Back in the 1950s in Texas, it was easy to get information out of the police.

Phil Record, then a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, urged his new colleague Bob Schieffer – later anchor of the CBS Evening News – to buy a snap-brim hat.

“He needed to look like a detective when covering crime stories,” Mr. Record noted. “A snap-brim hat was a great tool for newspaper reporters in those days. Detectives always wore coats, tie and hats. A reporter in the same attire could easily blend. We figured that if others mistook us for detectives, that was their problem.”

Today, such antics would be considered unethical by American journalism standards, according to Mr. Record, who teaches media ethics at the Schieffer School of Journalism. Self-imposed standards by the news media have given the public more privacy rights and stamped out conflicts of interest.

Working the police beat in the Washington suburbs in 2002 – right after journalism graduate school – I never would have thought to identify myself as anything but a reporter. Indeed, that often got me nowhere interesting on assignments, from using canned quotes of public relations officers to staying behind the parked cop cars at crime scenes. I don’t even remember seeing the yellow police tape, and forget about any chalked outlines of dead people.

That’s why Chinese “journalism” is getting so interesting today. Thanks to normal people – posing as normal people – what’s going on in China is being uncovered like never before.

Undercover university students recently infiltrated Coca-Cola in China, according to China Daily. It was a summer job that turned into a 28-page report filed on Internet websites. The report found that 90 percent of workers in Coca-Cola’s bottling factories were “treated as short-term dispatched workers, but in fact have worked for contracts of over two years, some even ten years,” according to the Daily. “Dispatched workers can be treated less well than ordinary workers, and are not covered by labor insurance, said the report.”

Even with their snap-brim hats, 1950s Texan journalists still had challenges in looking cop-enough to deceive and investigate. In 2002, I had the challenge of getting any information at all once identified as a reporter. But even the most proficient PR outfit with the best security available isn’t equipped to subvert normal people investigating, then filing Internet reports.

Normal people don’t have the professional ethics of journalists. Normal people can be workers. Normal people can file on the Internet, and those reports can become very popular.

Normal people can also get things very, very wrong, especially since even professional reporters can and do.

The following is a report in China Economic Review in 2007:

KFC, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut have been accused by local media in Guangdong province of not complying with labor laws when hiring local staff. Labor authorities are investigating allegations by the Guangzhou-based New Express Daily that the three restaurant chains were paying part-time workers in several Guangdong cities much less than the local minimum wage, the South China Morning Post reported.

In fact, local authorities later cleared the companies of allegations that they were underpaying workers. But the PR damage was already done, and McDonald’s vowed to raise wages in China by more than 50 percent in some cases.

This time, Coca-Cola is under fire – from normal people. So far, the company is fighting back, and rather limp-wristedly.

“The claim made by the students is not true, and the company wants to communicate with the students concerning the matter,” the company told China Daily.

Coca-Cola clearly is in crisis PR mode, but they don’t have anyone professional to counterattack. They’re having to battle young students. So what’s their approach? To “communicate with the students concerning the matter.”

Wow, they’re having to eat a grenade, but chew politely.

Could this have been prevented with more strict labor law compliance or a better worker vetting process?

Perhaps, but when everyone nowadays might be an investigative reporter without professional ethical standards, managing your public image just got a lot tougher.

Maybe it’s time to stop thinking about how your going to handle your image in relation to China’s official fourth estate, and start thinking about what you’re going to say and do up against an unofficial fourth estate – one that’s guided less by the standards of the socialist press and more by the standards of anarchy.

    Channel: Vital News     |