There are more crisis than I can wrap my head around. It seems that pretty much every piece of news these days is some type of crisis. But is it? Have we as a society gotten trained to await bad news and be prepared to live in fear that we manifest crisis situations? Or, do we just not respond to any news that isn’t bad news?
Everything is about shock value. What Howard Stern once used as his platform to fame has become every news medium’s standard for getting viewers and readership. News of everyday happenings, like for instance a story of an environmental clean-up of a highway is spun to tell of the story of the “crisis” behind the clean up. Imagine the news report… “The stream next to the highway is so polluted that the ecosystem is at risk. Fish are dying. The water flows into our sewer system and is creating a hazard for our drinking water.”
Even just the report of the weather gets morphed into a potentially high risk event. Floods, blizzards, and droughts are constantly being used as propaganda to switch us as recipients of the news into crisis mode.
How does this affect our society’s ability to perceive a crisis? Are we able to filter genuine risk from inflated hype?
A few weeks ago a local news channel reported a story about the company that I work for. It was a partially true story, however, it was spun to generate fear, anxiety, and a sense of threat within the community. The story could have majorly impacted the public perception of the company. Our communications team needed to take action- in both a public response as well as with the channel that ran this report. It required using a crisis management plan, however, there was no real crisis.
I feel that the modern day media has created a problem for crisis management. While the threat may be quite real in some cases, we need to be able to differentiate between a legitimate crisis and a news manifested crisis. I found this article to offer insight into who the media is serving and why. It's an interesting perspective when thinking about crisis comm. and how the public is bieng informed.
Great post! Do you think it makes it easier to weather a real crisis because of the number? I think it is possible that the 24 hour news cycle can make some important matters seem less important as the news agencies race to be on top of the next big topic. What I believe it makes more difficult is the ability to discern what will become a larger crisis. Ultimately, this means companies have to always prepare for everything to be full of impact, even if it isn't necessarily warranted.
ReplyDeleteAgreed KBC! It's very hard to differentiate crisis situations from hype in this media saturated culture. Being prepared is critical- but certainly not easy!
ReplyDeleteGreat insight! The immediacy of information fuels competition between the networks. It comes down to selling techniques. What sells? It's sad that agencies take advantage of the public by puffing up situations so that viewers will draw the worst case scenario as The Conclusion. I think that, in time, the public will begin to devalue news stories and seek their own information. Many news agencies will fall prey to "The boy who cried wolf" syndrome which will ultimately harm the public when a real crisis emerges.
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