Time for Professional Communicators to Reassess What They Do

No country is perfect, nor is there one is not dealing with issues that create tension among its citizens. Here in the United States, one such point of contention revolves around communication. Several national surveys conducted recently by the Pew Research Center highlight. One survey, conducted in 2011, found that Americans have major trust issues when it comes to the work of journalists. Simply put: Americans, regardless of their political persuasion, were found to view members of the media as being unethical, biased and inaccurate. A more recent conducted in 2014 by Pew found Americans to be more polarized than ever, less willing to even associate with those whose politics are different than their own.       


One clue as to where these attitudes come from may be found in a 2011 study released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which showed an alarming income gap between the richest or most wealthy households and the rest of the country. Between 1979 and 2007, the CBO reported the income of the top one percent households increased by 275 percent as compared with an approximate 60 percent income increase for the remaining 99 percent of the households. The overriding results of such a trend are a shrinking middle class and, according to Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a serious lack of distrust on the people's part of government and business in terms of their work and what they communicate.    


Putting these various surveys and reports together, it is not surprising that there is definite need for all professional communicators to take a hard look at what they do and how they do it. The media, for example, need to begin moving away from niche journalism; stop catering to conservative or liberal audiences and, instead, be more informed and lazy in their presentation of the issues. Public relations practitioners are not off the hook here either. They should strongly consider focusing their energies more toward helping create a more enlighten citizenry rather than simply trying to persuade or manipulate people to take certain actions or adapt particular beliefs. It seems clear that people are communicating their dissatisfaction with professional communicators. The question is: are the professional communicators listening?