Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

I was disheartened to see in the Bulldog Reporter recently some poll results showing that people rate television news as the most credible news source.  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being highest, those surveyed rated TV news at 6.6, as opposed to newspapers at 6.3 and various online news sources all around 5.0.  Is it me, or is that a scary statistic?  Think about it – Lou Dobbs, Nancy Grace, the Misogynist Twins (aka Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman).  These are the sources most people find credible? 

I like TV, even worked in it for a while, but I’ve never really liked it as a news medium.  I always have more questions about every story than television takes the time to answer.  It’s a medium that hates complexity and, face it, life is complicated.  Give me a newspaper any day, or now (sometimes) the Web, where I can search out the answers to my questions on Google or ask my connections on LinkedIn what they know. I realize that it’s not always easy to tell if the info coming from the Web is accurate.  However, a case can certainly be made that the same is true for television.

Every day these “pundits” are on the tube beating to death one or two stories, as if nothing else happened in the world.  Lately it’s been all about the bailout.  Why “bailout” as opposed to, say, “rescue plan” or one of those cute catch phrases lawmakers love, like “The Antidepression Act of 2008?” (Hey, that no more disingenuous than “The Clear Skies Act of 2003.”)

“Bailout” conveys emergency.  OK, that’s accurate.  But it also carries a connotation of giving up.  One bails out right before the plane goes down.  Not exactly a hopeful message.  And it also conveys a sense of rescue, as in “the feds are coming to rescue Wall Street.”

While that may be true to some extent, the implication is that government had nothing to do with this mess.  It was all those greedy New Yorkers who screwed things up for the nice people who live west of the Hudson.  This is just plain old spin designed to obscure the facts of government cronyism combined with a breathtaking breach of the public trust on the part of the Bush Administration.  And it gets to be called “bailout” because those who had an interest in obfuscation got quoted first on television.

The Web might be the news source of choice for the younger crowd, but we baby boomers were raised on TV, and we’re a BIG demographic that donates, volunteers, votes and still makes a lot of the decisions in this country.  And, apparently, we remain glued to the set.

So if you’re in a nonprofit organization and thinking of cutting back on marketing communications during the downturn, please think again.  It may be self-serving to say, since we at MAKE WAVES are in the business, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t right.  In this world, it’s frame or be framed.  Like it or not, progressive nonprofits can’t afford not to be seen and heard on the nation’s most credible medium.

--BONNIE