Journalism Warning Labels [via Valentina Tanni]

Must say I’m jealous of Tom Scott’s journalism warning labels – they may not be useful (it’d take a prohibitively great deal of time to vet the daily newspaper and apply stickers for an effective information campaign) but perhaps a few choice applications would remind readers to think critically while reading their morning paper…

For examples of lazy journalism, try searching up articles which reference “officials”, “experts”, and “representatives” at industry trade groups like the following:

• Advertising Research Foundation
• Marketing Research Association
• Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America
• American Beverage Institute
• American Frozen Food Institute
• American Institute of Constructors
• American Iron and Steel Institute
• American Meat Institute
• American Petroleum Institute
• Community Associations Institute
• Edison Electric Institute
• Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries
• Investment Company Institute
• National Fisheries Institute
• Nuclear Energy Institute
• Pellet Fuels Institute
• Tobacco Institute

… In closed markets and/or less-open cultures, corporations can have powerful identities. In Japan, for example, many people feel privileged to work for their corporations and attribute a great deal of identity and benevolence to them. In the United States, large corporations will also contain many people who treat “the corporation” as a specific entity, capable of rewarding or punishing them.

Just like religious and racial groups, corporations will do their best to influence the government for their own ends.

- God Wants You Dead
by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg

Executive Summary

This document and linked multimedia describe the individual identity’s corporate identity sublimation and the brand-imprint process follow-up for new hires.

[Day 01] Agenda: Orientation Video

SNOG

[Day 02 - Dismissal] Agenda: Work Hard

The Faint

All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don’t affect you. If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.

- The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde, 1890

I love the subtle distortions employed by Wilde’s characters Lord Henry and, later, Dorian Gray – but a small sampling of the power of words over reality and a prescient indictment of such manipulation which, in many ways, seems far ahead of its time…

Politics – Public Relations – Disinformation – News Media

What’s in a name?

That which we call “persuasion”
by any other name has results the same

Falsehoods – Distortions – Manipulations – Prevarications

Neuro-linguistic Programming places great deal of importance on non-verbal communication and body language. However, our language also plays a significant role in effective communication. It embodies not just the vocabulary we use in our dialect, which is around seven percent of the communication, but also the language we use in our brain. Every word we use has an impact on the communication and individual words can carry deep meanings.

- NLP E-Prime Technique

“The cost of an Associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55% more than the cost of an Associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity, moreover, because we pay an Associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that Associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart.”

The horror! If we treat our people well, they might actually want to stay. This kind of thinking by a senior human resources executive at one of the world’s biggest companies is simply unconscionable. Over the years, there have been too many examples of this kind of pervasive thinking among Wal-Mart’s top ranks.

When you have to hire an army of people to help improve your image, you’ve probably been doing some things wrong. That’s a lesson Wal-Mart seems incapable of learning.

- Why you should hate Wal-Mart
by Megan Barnett for MSN
2009-10-09

Wal-Mart hires people like Gavin Gibbons (i.e. the type who are comfortable spinning yarns and towing the company line) because it’s cheaper and more efficient than changing their practices. Wal-Mart is not incapable of learning: it has learned the most important lesson of public image and opinion.

The truth is merely what you can convince people to believe.

Call in the Public Relations cleanup crew before this hits the press!

When you are the chief executive officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals you’d better hope that your organization gets plenty of good press – and the last thing you want in the news is the story of how you killed your own pooch by broiling him in your locked car…

Starr says she drove to work and didn’t notice Louie was in the vehicle until lunchtime, when temperatures had reached 91 degrees. The dog was in heat stroke and rushed inside where SPCA veterinarians started to treat Louie. According to the news release from the SPCA, he was later transported to a second clinic where died that night.

- SPCA CEO: Dog Dies After Left in Hot Car
WTVR.com Richmond, VA

… will the machinations of PR flacks manage to spin this story in a positive light? As much as Robin Starr’s reputation demands it, I would hope that this incident remains known for what it is: gross negligence and, should she remain on board as the CEO of the SPCA, a travesty akin to a judge who considers himself “above the law”… her organization argues for stringent penalties for animal abuse, after all.

From my August 30th, 2008 post regarding the Bayer CropScience Facility Explosion in Institute, West Virginia:

I rarely read much of the news, though it does lead one to wonder – how often do reporters substitute a quip from a company spokesman/government official/authority figure for factual information?

Conveniently enough, a congressional review of the incident was conducted.

“Bayer engaged in a campaign of secrecy by withholding critical information from local, county, and state emergency responders; by restricting the use of information provided to federal investigators; by undermining news outlets and citizen groups concerned about the dangers posed by Bayer’s activities; and by providing inaccurate and misleading information to the public,” according to an April 21, 2009 staff report (pdf) from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In testimony before Rep. Bart Stupak’s Oversight Subcommittee this week, Bayer CropScience President William B. Buckner admitted that Bayer’s secrecy practices were driven not only by “legitimate security concerns” but also by “a desire to limit negative publicity generally about the company or the Institute facility.” “We concede that our pursuit of [secrecy protection] was motivated, in part, by a desire to prevent that public debate from occurring in the first place,” Mr. Buckner said.

