A Name for Strategic Communication

Gabbey Albright

ga210814@ohio.edu

It might be easy to recall a few big names in news journalism. But what about the other side of journalism? The strategic communication side.

The strategic communication specialists tend to be more of a behind-the-scenes role. Even though they do a tremendous amount of every brand that we know, their names aren't as prevalent.

Pulling a Strategic Communicator From Behind the Scenes

To get a better understanding of what it takes to become a public relation specialist, Ohio University's PRSSA brought in someone who helps lead one of the most successful agencies in America.

Brett Pulley is the Executive Vice President at Weber Shandwick. This is one of the world's largest PR companies. They employ over 4,000 people in 79 cities.

Weber Shandwick Work

One example of the work that his company does that Pulley shared was with the company Barbie. Over generations, Barbie had developed a negative connotation with being an unrealistic goal for young girls and women to meet. It was time for rebranding. With the help from their PR specialists, Barbie created three new Barbie shapes and seven different skin tones. Weber Shandwick created a video as a part of the campaign that went viral. The video also included the fact that unlike a regular doll which encourages girls to prepare for motherhood, the Barbie doll has had multiple different careers that encourage girls to become whatever they want to be.The positive feedback from this brand-revamp was extensive. It was undeniably a PR success.

Advice from Pulley

Something that Pulley noted multiple times through his presentation was the importance for strategic communicators to be well-versed storytellers. As communicators, one must be the best there is. If a strategic communicator cannot take a message and relay is clearly and effectively they aren't doing their job. He also mentions that writers can only be as good as the information that they gather and the content that they distribute.

When it came to the question and answer portion of the presentation, many students were curious about how it was to work within the professional world with strict deadlines. Although the students seemed anxious, Pulley insisted that they deadlines only encouraged his brain power and quickened his creative process. The message here was that deadlines and creativity can work hand in hand.

Another key point which students were inquiring about was advice about how to land a job in public relations. To this, Pulley simply spoke about the importance of networking. Although he wasn't fond of the word networking, he encouraged that it is important to get one’s name within the industry and to continue to create relationships within it. Additionally, it is essential to maintain these relationships and remain relevant in the person’s mind.

The Illusion of White Supremacy

Ihsan Alnaneesh
ia955915@ohio.edu

The Backward Illusion of White Supremacy (Make-Up Blog)

In essence, a 'white supremacist' is one who believes the white race is the true, superior race that should dominate and control every other race merely due to their narrow-minded thinking and inability to perceive the reality of things.

While it can be seen as being egocentric in a collective manner, the entire white supremacy ideology is backed by pseudoscientific notions and does nothing but attack people of color and others who abide by different methodical structures of views and beliefs.

Relatively speaking, this ideology is a fairly new one. White supremacy was associated with the European's processes and efforts to colonize non-white nations. The term was born in hopes to normalize the acts of controlling and dominating 'inferior' non-whites.

White supremacy has the ability to reconsider experimental reality for the individuals who have deliberately, yet subliminally disguised it and took in its principals and presumptions. White privilege is focal here, in which individuals considered white are likewise judged to be normal human beings. The encounters of white individuals are taken to be all inclusive and a gauge for how others are to be assessed; African-Americans are judged altogether as having "terrible culture" while whites are accepted seen as having "great culture."

George Orwell once said, "In a world full of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Early primates were shrouded in fur, the same as chimpanzees and gorillas today. Hereditary proof shows people lost our hide covering around 1.3 million years prior; most likely as an adjustment to enable us to sweat increasingly and henceforth, remain cool while traveling across the African savannah. Without the fur our skin was presented to the bright radiation in daylight. So a related adjustment was to build the measure of melanin in the skin cells - melanin assimilates the UV radiation and forestalls it harming DNA in the skin cell core, causing disease.

Around 70,000 years ago, Australian Aboriginals and Melanesians moved along the south bank of Asia. Since they remained in areas with high UV radiation, they were capable of retaining the melanin homo sapiens initially had. A second group of homo sapiens migrated toward the elevated continent of Europe between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, in which weaker sunlight due to geography led to the 'whitening' of the skin in the form of evolution to lessen risks of UV radiation and enabled humans to find a new means of synthesizing Vitamin D.

According to Wikipedia, the black panther is the melanistic color variant of any big cat species. If we replace the black panther with homo sapiens, we can see exactly why white supremacy exists and where it comes into play.

