Day (May 29, 2004)
Once the World War II Memorial design and site were selected, an organization called Save the Mall arose to mount a challenge to positioning the memorial on the
"sacred ground" of the National Mall.
The group armed itself with three World War II veterans, one self-described architectural historian, and many specious talking points including one that postulated that if built, the WWII Memorial would compromise the aquifer under it causing the Washington Monument to topple.
Memorial supporters numbered many architects and over 11 million World War II veterans, including the rank and file of the VFW and American Legion. What was disheartening, if not frightening was that the news media felt obligated to allocate an equal if not greater amount of column inches and airtime to the protestations of what many would reasonably call a fringe group.
Did this group have the right to have its voice heard? Sure. But given the thinness of its argument and numbers of supporters, it made our job of helping journalists gain some fact-based perspective all the more difficult.
At one point, I conducted an audit of the Washington Post during an especially crucial period to compare the number of opposition quotes in its news hole versus those supporting the project. It was three-to-one against. False equivalency or just false? My client unfortunately wouldn't let me send a letter to the newspaper's ombudsman. I also remember cornering the news director at a local TV station that planned to air three segments on the memorial, featuring three different "experts" -- all from the opposition. He acquiesced to our demands for balance.
Flash forward to today when privately created content (owned media) can easily bypass the journalistic filter to engage directly with audiences. What's more, the media and the indy fact-checking orgs have neither the temerity nor a pulpit big enough to quell the falsehoods that pollute the public discourse. Mitt Romney's pollster Neil Newhouse recently boasted (according to Politico's Ben Smith):
"Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have “jumped the shark."
Suddenly, however, it seems that the once noble producers of quality journalism have awoken from the dream in which they incredulously attributed Congressional paralysis to obstructionists from both sides of the political aisle.
Was it HBO's "Newsroom" or the Republican National Charade (RNC) that has given CNN's Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and Soledad O'Brien a new bounce in their steps? Is it my imagination or are they suddenly calling out some of the scripted and unreliably sourced BS emanating from their guests' mouths?
Now if only Candy Crowley, David Gregory and Bob Schieffer would grow some kahunas! (Schieffer admittedly may be too old for the fight, but then again that didn't stop his octogenarian colleague Mike Wallace from putting his guests' feet to the fire.)
Over the weekend, NYU's Jay Rosen compiled a nice round-up of the various pieces and posts about this hopeful journalistic sea change that's percolating. Titled "#presspushback," it led:
"Professional journalists, whose self-image starts with: ‘We’re a check on…’ had to decide what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, laughing at how easy it all was."
"Catching up on several related indicators, which together might point toward a positive and potentially major development in journalism and public life."
Finally, you're probably wondering why a PR guy whose clients have both benefitted and have been harmed by lazy reporters would decry the imbalanced state of journalism or recent years. It's simple. Professionally, I'd rather go toe-to-toe with a smart reporter who takes the time to wrap his or her arms around a subject than one who gets it wrong out of expediency or personal bias.
More importantly, I believe that a strong and vital fourth estate is essential for a modern democracy to thrive. Without it, we could all be living in Putinville.
