Welcome to Lesson 2 from Media Framing and Ethics. Equipped with the principles of agenda setting and media framing, this lesson explores how media scanning informs daily public relations practice. One of the core tasks often assigned to new practitioners is to scan and report on their organization's media coverage.
While something as basic as reading and analyzing the news might seem inconsequential, doing so is central to our role as environmental scanner. Arguably, we are the only function in an organization tasked with seeing the whole picture. how an issue or topic affects all of our key stakeholders.
So, we must be in tune with the news media. We must know what topics or issues they're discussing and how they're discussing it. Our close scanning of the media, in turn, directly helps us in our role as our organization's ethical conscience.
Much like a legal team provides legal counsel, the PR team must provide ethical counsel. And the media provide cues that allows us to do just that in two specific ways. First, We must understand how media covers our own organization's news, as well as the news of our industry. The guiding premise here is that yesterday's stories become today's context for news media coverage, and today's stories become tomorrow's context for news media coverage. Put another way, in public relations, we must remember that today's actions become tomorrow's footnotes.
In covering a new announcement from Volkswagen, for example, a good reporter is also good at mentioning how the company is trying to recover from an emissions scandal. Second, we must move beyond issues and topics that explicitly, directly, immediately touch our organization and look for those issues that might arise and possibly affect us downstream. Media scanning helps us determine when our organization needs to join a conversation, lead a conversation, or help steer a conversation.
Organizations need to be aware of and appropriately respond to the social climate in which they operate. During the ongoing heated debate regarding North Carolina's notorious bathroom bill, for example, the public and media turn to businesses wanting to know their stance on the law. Understanding the process of agenda setting and understanding the principles of media framing therefore helps us in our role as environmental scanner, and in turn it helps us provide key ethical guidance for our organization.