Wednesday, 25 July 2007
Sky - That's Better!
I can only hope that my profound indignation, in the spirit of a butterfly in Beijing, somehow transmitted itself to London and changed a few synapses in the mind of a senior production team member. But sadly I have to admit that it's more likely that they simply came to their senses...
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Ainsworth 1 Sky News 0 - They're Still Getting the Tone Wrong!
Following my wee rant about Sky News and how I think they’re getting the tone of their reporting on the floods in the
The UAE’s Shamal whips up the desert and dumps it on the cities: sand streams across the roads and visibility drops, sometimes alarmingly. Shamal is Arabic for North and, perhaps interestingly, many people in the Arab World use shamal to mean left as well as yassar (right is yemin). Quite why North is synonymous with left is a mystery to me...
Monday, 23 July 2007
UK Flooding: The Spokesperson Bites Back
I spend quite a lot of my professional life coaching spokespeople who will be dealing with media. I spend a little bit of my time being a spokesperson talking to media, too. And so I guess, despite my pro-media approach to my work, I’m also inclined to ‘root’ for a spokesperson. Rarely have I found myself so involved in the moments of combat, because let’s face it this is a contact sport, as I was watching the Bowskill interview.
The story is simple: a huge volume of rain fell on areas in the UK again this week, forcing motorists to spend overnight in their cars on blocked motorways. Roads across the country were flooded and became impassable: whole communities have been flooded out with huge volumes of water - much of it now contaminated.
So when Sky News’ anchor starts to play the blame game and try to pin the misery of overnight stranded motorists and flooded homes on the Highways Agency, you’d expect spokesperson Graham Bowskill to stutter and witter, to try and defend his agency’s pathetic performance to the journalist who speaks for all of us.
Well, he didn’t. He spoke well, cogently and with dignity.
Now UK PR commentator The World’s Leading (Theo to his mates) has already made the point that spokespeople in the
The fact is that Bowskill putting his strong case forward well actually played against everything that the journalist wanted – a cheap shot story angle that focused everyone’s rightful indignation and anger on the sucker being interviewed. And so he came through it all beautifully. It’s such a shame that nobody was there to point out how at odds with our common feeling at a time of crisis this style of ‘blame game’ journalism is. Because, of course, the media playing that game would never DREAM of facing public criticism that their response was inappropriate.
Several of Sky's interviews around the whole flooding disaster since have been in the same vein: alarmist and obviously ranging around and looking for someone they can pin blame on. Last night they cut an interview short with a chap who was telling them that the community had actually given up worrying and was taking it all lightly. Again, it's not what they wanted to hear and so they moved on and cut the interview.
And I do find it interesting that, as communities pull together in the face of this unprecedented disaster, Sky is just lobbing stones, being alarmist and generally plain unhelpful. It does seem to me that their tone of coverage is sharply at odds with public sentiment. I wonder if it will backfire on them...
From The Dungeons
Book Marketing And McNabb's Theory Of Multitouch
(Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I clearly want to tell the world about A Decent Bomber . This is perfectly natural, it's my latest...