The press must balance and lead public opinion correctly in a media crisis.

A media crisis can happen at any time.

In Vietnam, the past time has witnessed many media crises, including the Gongcha incident in 2021 when Market Management Team No. 17, Hanoi Market Management Department chaired an inspection of a business establishment and 3 warehouses storing goods belonging to Mr. Drink Vietnam Co., Ltd. in La Khe ward, Ha Dong district, Hanoi. The inspection team discovered a warehouse containing tons of milk tea processing ingredients such as black sugar and brown sugar flavored syrup, milk tea powder printed with Royal tea, Gong Cha logos... The goods here showed signs of smuggling and trade fraud.

Or a familiar brand of the people of our country - Hao Hao Noodles also in 2021 was involved in a banned substance scandal causing a major media crisis for this brand.

In reality, a communication crisis can happen at any time, from any issue, even the smallest one that senior management can sometimes overlook.

A defective product, a fired employee, a customer complaint, an inappropriate attitude towards a partner… all can escalate and become a major crisis for a business. Not to mention that there are now many units specializing in creating fanpages to expose and sabotage businesses in order to profit from user interactions.

Journalists must balance and moderate public opinion in a traditional context, picture 1. — Crisis management is becoming an important issue for individuals and businesses that want to protect their reputation and brand.

And now, in the context of the explosion of social networks, social network users can participate as news and content producers. Every action and behavior of individuals and organizations leaves traces and becomes the "seed" for media crises: status, comments, photos, live videos... Media crises do not only stop at businesses and organizations anymore but also happen to individuals, whether they are famous artists or people doing normal jobs.

Recently, the "review warrior" Ha Linh, a hot TikToker, also had to go through a relatively serious personal media crisis. Specifically, social networks are spreading the image of a restaurant posting a sign prohibiting TikToker Vo Ha Linh, the reason is because many people think that Ha Linh's reviews are too personal and Ha Linh herself does not have enough understanding of the dishes and restaurants that she reviews, which significantly affects the business activities of these restaurants. Ha Linh had to post an apology clip and announce that she will stop reviewing restaurants. This is a valuable lesson in how to speak and create content in front of the public.

Commenting on the media crisis when social networks are on the rise, journalist Nguyen Thu Ha - Deputy Director of the Center for Digital Content Production and Development (VTV Digital) said: The frequency of media crises today is more frequent, denser, more diverse, and develops much faster. One of the common and equally worrying situations is the personal media crisis, when anyone's personal information can be posted on social networks, condemned or opposed.

"Media crises like that, or what netizens often call drama, involve information being shared too quickly, too widely, and mixed comments, and the story eventually gets dissected and goes too far from the original that no one could have imagined. Crises happen at different levels for all audiences. Media crises with the explosion of social networks always create emergency situations and unexpected threats, beyond the control of the subject," said journalist Nguyen Thu Ha.

Question: Who?

Right after the Miss World Vietnam 2023 Finals ended, the reckless and ignorant statements of the new Miss Huynh Tran Y Nhi sparked a wave of outrage. Y Nhi anti-fan groups were continuously established on Facebook, of which the most developed group had reached nearly half a million members, was very active and demanded that her beauty queen crown be stripped.

According to media experts, the golden time to handle a media crisis is usually between 24 and 48 hours. However, many days have passed, and Ý Nhi’s crisis on the online platform has not only shown no signs of stopping, but has become increasingly tense.

A series of videos and images of Ý Nhi with her "lifetime" statements have gone viral on social networking platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Youtube... with millions of views. Hundreds of fanpages and large groups simultaneously posted images with keywords, followed trends, created memes and quotes about Ý Nhi that were widely shared.

Journalists must balance and moderate public opinion in a traditional setting, picture 2. — In recent days, scandals have continuously occurred with Miss Ý Nhi because of her statements after being crowned.

According to journalist Nguyen Thu Ha, this story has two aspects. From a human perspective, it is the initial mistakes that Miss Ý Nhi made when she was still very young. The public needs to look at those mistakes in a more civilized and tolerant way.

From the perspective of media management, there is a very important question: Who? (Who?). Who is the media crisis happening to? Who is the main character? Who is involved? Who is the victim, Who is the culprit?, Who is affected? Many questions of Who? are raised and are very variable. "In each situation, it is necessary to clearly identify whether the media crisis is happening to an individual or to an organization? It is necessary to re-evaluate the challenges in organizing beauty contests, and even the problems in the cultural background of society, in the concept of beauty contests?" , journalist Nguyen Thu Ha asked.

According to journalist Nguyen Thu Ha, in order to resolve the crisis and not let things go too far, the beauty pageant's organizing committee should take the lead in managing this media crisis. "It's easy to vent anger on someone, but it's very difficult to have the right perspective and action for social progress. It's even easy to criticize a beauty queen for being "ugly", but it's much more difficult to give young people the opportunity to continue to improve themselves, and for the true values of beauty to prevail," journalist Nguyen Thu Ha shared.

The press needs to create a counterweight.

In the digital age, crisis communications issues often accelerate rapidly through social media.

At that time, if a crisis occurs, the social network community will focus on reporting negative information with a tendency to "seriousen" the scale, extent, and influence of the incident. Moreover, the social network community tends to focus on gossip and nonsense, this type of news combined with "rumors" and "fake news" will increase rapidly, making the story's developments increasingly difficult to control and handle. Many scandals when posted on social networks lead to real crises, due to great pressure from public opinion and the "political atmosphere". Social networks promote the trend of resolving incidents according to crowd pressure.

From a journalist's perspective, journalist Nguyen Thu Ha said that it is very common for the press to follow trends and exploit online topics to create news. However, with the current situation of media crises happening "as often as meals", the press must have an appropriate approach and method to create a balanced voice and guide public opinion correctly.

"The press must create a necessary counterbalance to social networks to prevent dramatic stories and the keyboard hero effect of social networks from going too far and becoming uncontrollable. That is also considered the professional ethics of journalists, a part of the culture of journalism, how to lead and direct the community towards civilized development, humanity and the values of truth - goodness - beauty", journalist Nguyen Thu Ha commented.

Phan Hoa Giang

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