The press must balance and properly guide public opinion 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 presided over 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 commercial 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 call, 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 that specialize in creating fanpages to expose and sabotage businesses in order to profit from user interactions.

Journalists must balance and organize public opinion appropriately within the traditional context, figure 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 announced that she would 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 in the era of social media dominance, 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 media, condemned or opposed.

"Media crises like this, or what netizens often call drama, involve information being shared too quickly and too widely, with mixed comments, and the story eventually being dissected and going too far from the original, beyond anyone's imagination. Crises happen at different levels for all audiences. Media crises with the explosion of social networks always create unexpected emergency and threatening situations, 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, normally, the golden time to handle a media crisis is from 24 to 48 hours. However, many days have passed, and the crisis of Ý Nhi on the online platform has not only shown no signs of stopping but has become more and more intense.

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 large fanpages and groups simultaneously posted images with keywords, followed trends, created memes and quotes about Ý Nhi that were widely shared.

Journalists must balance and organize public opinion appropriately within the traditional context, figure 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 asked 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-examine the challenges in organizing beauty contests, and even the existence 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 true values of beauty to prevail," journalist Nguyen Thu Ha shared.

The press needs to create a counterweight.

In the digital age, crisis communication issues are often accelerated 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 "seriousize" the scale, level, 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 development 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 tendency to resolve incidents according to crowd pressure.

From a journalist's perspective, journalist Nguyen Thu Ha said that the press follows trends and exploits online topics to create news is very common. 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 with social networks to prevent dramatic stories with 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 journalistic culture, how to lead and guide the community towards civilized development, humanity and the values of truth, goodness and beauty," said journalist Nguyen Thu Ha.

Phan Hoa Giang

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