Mark Penn on media fails, corporations, colleges and Israel.
"Journalism's credibility now is at an all-time low."
Polling maestro Mark Penn, the CEO of marketing company Stagwell, joined The Media Mix podcast along with vice chairman, Ray Day, to discuss polling on support for Israel in America and why college students have very different views than their parents. But first Penn had some tough words for the media over the October Gaza hospital attack coverage.
“This was one of the biggest real-time mistakes in modern journalism history. And I think that the media should be more open instead of trying to fuzz it up.”
“The news media should have really proved that it's learned some lessons here and been a hundred percent clear that this was a mistake and this was misinformation. And they didn't do that. They kind of half-heartedly said that, well, US intelligence says and Israel says, and they wanted to kind of maintain a little bit of a half fiction that they had not been wholly inaccurate here.”
“Journalism's credibility now is at an all-time low. And it's really got to do a better job when it makes a mistake, at regaining credibility,” he said, referencing Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the Steele dossier on Donald Trump.
Penn did have praise for those war reporters bravely covering the action on the ground however. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported Sunday, November 19 that 48 reporters and media workers have lost their lives in the conflict which it said has left more than 13,000 dead, including some 12,000 Palestinians and 1,200 in Israel. The numbers shift upwards every time I check the CPJ website.
Ray Day, the former chief communicator at Ford and IBM, shares that the war led one of his corporate clients to breakdown in tears recently. Day is a former journalist. He’s heard enough talk on misinformation and disinformation and wants to see more done to combat it.
“It's an issue we need to stop talking about and we need to start acting on. I was trained as a journalist and the first thing you learn in journalism school is ethics and the ethics of accuracy and factualness and correctness. And I think even in this warp speed world that we live in, where everyone wants to scoop each other and you want to get the clicks and you want everything immediately. We have to take a step back as communicators and remember our first obligation to report the truth.”
Finding the truth in a war is no small task. The BBC Verify unit has certainly been questioning the IDF’s version of it in recent days. The corporation also had to correct a report suggesting Israel had targeted medics and Arabic speakers at the main Gaza hospital, after a Reuters article was misinterpreted.
Penn’s research shows corporations are split on whether to speak up, though he suggests consumers are not waiting for big business to jump into the fray even if their employees might be.
Yale School of Management Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is keeping a list of companies that have condemned Hamas’ attacks on Israel. There are more than 200 statements so far. Read who has said what here.
Listen to more of what Penn and Day have to say on the influence of TikTok and what else their research shows.
Our next podcast features a conversation with two media reporters - Axios’ Sara Fischer and The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Cartwright. They’ll tell us what stories they’re watching in 2024.
Catch The Media Mix wherever you get your podcasts. A big thank-you to our production team. Executive producers Jamie Maglietta and Ray Hernandez, and Global Situation Room Inc.
I’m in London next week interviewing some of the most influential people in global TV program development. Come and say hi at #ContentLondon and check out the full agenda here.
If you’d like to sponsor the podcast or this newsletter and connect with big thinkers in media, marketing and technology drop us a line at TheMediaMixUS@gmail.com. Feel free to share feedback and guest ideas too.