There’s a bit of a change in the regional media which may have gone unnoticed by many.
At one time, failing to get quotes from all sides of a story was seen as a near-capital offence for a reporter.
X says something (perhaps uncomplimentary) about Y. Y would ALWAYS, at the very least, be approached for a comment.
Sometimes that wasn’t enough for Y.
The story might have a huge headline, a picture of X, extensive quotes from X …. and at the bottom of the story a couple of lines from Y saying it’s not how it seems.
Not ideal but at least Y got a say. Good luck with that nowadays and schools seem to bear the brunt of this.
Last week there was a classic daft story which went national … the Mirror version in particular talked of toasties seemingly luring motorcycle gangs to a park!!!
So what … well the issue became problematic for a nearby school when a well-meaning local councillor suggested that there was a problem with kids bunking off at lunchtime with the head teacher having to dispatch ‘patrols’ of teachers to stop this mass exodus.
The truth? There is no issue with kids bunking off … the ‘patrols’ consist of a couple of solitary teachers on duty as happens in almost all schools.
All of which would have been cleared up with a phone call. But phone call came there none.
More and more often we read stories setting school against school. It is not a mystery that such stories create Facebook clicks.
For example …
Now no one is naïve to think these kind of stories will not appear. The issue is the decreasing likelihood, if a school gets panned, that it will get a right to reply.
The consequence is the story will be shared to the point of saturation … if the report is damning enough, you can be sure everyone will see it including those wavering prospective parents.
A few years ago we supported a school fighting headlines which screamed ..
DRUG DEALING AT THE SCHOOL GATE!
The story was not wrong … there was drug dealing at the school gate … but a simple call to the head teacher would have revealed that the reported criminality was actually happening at 10pm on Friday evenings and it just happened to be at the school gate and surrounding area. No students in sight and nothing to do with the school.
Trying to stop these stories is pie in the sky. Forget it.
What schools and their media/PR team CAN do is not allow news organisations to get away with it.
There needs to be a ‘difficult’ phone call EVERY time a response is not requested. Heads need to have a collective voice as well, lobbying editors as one.
Until schools are vocal about this, in the quickfire digital news environment, we can expect even less balance.
It’s time to shout a bit louder on this issue.
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