Keep The Post Public Media Coverage

[johnnyp]

Letter to Branches





No. 163/’09 Date: 25th February 2009

Dear Colleagues

Keep The Post Public – Media Coverage

Yesterday’s rally and lobby was a huge success from a political and media perspective. Although you were making the news yesterday, I hope you still managed to view some of the huge TV coverage, which was top story most of the day. A lot of the TV coverage focussed on the growing pressure on the government.

Our key messages were broadcast throughout the day on all TV and radio channels. As a direct result of the profile of our activity yesterday, we flushed out the BERR secretary of state, Lord Mandelson, to defend his position on the 6 o’clock news cycle.

Today, all national newspapers cover the rally in depth and again, our key messages get wide publicity.

The Guardian has joined support for our campaign. Although stopping short of an editorial, they carry a commentary piece that carries our key messages and supports our aims. The Morning Star has of course, again supported our campaign, The Independent and The Times carries broadly supportive coverage.

The Mail and FT always generally support privatisation but they do carry our messages in reporting the rally.

The negative coverage is carried by The Sun, which has editorially opposed our campaign today. At every opportunity, we should encourage our members who read The Sun to cease doing so as they are specifically calling for the sell off of Royal Mail.

By contrast, again The Daily Mirror has carried another editorial supporting our campaign and we are grateful for their outstanding support. Activists and members at the rally will have received a special edition of The Daily Mirror supporting our rally, yesterday. Thousands of these special editions were handed out by the CWU communications team around Westminster and they were issued to all MPs and Lords. As requested by a number of Branches, several copies of this special anti-privatisation edition have been posted to all Branches separately.

We also gained coverage in most regional broadcast media outlets and in many local newspapers. Thanks to all those Branch and Regional/Divisional officials who have worked hard to this end.

A national advert for the campaign was placed in the national copy of The Daily Mirror and the Daily Record (in Scotland) yesterday. More national newspaper adverts will follow as part of our public campaign in due course

Any enquiries to mmurray@cwu.org

Yours sincerely

Kevin Slocombe
Head of Communications