Traditional Media Can Damage Your Credibility

Traditional media used to be the best way to get your message out. That may not be the case anymore.

Recent job ad for a communications position with a large corporation:

[The job] focuses on reputation management through media relations, which includes developing and executing media strategies, building and maintaining relationships with key local, national and trade reporters/news outlets, pitching stories and responding to media inquiries, serving as a company spokesperson and member of the company’s crisis communications team and coordinating the Media Relations team’s participation in response efforts and exercises.

Noting that this particular company is in a traditional market sector and has probably been in business for 75 years, it's probably not surprising it is relying heavily on the traditional, mainstream media -- local, national, and trade by it's own account.

Is this a smart communications move knowing that the further crashing of media credibility and corruption seems to be accelerating? Here's just a recent sample of headlines exposing this downward trend:

• Co-Founder of ‘Fact-Checker’ Snopes Busted Plagiarizing Under Fake Name.

• Project Veritas Prepares to Depose New York Times For Defamation

• New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz sued for defamation by TikTok talent agent

These revelations come on the heels of an article from the New York Times about a company which seemed to totally insult its main audience. The article, the pushbacks, and the explanations:

• Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right?

• Black Rifle Coffee Company Does New York Times Interview, “Takes a Knee” for Woke Left

• Joe Rogan Slams Right-Wingers for ‘Canceling’ Black Rifle Coffee: ‘Come On’

• Black Rifle Coffee Co. Painted as Anti-Customer by NYT Magazine

• How Black Rifle Coffee Used Every Trick In The Book to Fool Conservatives

• Black Rifle Coffee's CEO Responds to the Social Media Furor Over His New York Times Magazine Interview

Whether Black Rifle Coffee Company survives the upheaval in its reputation and marketing remains to be seen.

Perhaps the point is that the company would have been better off never having done the interview in the first place.

The role and the place of traditional media outlets has changed over the last decade.

Case in point, the credibility of the traditional has been sinking during this decade to the lowest points according to polling:

Gallup pollsters reported on Thursday that American trust in the media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36 percent, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend."

Better to be your own broadcaster.