From 50,000 Feet

“Hit & Run,” a blog offering of Reason magazine, rats out a recent Ladies Home Journal article on the danger of drivers running red lights, which they claim was concocted to advance the interests of three private companies that make red light cameras.

Halfway through the article, there’s a box with a header set in bold and all-caps that reads, “WHAT CAN YOU DO?”  The copy inside the box says:

Readers can go to www.stopredlightrunning.com/lhj and click on a form letter urging the federal government to encourage states to adopt automated enforcement laws to reduce red-light running.  The letters will be compiled by the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running and sent to the White House early in 2009.

Neither the magazine article nor the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running website offer specifics on just how the federal government might “encourage” the states to adopt red light cameras, but the best bet is  that they’ll ask Congress to follow the example set in previous attempts to impose traffic regulations on the states—by withholding federal highway money from the states that don’t comply.

What Alexander and Ladies’ Home Journal don’t disclose in the article, however, is that the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running is funded by three private companies: Affiliated Computer Systems, Gatso USA, and Redflex, Inc.  All three are in the automated traffic enforcement business, and all three stand to make millions should the campaign prove successful.  That’s a pretty big omission.

Of course, Reason’s core philosophy would put grant less power to government, so they don’t like the red-light cameras on principle.  But the article (not online) should have mentioned that private companies had created and funded the “Stop Red Light Running” campaign, and would stand to benefit massively if the Ladies’ Home Journal’s form letters work their hoped-for legislative magic.  Local and state governments tend to like red-light cameras because they create a new revenue stream.  According to Reason, some cities actually shorten the yellow lights’ duration so as to write more tickets.

The PR people that gulled the Ladies’ Home Journal into doing their bidding earned their pay this month, I suppose — assuming readers follow the call to action, something I’m always dubious about. Deceptive astroturf campaigns — fake grassroots campaigns paid for by special interests with a financial stake in a political outcome — have been around since long before the invention of Astroturf.  But for a purportedly journalistic enterprise to participate in one can only degrade further journalism’s reputation.

Tags: astroturf campaigns, Ladies' Home Journal, public relations, Reason magazine, red lights, traffic safety

Barack Obama is more than just a messiah; he’s a brilliant marketer, especially to the Millennial cohort, according to this excellent analysis by Advertising Age’s Peter Feld:

Baby boomers and Gen Xers declared mass marketing dead long ago. We live in a world of fragmented media surrounded by cynical consumers who can spot and block an ad message from a mile away. But what Gen Xers and boomers may not realize is that the unabashed embrace of select brands by millennials, from technology to beverages to fashion, has made this decade a true golden era of marketing for those who know what they’re doing. And when it comes to marketing, the Barack Obama campaign knows what it’s doing.

IPod.  Harry Potter. Barack Obama.

Gen Xers and boomers may have assumed that today’s youth are as anti-marketing as they once were; millennials’ mass adoption of Mr. Obama’s brand may puzzle or alienate them. After a video featuring celebrities like the Black-Eyed Peas’ will.i.am and actress Scarlett Johansson crooning along with an Obama speech went viral last winter, a response mocking the mass Obama phenomenon was posted to YouTube, set to “Building a Religion” by quintessential Gen-X band Cake.

Pete Markiewicz, co-author with Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe of “Millennials and the Pop Culture,” said Gen Xer cynics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert often lampoon the Obama campaign’s messianic tendencies. Said Mr. Markiewicz, “Both Colbert and Stewart are liberal, but the worship of Obama sticks in their Xer craws.”

The article goes on to explain that Obama does have a message for the slightly older voters, but it’s carried more by the content of his policy proposals.  The balancing act Obama is trying to perform requires him to inspire the newest voters with lots of branding and whipping up mass excitement, while offering enough substance to the rest of us that we’ll overlook what we oldsters might think is too corny or swoony.

To use a baby-boomer expression that probably makes no sense to millennials, stay tuned.

Tags: Advertising Age, Barack Obama, branding, Jon Stewart, Millennials

From a Jordan Richardson’s review of OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion, a new book by Lucas Conley:

Marketers and advertisers love a separated, individualized public. Despite our world’s advances in communications technology (cell phones, email, instant messaging services, chat rooms, social networking websites, Blackberry devices), we are, as a people, becoming more and more alone with each passing generation. The pledge of a product and of a sense of belonging and community through that product is becoming more and more attractive.

Conley’s book does an excellent job at demonstrating the magnitude of the issue of brand obsession. With a world sliding ever-downward away from concrete social relationships, families, and a focus on community, marketers are establishing their own brand communities, brand tribes, brand promises, and proxy relationships through Coke or Nike to “fill the void.” And people are buying it.

When branding encroaches on our basic relationship and even on our social policy (post-Katrina New Orleans allocated public funds towards restoration of its “Mardi Gras image” rather than actually addressing safety concerns), it’s time to take a stand. Lucas Conley’s book lays the structure and is a solid read through a whirlwind of examples and stories that describe a riotously disquieting state of affairs in a world gone brand crazy.

