THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 14, 1995 TAG: 9511140001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
A politician or other government official who hasn't some idea of who in the media is friendly or unfriendly, fair or unfair, isn't earning her pay-check.
An official who is unsavvy enough to compile a little list, much less hire a consultant to enumerate and investigate the unfriendlies and unfairs rightly (if only briefly) risks losing her government pay-check.
Hazel O'Leary, President Clinton's secretary of energy, is in that position now. Distressed by unflattering reports of her department, she hired a consultant to rate media stories and the folks who write them as to how favorable or unfavorable they are to the Department of Energy. An unfavorable report, says an aide to Ms. O'Leary, ``meant we weren't getting our message across, that we needed to work on this person a lit-tle.''
And what did your tax money at work - $43,500 of it - produce? No surprises, it turns out, to anybody familiar with coverage of DOE. Which includes most DOE employees.
Ms. O'Leary is old enough to remember Richard Nixon's ``enemies list,'' and therefore old enough to know better. Like killing the messenger, investigating the messenger doesn't fix intrinsic flaws in the message or its sender.
But there's a message here for the messenger, too: Both the public and private sectors are increasingly aware that the media watchdog bears watching.
CARMA, the analyst Ms. O'Leary hired, says in its brochures that ``stories are sometimes `slanted.' '' People in the news and people who follow the news know that. People who report it must be equally aware. Perception counts for the press, just as it counts for the politicians, public officials and issues; and the perception of unfair, inaccurate, politicized news reporting contributes greatly to media's poor showing in public-opinion polls.
In fact, the public trusts the press only slightly more than the officials it covers. Yet the press - which under the Constitution must be the most self-policing segment of society - too seldom scrutinizes itself.
Secretary of Energy O'Leary needs first to look to her own department's policies, programs and personnel for the source of its unfavorable coverage.
The media could look long in the mirror, too. by CNB