Considering a history of oppression, enslavement, poverty and other socioeconomic factors, it would be logical to assume the collective mindset of the African-American race has been manipulated and somewhat brainwashed to forget their origins and who they truly are. African-American mind has been tricked into falsely distinguishing biological differences, which played a huge role in creating negative connotations throughout these so-called superior and inferior races.

Our Own Backyard

mm792814@ohio.edu


It's easy to say that racism ended when the civil war did, but as years have passed it is clear that this is not true. In the past few years there has been some light shed on the crimes that are committed against people of color, but it has not been covered well enough. Not only is the media doing a poor job of covering the victims of these crimes, but they also are not reporting well on the ones committing them.

When people think of the word "terrorist" they should be thinking of anyone who "intentionally uses indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror, or fear, to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim." Unfortunately, many people only think of foreign individuals coming to the United States to harm us, when most of the terrorism in our country stems from white people.

White supremacists have carried out more terrorists attacks than ISIS, but why does it seem like in general society is more afraid of ISIS?

It's imperative that the media does a better job of educating the public on the real threat: the people we interact with everyday. Christian Picciolini who spent 25 years as a member of the skin head movement  says, "It's the average American, it is our mechanics, it's our dentists, it's our teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses and unfortunately that's the way it's turned into the last 30 years."

Do media outlets not write about these racist groups because it will become an "unpopular opinion?" Americans want to be able to point to a group, living hundreds of thousands of miles away and put the blame on them for the divide and chaos in our country. When in reality, it is caused in most part by people that live much closer.

Without proper coverage of the actions that are carried out by white supremacists groups, like the Klu Klux Klan, they will continue to grow and prosper. There are over 917 documented hate groups in the United States, and as a member of this society I find it terrifying that I've never really heard of any of them.

While writing about what these groups are doing is not going to dissolve the issues, it will raise awareness. It is hard for people to put an end to the hateful activities without being knowledgeable about them.

With the election of Donald Trump many hate groups feel as if they have more freedom to their racism due to Trumps many disrespectful comments about immigrants. However, Donald Trump made it clear that he does not support the white supremacists groups and does not want the support that they were offering him.


A White Supremacist group supporting Trump after he is elected into office.

It's simple: the media needs to report on these events. The public deserves to know that these monstrosities are being committed and what they can do to put an end to them. The threat is in our own backyard and were ignoring it.

The Steps to Change

Madison Wickham
mw731914@ohio.edu



Journalists surround a member of the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party in Charlottesville


They say that the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Thankfully, that is what The United States is starting to do about it's problem with normalizing hate crimes. In order to jumpstart change about the immense amount of white supremacist terror attacks we have been having lately, we must start at the basics and realize what our society is doing wrong.

In an article titled Media struggles to develop strategies covering hate incidents, author Yang Sun discusses how even though a large number of hate crimes have happened throughout the past couple of years, only a fraction of them have been officially reported to places like the FBI and the Census Bureau because there hasn't been enough coverage of many of these events. Newsrooms often treat hate crimes as individual situations, when they need to be treated as a problem as a whole. If we as journalists can better report these incidents, we could not only make more crimes appear on the federal hate crimes statistics, but change the way that some Americans normalize hate crimes. Christopher Benson, an associate professor of African-American Studies and Journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign stated that it's a journalist's responsibility to bring people awareness in order for people to understand what is going on and want to make a change. "Until we are able to appreciate that context ourselves as media professionals, we are not going to be able to clarify that for the public," he stated. The SPLC counted 917 hate groups nationwide in 2016. Why isn't this fact a big worry or well known fact to the common American citizen? Most likely because facts like that are not made prevalent in the news, when they should be.

Another thing that needs to be changed in the media is the fact that the media makes it seem like there are more non-American terrorists in the United States than there are white terrorists, which is quite the opposite of the real situation. An article titled White-supremacy threat demands its own beat reporters, the author Christina Mbakwe questions why the media doesn't cover white supremacy the way they cover ISIS because in fact, there are more frequent and more deadly white terrorist attacks occurring in the United States than attacks from ISIS. She also brought up a good point that during the attacks on Charlottesville, people started tweeting the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs, saying that violence and racism isn't the American way. If we take a step back and look at our history, violence and racism sometimes, in fact, our way. We ignore our violent history more often than we should, and if we did accept our history and our present problems as well, maybe we would be able to move forward better. If we had covered Charlottesville in a better way, maybe more people would've gotten a grip of America's problem. "If more newsrooms covered white supremacy with the intensity it deserves, fewer white people might have been surprised by the events in Charlottesville. The response instead could have been, 'This is us, and all the signs have been there".

