Politics, politicians and The News media in Europe and in the

Czech Republic

how to not get mad from them

PhDr. Vojtěch Bednář

www.medialni-poradce.cz

Our topics

1. The role of News media and how they play it

2. News media in the Czech Republic

3. News media and politicians – hard relationship

4. Personal media skills – how to communicate with journalist

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Do we need them?

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Principal roles of news media

1. To provide information

2. To entertain

3. To educate

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such information:- must be interesting (!)- must be relevant (??)- must be balanced (???)- must be objective (?!)

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1. To provide information to the public

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News media are high ethical and serious

Here is missing picture which could be offensive to you but was not offensive to one of the biggest newspaper in the United Kingdom.

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2. To entertain

More then 90% of news media content is either pure entertainment, or so-called infotainment

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3. To educate

Embedded video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIZKIV0eE4U must see

News media in the Czech Republic

(we use it as example, similar state of things is in most developed countries)

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Part II.

1. Public media (not state)

2. Private media (media corporations)

3. Independent media

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General types of news media (by the form of ownership)

1. Public media

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2. Private media corporations

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3. Independent media

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Thousands others (most online)

Main trends

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1. Go online 2. Reader does not willing to pay for content 3. Sales of printed news dropping down 4. Quality of content is still dropping down 5. High fluctuation of personnel 6. Almost no requirements for personnel

7. High level of aggregation 8. Media – content disconnection 9. Must satisfy „fast user“ 10. High level of destructive concurrency

3. News media and politicians hard relationship

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we need them – they need us

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we have to:

- provide news media with information - give journalists our opinion - answer their questions

why to do this?

- because news media in democratic country is main (and in most cases only) way how to inform our citizens about our work.

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they have to

- ask questions and then interpret them - find our weaknesses- investigate, judge, sometimes execute us

why they do this?

- because politicians are for most journalists main reason for their work. Without them they could be useless

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Media regulation and censorship

Every developed country is regulating electronic media which uses public broadcasting frequencies.

No democratic country is applying censorship to media content, except for content which would be harmful, representing some types of pornography, excessive violence, or hate.

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Summary

- News media play extreme important role in developed democratic country

- Journalists need politicians and vice versa

- For most citizens news media represents most important way how to get informed

- Media must criticize politicians

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4. Personal media skills

how to communicate with journalist?

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Key principles:

- journalist is not your business partner

- you have not last word

- you should not try to force him to anything

- journalist is like keyhole to the public

- journalist will make interpretation of you

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Best practices:

- be short - have few „key topics“ and „key words“

- repeat important information - use simple language

- have patience, it will pay off - keep smiling

- have precisely limited time for journalists

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Let’s try it

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