- Secrecy vs. Scientific Integrity at FAS.org
Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Bayer willfully attempted to obfuscate and confuse the issue with some legal slight of hand; thankfully, they were not entirely successful.

If this incident does not lend to the notion – cynical though it may be – that companies cannot be trusted to set the media’s talking points for their own failures to protect the public interest…

I told you so.

… and what of the Bayer Institute site’s leader, Nick Crosby, and his assertions?

“There’s no danger to human health,” he said. “I can confirm that our monitoring system did not detect anything.”

…

He said people in the area may smell a foul odor, but there are no harmful effects.

- Charleston Daily Mail

People Concerned About Methyl Isocyanate, a grassroots community protest group, has formed in response to concerns that Bayer CropScience’s activities in Institute, West Virginia may lead to a repeat of the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

Taking another page from Machiavelli’s own Public Relations guide, here is an excerpt from an internal Bayer CropScience document (drafted by Ann Green Communications, a contracted public relations firm) which was released over the course of the aforementioned congressional review:

Community Relations Strategy

Our goal with People Concerned About MIC should be to marginalize them. Build the stronger ties with the rest of the Kanawha Valley, keep operations safe, rebuild confidence in emergency response communications, and the activists will become irrelevant. This is especially true in a difficult economy where good jobs mean so much to the area. Interaction with People Concerned should be kept in the public arena where they cannot distort the facts. Treat them civilly so observers will not feel the need to come to their defense. Allow them to seem uncivil. Local citizens have, historically, not supported fanatical, negative activism.

- Community Relations Strategy, Bayer CropScience Institute Plant
as referenced at PeopleConcernedAboutMIC.com

Nearly nine months after the Institute facility’s explosion, long after the media’s initial reporting frenzy has died down (any meaningful questions or revelations deflected by Bayer CropScience’s deceptive practices) the truth regarding this incident is slowly leaking out and, in that respect, perhaps this incident is an exemplary one – the machinations of obfuscation and the PR firm modus operandi are plainly exposed for all their ugliness…

… though a thousand less conspicuous variations occur every day.

Leave it to Canadian reporting to sum up the entirety of an exasperating issue fraught with futile appeals to logic in a single expository sentence:

In 1976, then U.S. president Gerald Ford ordered a national vaccination campaign in response to an outbreak of swine flu at a military base in New Jersey. In the end, only one person died from swine flu, while roughly 25 people died from a rare neurological syndrome believed to have been a side-effect of the vaccine. The program, now considered a case study in how not to handle a flu outbreak, cost roughly $500 million US in today’s dollars.

- Virus raises tough vaccination questions
Canada.com

So… where did the money go? Cui bono?

It’s that time again – time to shell out for a Swine Flu shot – because:

• You don’t want to die
• You don’t want to kill your family
• You really like lining the pockets of your friendly neighborhood multinational pharmaceutical corporation

US data on influenza deaths are false and misleading. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges a difference between flu death and flu associated death yet uses the terms interchangeably. Additionally, there are significant statistical incompatibilities between official estimates and national vital statistics data. Compounding these problems is a marketing of fear—a CDC communications strategy in which medical experts “predict dire outcomes” during flu seasons.

… [The CDC states] that influenza is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people, helping foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza.” Preceding the summit, demand [for influenza vaccine] had been low early into the 2003 flu season.

“At that point, the manufacturers were telling us that they weren’t receiving a lot of orders for vaccine for use in November or even December,” recalled Dr Nowak on National Public Radio.

“It really did look like we needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot.” If flu is in fact not a major cause of death, this public relations approach is surely exaggerated. Moreover, by arbitrarily linking flu with pneumonia, current data are statistically biased. Until corrected and until unbiased statistics are developed, the chances for sound discussion and public health policy are limited.

- Are US flu death figures more PR than science?
by Peter Doshi

Wait, maybe that Thimerosal (“mercury-containing organic compound”)-bolstered dose of virus you paid $20 to get injected into your arm a few months ago will protect you? Nope.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly doubts that this year’s flu vaccine will offer people any protection from the swine flu. “We don’t think that any of the existing vaccines are effective,” acting CDC Director Richard Besser said yesterday at a press conference.

- Will Your Flu Shot Protect You Against Swine Flu?
by Jon Cohen for ScienceNOW Daily News

The practice of implying or threatening harm should one’s demands go unmet is also known as extortion – in this case the vaccine’s manufacturer is aided and abetted by both media and government bagmen.

Could public relations be a euphemism for extortion?

… what of public health?

