I’ve had to stop watching the news today. I found myself shouting at the TV. At the risk of sounding like a complaint letter: why oh why oh why are we waking up to ever more sensational descriptions of the weather each day?  I know that it’s cold out there and that things certainly aren’t normal, but I’m finding myself increasingly incensed by the language used by the media, especially by news broadcast anchors and reporters.  It seems like everyone is trying to out-do each other to have the most alarming report possible. As the news media reports on the admittedly challenging weather conditions in the UK, we have already moved from Severe to Extreme Weather warnings. The country is fairly snowbound, but with the prospect of another week or more of Arctic weather, there is certainly the potential for the situation to worsen further. Unfortunately the Met Office and the news media seem to be running out of adjectives already, so I live in daily anticipation of Fatal Weather Warnings or something similar.  Such extremes are already showing up, in fact - First Road Fatalities was one of the travel headline messages on the Beeb this morning, although the reporter could only point to 1 road death to back it up. Even one is absolutely tragic, we know, and no doubt there are other fatality consequences right across the country on the roads and elsewhere – but that doesn’t excuse it being blown up into a suggestion of swathes of deaths without any kind of story backup. It’s plain irresponsible. I normally come down firmly on the side of the media on the question of reporting standards, because in the UK the major broadcasters by and large feature pretty clear communication and balanced reporting. We are still proud of the BBC; Sky is an excellent news broadcaster; Channel 4 has very thoughtful news programming and there is a hot international broadcast marketplace providing plenty of competition.  Most of the UK newspapers fall into this category too (with a couple of notable red top exceptions, but that’s part of the landscape and we all accept it). As a PR person I fight a daily battle with clients and prospects on this question.  Normally I defend the media’s right to report fact and that they have the freedom and discretion to interpret news, because they do it rather well, in general. I also fight with my clients for the use of clear, balanced and unemotional language.  Anyone in this business or indeed in the media will know the tendency of companies to use over-emphatic and often unjustified language in their PR activities. Most companies starting out with PR will tend to wish to be positioned as the first, the only, the leading, the best, the unparalleled, the undisputed champion of the WOOORRRLLLD!!!  Most sensible PR folks will slowly educate them that the press require clear, factual, provable statements and content from which they do the job of writing or telling the stories.  Yes, we do write things which are designed to provoke an emotional zing in the reader – a bit of humour, pathos, shock or indignation are all tools which PR people utilise judiciously. The one thing we always end up stripping out of each draft of a news release are superlative words because, we explain, it is lazy and unjustified and more likely to annoy the journalist or reader than to inform them. The news media are starting to undermine my position, and I don’t like it. Please oh please oh please (there I go again) can we have a little more sanity in our reporting. Things are difficult enough already for the UK population without you scaring old ladies, panicking mums and making men in general do silly things just to prove how hard they are.  I vote to put a language sanity check on the agenda of every editorial meeting – and if someone would slap the caption jockeys around a bit too, that would be wonderful.   Meanwhile, I hope everyone who has the chance to is having fun in the snow, and those who can’t are sensibly tucked up in front of a fire doing what work they can.