Maybe you don't follow it, but in England all sorts of things are going on around Dutch coach Erik ten Hag. He is coaching Manchester United, a club from whom strong performances are expected. The “sky is the limit. In this article, I will look at how media are dealing with this. With the underlying question: are media concerned with customers, or are they primarily ruled by the dough?
Ten Hag is now in his third year, has invested more than half a billion in new players, but the results are not forthcoming. So the media have been speculating furiously for weeks about his dismissal. The story is getting heavier and heavier, while Manchester United's top brass has yet to budge. Yet it may just have happened because of pressure from the media, and in their wake the fans.
Media framing is often brought up. Just think of Trump using the term 'fake news'. It may be a little crazy, but do customers get value for their money where news coverage is concerned? For that, we must first have a picture of things that customer wants from media.
There have been several marketing studies on that. Customers want (1) reliable and accurate news. Accurate, well-researched information, as objective as possible. Then there is the need for (2) local coverage: what is happening in my city and region? Popular are also (3) in-depth and good analysis and (4) a variety of topics. Finally, there is a need for an accessible and user-friendly format (5).
But there is more. Readers get very hot on clickbait and sensational journalism. We humans are attracted to emotion and conflict. We may not like it, but extreme and shocking events can count on our attention.
Media (newspapers, television, radio and Internet media) want to survive in the market, so they fight for readers. And that's where news reliability loses it from money. News providers attract attention with increasingly screaming headlines, but also with confirmation biases.
An example of media framing around Ten Hag can be found on the Dutch FC Update's media site (I could have found other examples, but let's take this one). This is one of the soccer sites that likes to add something sensational to its headlines, luring you as a reader to their site. The more readers, the more advertisers. And this is exactly where journalism becomes unreliable.
According to FC Update, Ten Hag does not consider Arne Slot a friend. However, this seems to come from the imagination of the creator of the article. After all, where does he derive this from? I can tell you. Ten Hag said in an interview, that he regrets that English soccer has abandoned a tradition.
It was always customary, for English managers to talk to each other briefly after the match. Ten Hag says in the interview that because of the press conferences this tradition has disappeared and that that is a shame. Partly because of this, he states that other managers 'are not friends, but colleagues'. FC Update makes of this that Ten Hag has no friends among his fellow managers, and that Arne Slot and he are 'therefore' not friends.
'Erik ten Hag does not see Arne Slot as his friend,' FC Update headlines. And that is framing, drawing us to the site, because it stirs our emotion. But we are being fooled as readers. We can't say it's a lie, but it is misleading in what it suggests: Erik and Arne are not friends. And that is never said.
We are being lured with something that plays on our emotion. Just because FC Update wants to take its place in the market. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but the way is not geared toward customers. We want reliable information. In-depth articles are allowed, but this is not in-depth; this is vulgar gossip journalism, and then also of a to level. And then you come across gekopklanten.nl....
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