Meet the press
One of the tasks that I fall to me from time to time is to make statements to the press about this or that.
It’s not a task that I relish. I have always tried to keep a “low profile”, but it is not always possible. As one of the relatively few foreign investors here in Kyrgyzstan, journalists often seek me out for an interview, looking for a “sound bite” that they can use.
Now, as a teacher I undertook a number of management courses which included a Marketing element, and I am very grateful to my Union (the Association of Teachers and Lecturers) for sending me off on a short course on Public Relations, when I was serving as a Branch Official, which covered topics like “crisis management”, writing Press Releases, and so forth. I have found both very useful in my occasional incarnation as “voice of …”, or “spokesman for …”, foreign investors and the tourist industry.
My reluctance might seem odd to people reading this. I am, by nature, quite verbose and opinionated, so it might be thought that I would welcome the exposure – the chance to “get my point across”.
Here, on my website, I have some control over what I write … but it is possible to say all the “right things” in the interview, to think that you’ve made a good case and got your message across, only to be surprised by the report when it is actually published or broadcast. There is a maxim that in a interview, the interviewer may control the questions, but the interviewee controls the answers. However, when the interview is with a journalist then that control is lost, it passes to the journalist who writes the report. The journalist, is under various constraints such as the amount of “space” available for the report, a word or time limit, which means that they have to be selective of the material they include. Also, journalists have their own “agenda”, which may not coincide with yours. Journalists need something “newsworthy” – and, usually, “good news” is not newsworthy. They seem to prefer an argument, conflict, controversy, disagreement and disputes to agreement and concord.
I remember, for example, one occasion when there was a “Teachers’ Dispute” and several of the teachers’ unions decided to conduct a variety of different forms of “industrial action”. As a trade union branch official I took part in a press conference along with representatives of the other teachers’ trade unions. At first the journalists were very interested, but they soon lost interest when they heard the answer to one particular question. The problem was that we all said, independently of one another, that any planned industrial action was part of a national campaign and was not targeted at schools in our branch simply because they happened to be in the constituency of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. If we had said “Yes”, then we would have been news … our case would get an airing … although I am not sure that our arguments would have been presented.
So, the only way to control the way those answers are presented is to commission or write the article yourself. That’s why writing a Press Release is a very important skill, many a busy reporter or editor will simply quote one verbatim.
(Fortunately, there is an alternative approach which is sometimes used here, to agree with the journalist beforehand that they will agree the text of the final report with you.)
As a result, I have always been relatively suspicious of press reports.
I don’t believe everything I read, hear or see in the news. It isn’t necessarily true simply because it is reported in the press. Neither do I believe it because it seems to be the common view or is often repeated. For example, although there is some doubt about the attribution, Goebbels is supposed to have said: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth,” … but Lenin did apparently say: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”.
During the Tulip Revolution of March 2005, I found myself scanning the press reports with unusual attention … I was living through the incidents that they were describing and I wanted to see how fairly and accurately they reported what was happening. I found that there were two newspapers in particular that were giving a good picture of what I felt was the true situation here on the ground.
One was British, The Daily Telegraph. Some of my friends said that the fact I showed a preference for this newspaper, which is “conservative” by nature, was a sign that I was getting older, and moving away from my “liberal” roots. (A function of age? As Sir Winston Churchill put it: “If a man isn’t a liberal when he is young, then he has no heart, but if he isn’t a conservative when he is older, then he has no brain.”) It wasn’t like that at all, however, it was just that I found the reporting to be a good reflection of what I was experiencing, how I saw the situation, here in Bishkek. In 2010, I hoped for something similar, but was dismayed when I saw a report in that same newspaper which confidently affirmed that as well as the American airbase here in Kyrgyzstan, “both Russia and China also maintain military bases in the country.” They don’t. The Russians do, and they beefed up their presences by sending 150 additional paratroopers to help maintain security there, but the Chinese don’t have a base here. I am sure that they would like one … but they don’t have one.
The second was a Russian newspaper: Kommersant, the largest independent newspaper in Russia.
This time round, in 2010, there seems to have been far more coverage. Unfortunately, much of it seems to have sensational. As I said, journalists need “hot news” in order to sell their newspapers. There was one publication in particular that I found disappointing and sensationalist. When I read its reports I felt more and more depressed. Now, I don’t doubt that the journalist was describing which happened to him, and how he interpreted those events, in the same way as I am describing the events that I am part of, and how I interpret them. However, I was left wondering why the emphasis was so negative … did the journalist not see any of the positive things that was also happening, or were they just not “newsworthy”. I would have welcomed a bit of balance.
Balance is important. Back in Britain I would read several newspapers to see what different people were saying about a story, and then try to analyze and synthesize the reports in order to make up my own mind about what really was happening. That’s easier today, even here in Bishkek, than it used to be back then in Britain. The internet gives access to an incredible volume of reports and opinions, and I have the opportunity, that to cable and satellite TV, to see the news as seen through the eyes of Kyrgyz, British, American, Russian, German, French, and other news channels. Sometimes they present quite a different take on the same story.
Bishkek