SA Church needs more media savvy

In public relations circles they call it “damage control”. Even if it sounds like a lot of deceptive spin-doctoring, it is a vital communications function these days.

Damage control involves a number of specific actions that need to be taken by people, companies and public organisations to ensure that their words, actions and honest mistakes are not misrepresented or sensationalised in the media.

What one needs to understand about the mass media is that they are primarily businesses. As with any business, their main objective is to make money for their shareholders.

Most of our big mainstream newspapers, TV and radio stations do not set out to misrepresent the truth or purposely lie in order to increase numbers in circulation, listeners or viewers. But they certainly do push the envelope as far as possible when they are presented with the opportunity to sensationalise.

What exacerbates the problem is that perception is undeniably more convincing than fact. So one of the golden rules of damage control is to understand clearly that it is often pointless dealing only with the facts of the matter, and to be very aware of the persuasive and pervasive power of perception.

Damage control is very much something the Catholic Church in South Africa should seriously consider improving on because for a number of years now we have been mercilessly beaten about the ears by the media.

For example, I read with interest and some sadness a recent Southern Cross report quoting Cardinal Wilfrid Napier as saying in regard to a Mail & Guardian article that he had suffered a “trial by media”.

Some years ago in this column I offered pointers on how to prevent precisely this kind of thing. In a letter to the editor, Cardinal Napier dismissed my advice, and instead read into it what he seemed to see as a mischievous criticism of his approach to media relations.

My suggestion was that the cardinal and other Church leaders should get to know the editors of the major newspapers. This aspect of damage control—getting to know the enemy, so to speak—takes advantage of one of the most fundamental of all human traits: it is far easier to badmouth, insult, misquote or verbally attack a stranger than somebody you know.

In my lectures on the subject I often use a road rage analogy. Imagine you are a typical hot-blooded South African male, and while you are driving along minding your own business, another motorist cuts in front of you, forcing you to swerve or brake sharply. Many would respond by catching up with him at the next traffic light, wind down the window and hurl abuse or shake their fist at him—or, as has happened, beat him to death with a hockey stick.

But what if you pull up next to him and find out it is someone you know? You might make a few wisecracks about getting driver’s licences from lucky packets, and perhaps direct a little ribald joshing at him—but your level of unbridled anger will have diminished considerably, precisely because you are not dealing with a complete stranger.

All I am suggesting is that our Church leaders should make the effort to meet with and get to know some our leading editors. It will make life a lot easier for them.

Cardinal Napier would soon find out that these editors are not at all the muckraking, unprincipled rogues of popular imagination, but just normal people working under fairly trying pressure from shareholders. They are employing journalists who are also human beings and therefore prone, like most of us, to treating strangers a little more harshly than the people they know.

More importantly, the editors would find that our bishops are not the pompous, media-reclusive, protectionist parsons they might suspect them to be, but men of honour and humility whom they can trust. Right now I have a feeling that the editors in the secular press have no idea about, say, Cardinal Napier as a human being, and so simply assume the worst rather than the best of him.

At the risk of sounding vainglorious, I really hope my suggestion will not be dismissed as part of a mischievous agenda. After more than 40 years of advising captains of industry on how to deal with the media, I can say with some authority that the Church itself has to blame itself as much as it blames the mainstream media for these persistent sensationalist press reports.