PR: All The News That Fits
If you want to know how journalists are stymied in getting news for you from people paid by you about how your money is spent by your government, here is a modern, updated version by the Globe and Mail’s Shannon Proudfoot.
And in orchestrating news, Happy Town News (the city’s PR department) has this down to an artform. Emailed answers about what the government wants to tell you rather than what you want to know. No chance for follow-up questions plus news conferences for which journalists must register opening the possibility that HTN can be the gate-keeper as to who is allowed to talk to pols and staffers in the most orchestrated of environments.
A Brutally Bad LRT Report Response: BENN
When I was covering city hall, if you called former mayor Bob Chiarelli, he’d call you back. Sometimes he’d call you first. Then you could at least try to get the information you wanted and Chiarelli believed in open government so he usually told you. Or you could capture him on the way to a meeting and you’d ask questions as he walked briskly to his next chore.
Regional chief administrative officer Merv Beckstead would apologize if it took two hours to get back to you. Then Beckstead would give you his joke of the day and you’d start talking. Once Beckstead joked that he’d get me, a pesky sort you know who’d just written a nasty story, sent to the Trail Road Landfill and leave me there. He didn’t mention what kind of condition I would be in. At least he sounded like he was joking. Couldn’t blame him though if he did.
What you had in Chiarelli and Beckstead was open government, at least as open as it ever gets. It’s something former journalist Mark Sutcliffe could shoot for. But if the mayor is interested in doing that, he has 12 years of cultural change and ethical challenges in a closed city staff to overcome.
LRT Response: Baking A Cake Out Of …: WHOPPER WATCH
This is municipal government … not the White House. In fact, once I had the opportunity to call the White House and the person answering said, “White House.” Really? It was faster and more open than HTN could imagine. Then the telephone answerer got me to the person I needed. We talked … no orchestrated emails there.
Another time, I called a federal minister’s office after hours, and the minister answered. What? Something to shoot for HTN.
Here’s Proudfoot on the state of government and the media:
Once the absurd idea of an interview is waved off, you are asked to submit questions for response by e-mail, and to state your deadline. This is where the whole thing devolves into play acting.
If you get responses by deadline, they will generally be “answers” to what you asked only in the geographical sense that they will be located below each of your questions. They will otherwise bear, at best, a one-night-stand relationship to the original queries or to anything resembling a clear thought or fact. They will be so obviously, transparently workshopped to death by an unseen army of staffers and bureaucrats that you will practically be able to see the sweaty, nervous fingerprints still steaming on them.
To read the whole Globe story (I think you get a free one or two … I subscribe as a booster of journalism), click here.
Ken Gray
Digital image on front created by AI generator Craiyon
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HTN still uses the obfuscation of the F.O.I. which sometimes cost the person applying dollars and much delay. Not exactly what an investigative journalist wants when trying to meet a deadline!. Why was the F.O.I. brought into play??? for more delay?
Media folks should go back to the basics…
1. Ask a responsible question with an encouraging attitude;
2. Listen and record and/or not document the response.
3. Follow up after investigating the facts if there are any in the response and get back with a new fact filled question
“A media Question should be an answerable Question so the public can benefit AND not an open door to debate the media person’s opinion. Change the approach. Give up trying to embarrrrasss and be a little more patient…..!
Ask yourself how come many successful media folks obtain the information they request in their question.
Don’t be the News… Report the News, please!
Bob:
I rarely asked questions at press conferences because I probably already had an angle on it and I didn’t want to give away what I had.
I don’t like press conferences. It’s a dog-and-pony show. I would rather get real stories rather than the same one everyone else has. But that takes confidence because the safe and easy way to cover stories is to write what everyone has. But you can get better away from a presser if you know what you’re looking for.
Let everyone else write on the presser. I want something better.
cheers
kgray