FACT-AVERSE MEDIA: The chauffeured transportation industry has sustained a "drive-by" media barrage about the sedan services provided to many corporate clients in New York. This means operators of all sizes need to be out front rebutting the misleading claims in the report. . .
You can see both the video and print versions of the report, along with responses so far.
Simply put, this report fits the typical class-warfare journalistic model. Show Wall Street workers getting into Town Cars; then interview man-on-the-street who professes to be outraged about the firms with chauffeured employees getting taxpayer bailouts. (Do some of these "man-on-the-streeters" even pay taxes, now that so many Americans have been taken off the tax rolls? And while we're following the media script here, why not interview some vagrants pushing shopping carts about the "injustices" of having to watch employed people riding by in Town Cars?)
This is such a shopworn, lazy media cop-out: Demonize anything done or used by corporate America, whether it's hotels, air travel, charter jets, or chauffeured transportation.
Operators and associations need to get out front on these type of media hit jobs and explain the obvious overall value, service, advantages, and uses of chaufferued transportation. Chauffeured transportation also is very much a MIDDLE CLASS phenomenon, not just an exclusive province of the rich.
How about NBC-TV interview retired GM factory workers with gold-plated pensions and health benefits vacationing at age 52, and then interviewing "outraged" private sector workers of the same age who pay the taxes for the GM bailout and have watched their 401k plans cut in half? Don't count on it.
And what about the government-fleet black SUVs used by every Congressperson who voted for the Obama so-called stimulus plan? You know, the plan that no one, not even the President, bothered to read? How much do those taxpayer funded SUVs cost, and why aren't the Sen. Menendezes of the world setting an example and taking the bus, the train, the taxi? (Or better yet, just push your own shopping cart, Senator). Don't count on the media doing a report about that either. . .
By the way, it's not a "limousine." It's a "chauffeured sedan." Someone may want to explain the difference to the old media mentality at NBC.
-- Martin Romjue
Print | posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 10:07 AM