RunSwitch Public Relations CEO Scott Jennings addressed the distrust in media, distribution of information, and the weakening of major political parties Wednesday during Owensboro Rotary Club’s virtual meeting. Jennings also said his background in politics set the foundation for his own successful business.
Jennings, who regularly appears as a political correspondent on CNN and serves as a political adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Brett Guthrie, discussed the many ways in which the exchange and distribution of information had evolved in recent years.
“With our clients, it all comes down to having the right audience, the right time, and the right message,” Jennings said. “Media, as an industry, has lost some trust with viewers because speed has [overtaken] accuracy.”
Clients and those reading and watching the news weren’t as interested in consistency as authenticity, Jennings said. He used former President Donald Trump’s base as an example of what attracted people to authenticity, saying that even though Trump “was not a moral person,” people still valued him for not apologizing.
“He didn’t get it right all the time. To some of his audience, it was enduring,” he said.
Jennings said people also took to Trump for vocalizing his distrust in the media — an issue that had been on the minds of many Republicans over the last couple of decades, he noted. Jennings went so far as to say that Twitter was the worst thing that had ever happened to journalism.
“You can get defined very quickly as credible or not credible right out the gate,” he said.
With politics, Jennings predicted a major change in the two-party system, saying the Republican and Democratic parties had largely evolved into factions of the educated and uneducated, rather than the business-focused and working class parties.
Jennings said that, combined with having more access to information than ever, has led to “weaker” political parties. He added that with a media industries so based on algorithms, nobody from the two parties was reading the same story.
Social media-based journalism was a problem that Jennings said he was often asked about, but something he didn’t have an answer for.
“Republicans have developed their own information ecosystem, and for Democrats it’s the same,” he said. “The information ecosystem for both parties overlaps very little. It’s a huge change. There are almost entirely separate audiences, and it breeds a whole bunch of problems. If your Facebook algorithm is set to appeal to you as a conservative, you’ll see something different [than a liberal].”
With so much information available to the public, Jennings said he believed people were more interested in authenticity over consistency, and accuracy over quickness. He also said there was still a benefit in polling, even though the industry had been criticized in recent years regarding the past two presidential elections.
“Where you saw the big misses [with polling] wasn’t nationally, but in states, especially those with large rural areas,” he said. “If you have the budget for it, do [polling and focus groups]. I find I derive a lot of value out of focus grouping.”
