photo by puregarlic.blogspot.com

For the media, there’s often a fine line between reporting the news and becoming the news. Case in point -on May 30th one of the more reputable 24-hour news stations (yes I’m being satirical here), Fox News, aired a video billed as portraying Obama’s first term in office. Well, since then, all hell has broken loose in media circles. You see, apparently, this event promotion turns out to be nothing more than a propaganda video aimed at drawing support for Obama’s competitor, Mitt Romney, in the upcoming election.

Political Events Are a Great Study on How to Promote an Event

In politics, like meeting and event planning, the name of the game often boils down to promoting the event. In meeting and event planning, the event can be a conference where you need to get word out so that it is well attended. Political events are no different. Except what they’re trying to promote is the candidate as the event itself. And let’s face it whoever gets the most people out usually crosses the finish line first.

Media organizations are expected to remain relatively neutral. However, it’s becoming more and more frequent in the US for media organizations to pick sides and then do whatever they can to promote their candidate, or the event. Without going into too much detail here, what media organizations have to be careful of is crossing the line and becoming a medium that promotes instead of reports. Fox News likes to bill itself as being fair and balanced. Unfortunately that couldn’t be further from the truth. They barely hide their tactics any longer.

Here is the video in question that was aired on “Fox and Friends” on May 30.

Before you say that it’s just the liberal media having an issue, the video in question was also panned by many conservative commentators as well. As usual, a senior Fox News executive later issued a statement saying that the deed was done by an associate producer and that person was not authorized to do so. Ohhhhhh, I see… Not my business but maybe Fox had better take a long hard look at its internal policies and revisit the section that states who is allowed to put content on the air.

Just sayin.

It seems that many news organizations will justify their lame attempt at reporting by putting a “?” after certain controversial news stories. I guess, to them, the “?” makes it legitimate. Let me show you an example of how this can be utilized. Say, for example, somebody reading this post decides that they don’t like Plan an Event. So they put a blog up on their site titled “Is plan an event trying to destroy the meeting planning industry?”. You see, by adding the “?” at the end of that phrase gets them off the hook for any slanderous comments. Then in the article all they would have to do is state that according to rumors that they’ve heard, such and such is doing such and such and therefore by all accounts destroying the meeting planning industry. You see where I’m ongoing here…. A slippery path.

Political event promotion can be a dirty game at the best of times. It’s a sad fact of world we live in today. Having said that, I’m going to be following the upcoming presidential election with fascination. First, it’s an excellent study on how to, whether correctly or incorrectly, promote an event. As for Fox News, well they too are an excellent study. I’m sure we haven’t seen the end of these little “mishaps”. We’ll just have to wait until November to see how effective they were at getting their candidate promoted the most.

Related Articles:

• Have Meeting and Convention Planners Soured on Alabama?
• Political Planning Conference-Who’s on First?
• How to Promote an Event-Not!