To solve this, American journalists as well as citizens must come together to raise awareness. These problems will not be heard of unless they are truthfully shown to the world. Once we show the country how serious of a problem there is with hate crimes, more people will be aware of the intensity of the situation, and we can come up with a way to make these problems a little better. Until that happens, there will be no progress with the way hate crimes are starting to become commonplace in America.

The Dangers of Watering Down Hate Speech

Ethan Gates

eg330214@ohio.edu

Image pulled from CNN

The Ideology Persists

Although the United States has close historical ties to white supremacy, we have made efforts to distance our country from this ideology. But after the events of Charlottesville, it is impossible for any citizen to deny that these problems simply do not exist. 

White supremacist extremism, according to the FBI, poses a persistent threat of lethal violence. We have known about the dangers of these groups for years, but for many--myself included, we have not known how pervasive this culture actually is. 

An Unexpected Ally

Many cite Trump's rise to power as an authentication of white supremacist beliefs. Throughout his campaign, he was endorsed by several prominent individuals with strong ties to white supremacist groups, including former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke. 

Whether or not these endorsements align with Trump's personal beliefs is irrelevant here. The point is his candidacy was filed with fear-mongering hate speech that incidentally gave these white supremacists validated forums where their beliefs were no longer seen as unimportant. 

The Long-lasting Effects

After Charlottesville, news outlets differed monumentally on how these events were covered, primarily based on perceived party alignment. With headlines telling entirely different sides to an undeniable event, the truth of the matter becomes muddled. 

Take for example Trump's response to the attack and his statement that "violence was on both sides." Without immediately condemning white nationalists, many differing headlines surfaced: Fox News had this response, while the Washington Post had this to say.

This is not a new phenomenon; news outlets have always changed perspectives on stories they report to better suit their followers. But it is disheartening to see that in today's volatile media industry, every disastrous event has to become a partisan issue. Until Charlottesville, I did not realize that major public figures--including prominent journalists, celebrities and politicians--would not vehemently condemn the actions that occurred. 

By making the events that unfolded into a partisan issue, we have failed to recognize the severity of legitimizing these actions. When hate speech is continuously accepted, it becomes normalized. And when it becomes normalized, we can no longer draw a line between 'good' and 'evil.'  

What Can Change

While it is doubtful the rhetoric in the country will change anytime soon, we are not without hope. News outlets will continue to post damaging articles aimed at causing major controversies. Sites like Breitbart and Shareblue will continue in their polarizing ways, to create dissonance among citizens. Fighting this mindset will be difficult. 

When major travesties occur within our country, we need to address all the underlying circumstances. This political warfare of 'he said she said' is offering no concrete details and only confusing citizens by the thousands. So many outlets are already locked in to their political alignment and that's unavoidable; we need a new generation of ethical journalists to rise and influence the political spectrum objectively. 

When one party calls out the other, no solutions are presented to prevent similar events to occur in the future. Targeting one another will only inhibit our abilities to ever progress toward a harmonious nation. Playing the blame game only digs us deeper into the moral hole we've dug; news casters and politicians simply deflect to other similar events that happened in the past. 

But that's the past; and it (it being representative of any tragic event/attack) happened again, and the underlying cause of the problem was never resolved. When did we quit caring about the safety of our citizens just so we can blame the other side?

Efficiently Reporting on Racism

Spenser Brown
sb655514@ohio.edu

In covering race a journalist must be precise, clear and descriptive (Mark Peterson/NBC News).

Covering racism is a difficult task. In the current political climate, journalists are closely watched for any mistake they make. Even the smallest error can be harshly criticized, destroying credibility and trust for themselves, their publication, or their company.

One of the most important aspects when covering race is the use of language. Word choice must be sharp when clarifying who is involved, what they did, and with whom they are affiliated. Generalization of a group can lead to false information being published. Rather than calling a group 'counter-protesters', specifying their cause (i.e. Black Lives Matter, Democrat, Progressive) helps the reader know the true story.

