INCREASING JOURNALISTS’ AWARENESS OF PUBLIC POLICY ADVOCACY

While the level of attention from the media on public policy advocacy is high, it is often off-topic. Journalists are not interested in reporting how public policy advocacy works. Reportages often describe public policy advocates as people with a large network of contacts, and in close friendship with politicians. 

Whenever journalists write about the power of public policy advocates, they have rarely spoken directly to the people involved in the process. Nor have they been present in the negotiations between the stakeholders. Therefore, the media has a tendency to exacerbate different cases without concrete evidence or facts. Furthermore, journalists have little incentive to investigate highly successful projects, which were established through the effective collaboration of the legislative and public policy advocacy bodies. Such a detrimental attitude is bound to create a myriad of biased conclusions, which unfortunately dictate the public view that public policy advocates are the 'bad guys'

Gaining a greater understanding and knowledge about the public policy advocacy process would be an asset to a reporter. Indeed, doing so would help journalists meet their obligation to inform readers and hone their craft of news reporting.

Public policy advocates also need to reach out to journalists and make their work more available and accessible to them. This could take the form of organizing seminars for political journalists, publicizing research that is relevant to topics in the news or creating expanding public policy advocacy -matter guides for reporters and the public. Similarly, it might be possible to provide support to help public policy advocates engage with the press including media training in the area of public policy advocacy , creating venues for building personal relationships with reporters, or publicizing resources for journalists.

Public policy advocates can provide a novel perspective that could improve reporting in five respects: putting episodic developments in a structured context, providing new angles on the news; countering spin about the effects of events, better describing trends and comparisons and identifying known unknown in politics.

Public policy advocacy should be integrated with practical journalism and trainees should  have an awareness of current news issues related to public policy advocacy.