Though headlines about fat-cats and sweatshops may stick in our minds, recent research shows that the media is becoming more sophisticated about corporate responsibility. Briefing?s man on the inside asks whether press cynicism is really on the wane.
We all know that the media loves bad news, and therefore that the majority of stories about CSR are exposés or attacks of some kind. Except it isn’t true.
According to work by Echo Research, specialists in media monitoring, the majority of CSR stories are positive, another big chunk are neutral, and less than one in 10 is negative. This is true in the UK, US, France and Germany, and it held true last year even though the number of stories (in the UK) soared by 130%.
Perhaps the explanation for this dissonance is that the almost 600 stories analysed came from business media, ranging from China Online to the Washington Post. But all the main UK newspapers were also included, so it is fair to conclude that perceptions of media coverage are clearly distorted, presumably by the odd high-profile attack on the likes of Nike or Starbucks.
In fact the Echo research paints an overall picture of a business media which is becoming increasingly sophisticated about CSR (also perhaps at odds with many professionals’ perceptions). With one glaring gap – the number of stories in the US media plummeted last year. At less than 100 items, coverage was down by 40% and the total number was much less than the UK or France.
This could be a perverse sideeffect of the Twin Towers catastrophe, which included much immediate corporate response but left less space for stories of broader corporate responsibility. But it is at odds with experience elsewhere, which saw the attacks in the US provoke extensive examination of companies’ role in healing society. Otherwise, stories were found to have paid more attention to the social and environmental benefits of CSR, rather than concentrating on the branding and marketing benefits. That is despite the publications covered including the likes of PR Week and Marketing Week. In 2000 more than a fifth of all the stories the researchers examined were about the PR/marketing benefits of social responsibility. But last year that fell to about one in seven.
More interestingly, it seems that media cynicism is on the wane and business journalists are beginning to accept that CSR can benefit companies and society. The message that there is a business case for social responsibility has begun to come across loud and clear. It is allied to the notion that the private sector must play a wider social role rather than concentrating exclusively on shareholder value. But the media now appears to accept that CSR can bring varied benefits – companies have to make money, but CSR can work in tandem with economic and social interests. These three messages (the business case, the economic benefit, business responsibility beyond shareholders) were by far the most frequent.
Another clue to the growing maturity of CSR coverage is the rise of environmental stories. The environment featured in a quarter of all the items analysed, up from ten per cent in the previous year. That suggests business journalists are looking more closely at companies’ impacts, rather than concentrating on their community activities.
Perhaps this is part of the general development of CSR. The PR professionals interviewed for this research have also gone well beyond the shallow PR approach. They said very clearly that transparency and stakeholder dialogue are intrinsic to CSR, so communication is important in its own right.
These interviewees still want publicity to benefit corporate reputations, but they were not looking at communications solely in terms of marketing or PR. They stressed that before communicating CSR it is vital to have a credible programme in place, and that companies must avoid overclaiming. Perhaps journalists, faced with such maturity, are able to be less cynical and more mature themselves.
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