Writers should avoid the individualizing of racism, and particularly comparing two acts of racism. According to the Race Reporting Guide by Race Forward, drawing a parallel between racial biases "Provides an excuse for, or otherwise seeks to absolve, an individual who has expressed a racist idea or committed a racist act." Readers will become conflicted if two incidents are reported comparably, but can develop their own feelings if they can examine each story in a case-by-case form.

When using images and videos, it is crucial that reporters provide context. Without information that tells the whole story, a reader is not completely educated on the situation. Videos of racial outbursts should also show the reaction from the other side. The use of narration and captions to clarify videos and pictures is integral when posting to social media platforms.

The reporter, in all instances, must continue to stay bias free. Journalism requires a person to be fair, just and honest when covering all stories; regardless of race, age or affiliation.

Julia Martinelli, reporter for Nashville Public Radio, was treated horribly by white nationalists as she covered their rally. Martinelli is originally from Argentina, and this rally was directed at people who had come to the United States as she did. Despite intimidation and some instances of physicality, Martinelli remained calm and thoroughly reported the rally. It is crucial that reporters can maintain their composure while reporting, staying objective even if they are under attack.

There is an ongoing challenge of how to efficiently report the words, images and sounds of racial violence. The groups producing this hatred and bigotry are seeking to get their names into the headlines. By reporting the story in its entirety, not just the main headline, these groups will not be glorified; they will be exposed. In the same instance, reporters must not let their personal ideals and opinions take over their writing.

An outburst in the press can reflect as badly on a journalist as it does a white nationalist who is making racially charged comments. The First Amendment is still standing true, and people have the right to protest and speak their minds. Even though this can result in horrible events like Charlottesville, journalists can make their impact by reporting the story fairly. Moving forward, journalism must remain ethical, just and fair to all parties involved, regardless of the circumstances being covered.

Covering White Supremacy

Nick Niehaus
nn775014@ohio.edu

White men in Charlottesville were outraged to find photos of themselves going viral on the internet

People in America are often scared.  Scared of whatever they're told from the media that they listen to each and every single day.  But what is it that they are told from the media? When regarding attacks, mostly, they're told about "Islamic terrorist attacks". Whenever hearing about some sort of mass killing, most people associate it with Islamic terrorism in one way or another.  It is just what all media outlets cover. Specific jobs are even assessed to people on covering these sorts of attacks.  But one thing that has been a major epidemic in recent years that has been overlooked from the media, white supremacy.

White supremacy has been an issue recently (well, forever) that nobody ever seems to be talking about.  Which is crazy to believe, because ever since the attack on 9/11, 47 percent of attacks have been from right-wing extremists, compared to Islamic terrorism.

106 people have died from these white supremacy attacks, yet for some reason, nobody is scared of THESE extremists. 

So, I think the answer is obvious here, we need to start creating a buzz about white supremacy.  Media outlets need to make sure these events and attacks are being covered thoroughly and correctly.  The public has to be informed with who is behind these attacks and the motive involved.  With how easy this answer is, how we cover this sort of epidemic is not so easy.

Bias has to be thrown out of the window immediately.  If a reader is able to decipher which political affiliation the writer is while reading the piece covering a racial attack, the article becomes an opinion piece, which means the reporter didn't do their job covering the event as an ethical journalist.  Rather than bringing strictly politics into the conversation after an attack, simply give the facts of who, what, when and where.  Political influence may be behind the motive of an attack yes, but rather than creating an all out war pitting one side with another, stating the facts of the attack (even including the influence), will create a more informational piece that readers will be able to learn about and be informed.

There are many other things that could be said about how to cover such an event, but what is more important is what covering these events will do in the future.

People will get the facts.  People will start to realize that not all terrorism comes from those with Muslim descent.  People will soon realize that many of our problems root from hatred within our own Country, which is something that nobody has really believed in the past.  Statistics show the difference of fear across party lines when regarding this topic, and the results are not so hard to believe.

So the most important thing media outlets can do is begin to make this a priority in the news.  If they can cover these events with the same kind of urgency they do when regarding Islamic terrorism, people will begin to see what kind of harmful impact white supremacy has within our country.  If we keep the same kind of priority when speaking of attacks, with Islamic terrorism being the number one covered event, nothing will ever change.  

At the same time, white supremacy doesn't just need to be covered, it needs to be covered correctly.