.jpg)
By Mihar Dias (C) Copyright December 2022
Recently our new Minister of Education held her first press conference. For a newcomer, she did handle her first press conference relatively well.
What she did not know, she asked the technocrats in her ministry to answer for her. This a well known technique employed by many seasoned professionals. It has been used by the police at press conferences in time of crisis which involves many supporting departments like the hospital, fire and rescue etc.
An accompanying video from @detruthchannel on Tiktok offers you a glimpse on how she handled this difficult task for the first time in her role as a Minister of Education.
The video presented four instances where the Minister had to call upon the assistance of her Director General (KP) Dato' Pkharuddin Ghazali or Secretary General (KSU) Datuk Yusran Shah Mohd Yusof reply to questions she was not able to answer:
- For Question 1 which involves syllabus for schools, she had to call upon the Director General to answer for her.
- For Question 2 which relates to redeployment of teachers, she had to rely on the Secretary General of the ministry to answer for her.
- For Question 3 on "sekolah pasti", she asked the Director General to reply.
- For Question 4 on free breakfast programme for school children, she called upon the Secretary General yet again to reply for her.
While the technique of involving others in your team on the podium facing the press may be a desirable method, over-using it may result in exposing your own weaknesses to the public especially when it was transmitted live over all news networks. It may imply that the speaker is poorly prepared for a press conference or may not be at all familiar with the policy, operations and activities.
The latter may be a legitimate reason since she has been in the ministry for hardly a month.
For a press conference to be informative, impressive and memorable, you would need plenty of advanced planning. At least the Minister is expected to know basic policy matters like free breakfast programme for school children and deployment of teachers.
However, the best tip possible for anyone planning a press conference is to try not to take over the job of the Master of Ceremonies (MC) where you only call others to the podium to answer questions meant for you, the person from whom the press would like to hear, not your support staff.
Or wait until you are ready before appearing before the media or avoid a press conference.
Mihar Dias is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav.
Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
Newswav is solely an aggregation platform and hosts the content. The views expressed and content above including media (pictures, videos, etc) were provided by the author. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact Newswav.
