Posts Tagged ‘media’

Johnson & Johnson, the huge personal products company, apologized to a congressional committee this week after they got caught in a drug recall scandal.  Can this be the same company that set the gold standard for crisis response during the 1982 Tylenol tampering scare?  What happened? What were they thinking when they decided to do what’s called a “phantom” recall, where they hire people to go into stores and buy up all the inventory on shelves and they never reported problems with over the counter drugs including Children’s Tylenol?

It’s sad to realize that even companies who know what the right thing to do is, get caught doing completely the opposite.  Johnson & Johnson recovered quickly last time because they did the right thing.  Their customer base rebounded and actually grew because people felt the company could be trusted.  And they got years of free publicity when public relations professionals and media experts held them up as a shining example of how to handle a crisis and work with media in the middle of it.

There’s a new chapter in the Johnson & Johnson story and it’s not pretty.  Time will tell how much they have damaged their brand.

According to a just released Gallup poll a majority of our fellow citizens nationwide do not trust media to deliver fair, unbiased, and accurate reporting.  Newspapers and TV seem to generated the least amount of confidence in their content.  As a former television news producer it’s very disheartening, but not surprising.  I watch very little TV news myself these days and my local newspaper has more full page ads for prescription drugs than I’ve ever seen.

The news is not all bad for the news.  There are journalists around the country that are experimenting with ways to make news-gathering economically viable.  I think what they also need to do is make the news relevant and valuable.  If we don’t have access to credible information about our government and our civic and business communities, we’re all in serious trouble.

The furor over the proposed building of Muslim cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero has reached a fever pitch, now that the President had weighed in, at least it has in the media.   Freedom and democracy is messy and more importantly, our freedom does not mean bupkis if we don’t stand by our principles when it is hard.  There are many millions of people who will be against whatever this President says or does.  I’m familiar with that feeling because I have felt it when someone I didn’t vote for got elected to run this country.  However this principle is bigger than politics.  And if we allow the haters to win on this one, we have truly handed our enemies a gift wrapped victory and more propaganda to use against us.  And if this organization is somehow tainted by extremism, which I seriously doubt, what about the idea of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?

Why did so many smart people do dumb things this past week.  I’m referring to the Shirley Sherrod story.  She is the Agriculture Department employee who was fired, primarily because the Cabinet Secretary of her department and people in the White House, including President Obama, seemed to be  afraid of on-air tirades from their “friends” at Fox News!

They must be congratulating themselves at Fox for scaring all those important people they love to hate into over-reacting and making stupid decisions.  I’m not sure anyone will learn from this experience.  And I do hope Shirley makes a bundle out on the speaking circuit.  Her story was compelling before this episode. Imagine what she can say now!

I was very saddened to read the Helen Thomas story yesterday.  After a groundbreaking, glass ceiling shattering, brilliant career she left the job she loved because she said some really dumb and offensive statements which were captured on camera.  She is like the superstar baseball player who stays too long and leaves the game a shadow of his peak years.  We had a little taste of that this year with Ken Griffey, Jr. who abruptly left the Mariners because, his public statement says, he didn’t want to be distraction for the team.  Unfortunately he was having a lousy year and no true Mariner fan wanted to see him leave the way he did.

The same is true for Helen Thomas.  I met her in the mid-1990′s when she was covering the Clinton administration.  She was a great guest on our morning news show when we broadcast from the White House lawn. I had the pleasure of talking with her before and after her interview.  She was knowledgeable, feisty, and never afraid to ask the tough questions.  She was a trailblazer who made it possible for many more women journalists to move beyond covering the society pages.  But maybe she stayed just a little too long.

How do we know when it’s time to hang ‘em up?  It may be a bit easier for athletes to know, because the body often gives out before the heart gives up.  For the rest of us, I don’t know.  Hopefully we’ll learn something from Helen Thomas, not the least of which is not to say dumb and offensive things in public!

That is the question…and I get it all the time.  I was watching Nancy Pelosi last night on the PBS News Hour and she was talking about the passage of the historic health care bill that was signed into law earlier this week. Putting politics of the issues aside, I was struck by Pelosi’s ability to stay on message regardless of the many times Jim Lehrer, the interviewer, wanted her to bash her Republican colleagues.

If I were coaching Ms. Pelosi, I would give her kudo’s for bridging back to her main points and being very disciplined and not rising to the bait by revealing any harsh feelings she may have about the grueling process she had just witnessed.  However, there’s one behavior that distracts from Ms. Pelosi’s message and that’s the constant smile that she wears in all of her media interviews.  Sometimes it looks like her face has been cast in plaster and the smile sits there without regard to any human emotion.

For people who are regularly in the media spotlight and talking about controversial issues, instead of a constant smile, I suggest they create a warm and friendly demeanor.  Smiling all the time is not natural.  But if you can think “warmth and friendliness” it looks more authentic to the viewing and listening audience.  Smile if it comes naturally and the rest of the time, be yourself and think “warm and friendly!”