Although I'm not going to mention specifics here (anyone with a google news alert for Civil Air Patrol would see the stories I reference), there were a couple of prime examples for why you need good information officers for CAP missions as well as some training in publich affairs procedures for all members.
In one state you've got a CAP officer speculating to a newspaper on the cause of a crash that CAP had nothing at all to do with. He apparently stopped by the crash site while wearing his flight suit after some o-rides were cancelled and apparently consented to an interview about the accident (which occurred in a residential neighborhood).
In another state you've got a situation where the sheriff's department is saying that the pilot in a crashed plane isn't the person that CAP (and everybody else) says it is. This one might not be entirely an CAP MIO problem, though in general we probably shouldn't be saying much of anything about an accident ourselves after we've found it. In any case, it would be interesting to see an after-action review of the communications between CAP and the sheriff to see how things got so messed up. However, having us and the S.O. contradicting each other in the press is not going to be good for local relations.
Nature of the beast. If even the "paid professionals" get is screwed up...you are always going to have screw ups when dealing with the media.
If you are suggesting more training for the MIO and general membership.....do you have a proposed curriculm? Or a source for good PAO training?
Well, I think I proposed (or maybe I agreed with someone else's proposal - don't recall) some time ago that having a Technician-level rating in public affairs should be a pre-requisite for beginning training as an Information Officer. I would like to see us require them to also have the FEMA basic Public Information Officer class, but I'm not sure that it is widely enough available for that to be a feasible requirement for us. The AFRCC SAR Management Course should also be strongly recommended for MIOs as it has a strong public affairs component.
For the general membership I would like to see some sort of general briefing on basic CAP public affairs rules, recommendations, and guidelines (powerpoint or online) that senior members would have to review periodically.
We already have basic media relations training as part of our GES training.....
I know that FEMA has a MIO CBT (IS-702)...and do agree that it should be added to the MIO SQTR.
Pacific Region PAO college is the weekend following RSC in April 2009.
We were going to include MIO training at our PAO academy in NY (Syracuse) last weekend. The event got canceled due to lack of interest. Out of 10 who were going to attend, 8 were coming from over 150 miles away!
Only one attendee was going to come from the area code where we were going to hold it!
I guess in this case we could not even lead the horse to water!
Hopefully we will try again in 2009, I had prepared 3 classes and woud like to see my work not go to waste.