Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [3]
THE NEW POWER OF THE MEDIA
Important as the media has always been, it has grown even more influential in the last ten or twenty years. John F. Kennedy has been called our “first TV president.” Since then, our presidents and political leaders use the media and often get abused by it.
Today’s press—particularly TV news and the wire services—jumps on any story so fast that news organizations say their reporting of the story was a “triumph” or a “failure” when the story was aired mere seconds earlier or later than the competition. Just look at the “spin doctors” who appeared on every network news program after the 1988 presidential debates to see how the media’s interpretation of an event can influence public opinion.
Yet the common denominator through all of this media coverage is still the human dimension—you, the public person. Even though the circumstances of how they are viewed have changed, good communication skills are still essential and universal.
You may never be a great communicator like Daniel Webster, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Edward R. Murrow. You may never hold listeners in awe like Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Iacocca, Mario Cuomo, and others have done. But with a little coaching, you can become an excellent communicator, a man or woman whose appearance and speaking skills attract others to you and make them want to listen.
The power of the media has now made it not only desirable, but necessary for the public person to master media skills. All of a sudden, the “public person” has become a “media person.” Dealing well with the public and the press is a fine art, especially in this day of instant news. But it is not a difficult art to learn. This is true regardless of what stage of your career you are in or what kind of work you do. The higher you go in your professional life, the more is expected of you and the more you will need to develop solid communication skills. And that is the point of this book: to help you improve your appearances before others on the platform, in the studio, or simply speaking at a business meeting.
BUT ARE YOU A PUBLIC PERSON?
So just who are you, the person who can benefit from this book? Perhaps you have just landed your first job, or you have been working for several years but have just been promoted and are now concerned about how you appear to others. Perhaps you have become so successful in your career that all of a sudden you find yourself being asked to moderate panels, give speeches, present awards, or be interviewed on radio and television. Maybe you are running for public office for the first time or have held public office before and are now running for a higher position and are dissatisfied with some aspect of how you appear on TV.
Maybe you are a radio announcer, a television newscaster, a newly appointed chief executive officer of your corporation, an author on a promotional book tour, a diplomat, a university professor, a lobbyist for a national association, a person on the paid-lecturer circuit, a public relations officer or a spokesman for a company, a physician or lawyer or economist who finds himself or herself invited to comment on TV and radio, or a financial adviser or real estate whiz who keeps getting invitations to speak in public.
Maybe you are an up-and-coming young executive with a company where you hope to make it big. But when you are asked to give an important presentation, you make one or more of the following mistakes: You rush out and get a too-short haircut; you choose to wear a “power-red” tie with your black suit and white shirt; you arrive at the meeting with the body of your report scribbled on a scrap of paper; or you are suffering from acute stage fright and don’t know how to relax instantly so that no one notices.