As reported at the Brad Blog, Lexington 18 News, and Matt Blaze’s Exhaustive Search (where I happened upon it), a case has been made against election officials in Kentucky. They are accused of altering votes attempted on an electronic voting machine.

Their technique exploited the weakest link in the electronic voting security chain: both usability flaws and social engineering (by all appearances) allowed voting officials to misguide voters away from ballots which could subsequently be revised:

Yes, the technique is low-tech, but it’s also very clever, and not at all obvious. The only way for them to have discovered it would have been to think hard and long about how the machines work, how voters would use them, and how they could subvert the process with the access they had. And that’s just what they did. They found the leverage they needed quickly, succeeding at using their discovery to steal real votes, and apparently went for several years without getting caught. It seems reasonable to suspect that if a user interface ambiguity couldn’t have been exploited, they would have looked for — and perhaps found — one of the many other exploitable weaknesses present in the ES&S system.

- Is the e-voting honeymoon over?
by Matt Blaze

Security gurus like Matt Blaze and even Bruce Schneier (arguably the Chuck Norris of cryptography) never miss a beat in pointing out that the vector(s) which are exploited tend to be those with the lowest barrier to success – that the simplest vectors (willingness to follow instructions, socially-motivated subjection to arbitrary authority, inattentiveness, and even desire to trust other human beings) are often the first avenue of attack in a variety of security scenarios belies more than the underpinnings of a one-off scam or con.

Consider institutions built upon the persistence of ignorance and disinformation.

Consider the Center for Consumer Freedom (formerly the “Guest Choice Network” – in defense of smoking in restaurants), a lobbyist group dedicated to defaming “anti-smoking, anti-drinking, anti-meat, etc. activists” and publishing information.

• ActivistCash.com – They’re all just in it for the money, eh?
• AnimalScam.com – “The modern animal rights movement is not what it seems.”
• MercuryFacts.org – It’s actually a great nutrient for developing brains? Amazing!
• ObesityMyths.com – …

What makes us different from many organizations is that we aren’t afraid to take on groups that have built “good” images through slick public relations campaigns. Just because they claim to be “ethical” or “responsible” or “in the public interest” doesn’t mean they are. Just because they claim to be “scientific” doesn’t mean it’s true.

- Center for Consumer Freedom at SourceWatch.org

They must really care a lot about consumer freedom to take such an interest in groups exercising their right to boycott things and demand corporate accountability for unethical treatment of animals, humans, and common decency…

Amazingly enough, these guys put Gavin Gibbons and the National Fisheries “Institute” to shame.

To what extent are the inherent weaknesses of human nature (itself a debatable amalgam of conditioning) exploited – and to what extent can voters, believers, and consumers alike protect themselves from an organized minority willing to trespass ethical concerns in pursuit of pathologically-bent agendas..?

A few places to start:

• LobbyWatch.org – If you want to know how the world works, this is the place to start.
• MinistryWatch.com – See the Top 20 ministries by Total Revenue
• ConsumerDeception.com – Debunking the “inappropriately-named” Center for Consumer Freedom

… but there is no clear-cut solution, unless one is willing to stoop to the level of a corrupt Kentucky plutocrat, Bible-thumping charlatan, or soulless public relations mercenary…

Somewhere, nestled in-between a food court and a fashionable shoe store, a new kind of propaganda awaits the consciousness of impressionable (and bored) teenagers: the new US Army Experience Center.

Pay no attention to the man (you know, the one with the gun, orders to seek and destroy, Modular Lightweight Load-bearing Equipment, et cetera) behind the curtain!

If the “Army Experience Center” features moldy barracks for wounded soldiers (and a quick termination for those who speak out), otherwise insufficient follow-up care for debilitating psychological harm, or overflowing toilets and dilapidated facilities, then they may actually be planning to tell the whole story.

Instead, this is the wonderfully summed-up and spun-up version they’ll be be sharing:

Unlike recruitment centers in office complexes, the center is surrounded by retail stores and designed to look hip and modern, with giant plasma screen televisions, brushed stainless steel fixtures, interactive displays, helicopter and Humvee simulators, a gaming area and a cafe.

“It’s not a recruiting center,” said Army chief marketing officer Edward Walters. “It’s really a place for the American public to get educated about the Army and for us to show that the Army is very high-tech and relevant.”

- Army Deploys ‘Experience Center’ at AdWeek.com

Apparently, this is the Army Experience:

Just another place to hang out, play some fancy video games, and talk to the friendly neighborhood recruiter about joining to get some easy money for college.

Surprise! Here’s what it’s really all about:

The Army isn’t doing its job right if there aren’t any graves to fill.

The youth of America are wasting their time at the local shopping center because they lack purpose – they are members of a disenfranchised population which constantly grows as the educational barrier for entry into desirable portions of the workforce grows greater and the quality of education provided by public schools worsens.

Win their minds and they will die fighting any war you can make for them.