Putting It All Together

Therefore, in performing our environmental scanning role—or more appropriately, our media-scanning role—it is crucial that public relations practitioners analyze news media to determine the most appropriate, ethical next steps, and then to counsel our management regarding those next steps. On one hand, it is the media’s responsibility to present our news in a way that best informs the public. We therefore must anticipate the ways our news might be reported, remembering that yesterday’s stories become today’s context. On the other hand, we must analyze media to ensure that we’re being reflected accurately, in a fair light. We have an ethical responsibility to scan the media, anticipate those frames, and identify gaps and opportunities to improve coverage. As mentioned in the first lesson, certainly media rarely set out to misrepresent an organization. But journalists have their own frames and varying degrees of experience with and knowledge of certain topics.

Understanding the principles of media framing help guide our media scanning role. First, we must search for news not only specific to our organizations or our peers, but also for news regarding topics and issues that could potentially affect our organization. Second, we must pull in various news sources covering that same topic and systematically analyze media content to identify how the news is being framed. Finally, working with the media and serving as an organization’s ethical conscience requires that we think long term. Indeed, today’s stories become tomorrow’s context. And as the principles of media framing emphasize, we must understand that context to be able to address important issues and manage key relationships.