Cult of personality
Do newsmakers love the concept of calling a media conference because it makes them feel important and promotes their cult of personality agenda?
There are times when a media conference is the best way to broadly disseminate important information about newsmakers or newsworthy events to the media. Media conferences offer the potential for reaching many reporters in one shot. They can be an efficient way of telling your story, answering the media's many questions and managing media suspicions and perceptions all at once.
If called for a good reason, press conferences can be exciting, eye-opening and friendly, and a good tactic for promoting direct interaction and mutual communication with the media. If the conference is well-prepared, messages well-packaged and presented and enough question time allocated, they can heighten interest in the story and even reinforce the natural competitiveness of the media, increasing the prospects of your story being extensively covered.
However, news conferences can be embarrassing at times if used for spin doctoring purposes. Media conferences are controlled by the host newsmakers or organisations. In other words, it's their show, so they get to make the rules.
On the one hand, some newsmakers call press conferences in order to voice their viewpoints and visions without be willing to answer journalists' questions. They are so arrogant that they expect respect and royal treatment by the media. When this is not forthcoming, they accuse the media of vicious, vacuous, vitriolic and inane attacks, and of displaying a tiresome and prosecutorial tone. They blame it on anything from racism, cheap journalism and jealousy to lack of understanding of the bigger picture and hidden agendas.
On the other hand, there are some journalists who may be engaged in practices that are aimed at creating a climate of confusion, assassinating characters, overthrowing governments, enforcing specific consumer behaviour, or achieving a secret agenda.
Hosts of news conferences are therefore warned to be ready to manage surprises and the unexpected. It is question time that is the most critical stage of any media conference. It determines whether the conference will be a success or failure.
In some instances, news conferences are often mistakenly called to make announcements that are not very newsworthy and that could have been handled a lot easier and quicker with a media release. I think it is for this reason that journalists despise most media conferences.
