Strategic Communication

I spent about 10 years in a graduate mass communication program, which was called journalism for the undergrads. It was well on its way even at the time — 30 years ago — to domination by advertising and public relations majors. To this day I have structural knowledge of how the institutions of media work that most people don't have, while still maintaining illusions of how things used to be, and "should" be.

This thread on Twitter may have busted my illusions for the last time. Its writer acknowledges at the end that, of course, "not all journalists." But he's pointing out the way things work in the main these days, and given the state of covid and climate coverage, I have to say he makes a pretty convincing argument:

If I hadn’t spent the last 15 years working in media and public relations, I too would interpret the media silence around covid and new covid research/science as a sign that there is nothing to worry about. But I have. So here are some things you should know.

More than 95% of all stories you read in the mass media start as a press release. I don't know if this is a dirty little secret of the media industry or widely known by people, but it's how it goes. Which is like this: A press release gets written for a client, it gets sent out to a big list of journalists, the PR agent (or in-house person) phones around the journalists in whatever sector they’re working in to try and get them to look at the story, offering interviews with the key players.

Sometimes the PR agent might not send out a release en-masse but “sell in” the story as an exclusive to just one outlet. When you read that something is an exclusive, it usually doesn't mean a journalist cracked a story, it means the PR agent gave it only to them. The bigger the PR agency, the more likely you are to get a journalist to bite on your story. And this is a major problem. Because the bigger the agency = the more expensive the agency.

So the biggest, richest clients hire the biggest, richest agencies with the most brand recognition and media connections, and these agencies are responded to most favourably by editors and reporters. And the bigger the agency, the bigger the budget you have to entertain journalists, go out for lunches/dinners, which enables the fostering of human connections that mean the journalist will respond favourably to your next press release/call pitching a client story.

In addition to this, many PR agency bosses, especially of the largest agencies, will be members of the same private members clubs as the media bosses, with a lot of informal “work” done during these evenings.

So how does this relate to covid? Covid doesn’t have a PR agency, and most studies come out of niche research labs or universities that have very limited or non-existent PR teams/agency support.

And even when it’s coming out of a big university, the media teams at these unis are spread thin and often don’t see the humdrum science research as something to prioritise when it comes to media. It doesn't raise money, it's not sexy etc.

Unless it’s a breakthrough piece of research, you’re unlikely to see it. It’s no surprise that when you do see a covid story it’s been published in a high-profile medical journal like The Lancet that has a bigger media team and more connected PR officers.

You might be thinking: but what are you going on about, covid was all over the news for 18 months. Yes. But this is because there was no denying we were in a genuine global emergency/event. Governments led and media had to respond. It was, for a time, the only game in town.

All the media outlets put their journalists onto covid, looking for sector-specific angles. The health reporter, the science reporter, the travel reporter, the food reporter, obviously the politics team, were all covid all the time.

For those first 12-18 months the whole ecosystem flipped. Journalists will have been asking agencies for their stories around covid, and agencies will have been crafting every story into something covid-appropriate for all their clients.

But over time, and especially as the vaccines began to be rolled out, the messaging from political offices and the media shifted explicitly and implicitly — the emergency is over and it’s time to get back to normal. It would have gone something like this: The press officers for No.10, the White House or any head of state office would have talked editors about the need to move away from the emergency framing to transition back to normal. Country leaders themselves would have talked to newspaper owners to encourage this shift.

And these political offices and leaders will have been making this push to media off the back of their own conversations with 'business' about the need to get back to normal. The push to return to a pre-pandemic mode will have been coordinated between the highest political and media offices, with business CEOs well in the mix, if not the originating node, of this push.

This is the broad context for the media silence on covid. It’s over, and we the media helped make it over. And if something’s over, how can it be news?

The dynamic has shifted a little for the climate crisis, with some coverage (in recognition of an ongoing event) and the omissions are subtler, primarily around failing to platform research and experts who advocate solutions that do not conform to an economic growth agenda.

The latest batch of stories was a good example: article after article telling us we’re going to breach 1.5C but without any decent critique of why this is happening and how we can stop it, beyond “reduce emissions.”

The current mass media ecosystem exists largely to propagate specific agendas that tend to consolidate business-as-usual, rather than to inform people of threats to their health, livelihoods or futures.

Which is why Twitter is still somewhat useful as a means to push against a media culture weighted heavily in favour of the biggest, richest businesses and PR agencies.

All of this made me remember the most recent alumni magazine from my "journalism" school, which told me that some ungodly high percentage of the undergraduate majors are in what's now called "strategic communication."