Of course, there’s all the research suggesting we don’t trust corporations, advertisers, prominent people, the media or anyone as much as we trust “a person like me.”  But the thought here is that the community of “persons like me” is being shaped by marketers.  Who do you have more in common with?  Your neighbor, or someone who has the same kind of mobile phone as you?

Besides, your neighbor might be a paid shill. In Richardson’s words:

(T)hink about the next time you talk to your neighbour about diapers. She might begin a chat by recommending Pampers or a comparable brand, talking to you about how it makes her baby feel and how the diaper is the best around. What you don’t know is that your fellow citizen has actually been dispatched by Pampers to offer WOM (Word-of-Mouth) about the diapers.

Tags: branding

I’m going back to work on this blog.

I pray to the Lord of All Blogs for the power to maintain a consistent pace.

It’s been a busy summer, but that shouldn’t stop me from sharing stories with anyone who comes through here for a read.

June 16th was “Anatomical Donor Appreciation Day” in the state of Maryland.  Our Dolan Media outlet in the state, The Daily Record, has a wonderful multimedia post on its blog, On The Record, with photos and audio of an annual burial service held for Marylanders who donated their bodies to science.  The interviews with the survivors are enlightening and the whole package is quite touching.  Please check it out.

Tags: Anatomical Donor Appreciation Day, donating your body to science, Maryland, Maryland Daily Record, multimedia, On the Record

I liked this column by Robert Samuelson. I suspect that’s because, unlike John McCain and Barack Obama, he’s not running for office or trying to advance a party’s agenda, so he can afford to think about the shocking 90 percent increase in oil prices in less than two years in practical terms.  Like this:

There’s been a huge transfer of power to oil producers. Even at $100 a barrel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will earn almost $8 trillion in oil revenues between now and 2020, estimates the McKinsey Global Institute. More troubling are the political implications. “This has really strengthened the Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans to be more provocative in the world,” says Larry Goldstein of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. Although governments control crude supplies, private companies have dominated distribution. Anyone can buy oil at a price. Now oil could become a political commodity offered to friends at a discount, withheld from rivals.

How can we retrieve some of our lost power? The first thing is to get out of denial. Stop blaming oil companies and “speculators.” Next, we need to expand domestic oil and natural-gas drilling, including Alaska. Although we can’t “drill our way” out of this problem, we can augment oil supplies and lessen price strains. It might take 10 years or more, because new projects are huge undertakings. But delay will only aggravate our future problems.

Finally, we need to realize high prices may stimulate new biofuels from wood chips, food waste and switch grass. Production costs of these fuels may be in the range of $1 a gallon, says David Cole of the Center for Automotive Research. If true, that’s well below today’s wholesale gasoline prices. To assure new producers that they wouldn’t be wiped out if oil prices plunged, we should set a floor price for oil of $50 to $80 a barrel, says Cole. This could be done with a standby tariff that would activate only if prices hit the threshold. Oil prices are unpredictable and should a price collapse occur, Americans wouldn’t be deluded into thinking we’ve returned permanently to cheap energy. We’ve made that mistake before.

It’ll be a good thing when the election is over and the winner is in his honeymoon phase.  A lot of old thinking about energy is ready to be discarded. But it’s about to get a long, last dance.

Tags: 2008 election, oil, robert samuelson

In the 1990s, I was part of a task force designed to increase telecommuting in the City of Los Angeles.  At that time, oil was cheap, but traffic was horrible and air quality still (then as now) the worst in the nation.

We were mindful of the 1984 Olympics traffic experience, when just an 8 percent drop in the amount of cars on the road resulted in traffic that flowed like midnight.  Small changes can have a big impact on the traffic.  Less traffic idling was another anti-smog strategy.  So, we thought it should be possible for City Hall to set an example for the business community.

It was a vain hope.
Both management and labor perceived telecommuting as a threat.  Department heads didn’t want anyone out of their sightlines for any longer than was absolutely necessary.  They assumed the worst of their employees.  The unions demanded that telecommuting become a bargaining issue.  Typical of how city unions work, the labor appointee to our task force missed the first two meetings, then came late to the third and asked to speak with me privately.  She said, “We’re not sure if telecommuting is a way for managers to unfairly reward or unfairly punish our members, but either way, we’re going to oppose it.”  Then she sat at the table with the rest of the task force, repeating a few platitudes, knowing she’d killed the idea.

Perhaps things are about to change.   In Southern California, every weekday there are tens of thousands of commuters who drive epic distances to get to work centers in LA and Orange counties.  In the 1990s, the Inland Empire land boom was just beginning.  Now gas prices are four times higher, and many people are driving west from places like Temecula.

Temecula is almost 90 miles from downtown LA, and more than 65 miles from Santa Ana. Do the math.  If your car gets 20 miles per gallon, pretty good for a beep-n-creep voyage on crowded freeways, it’s costing you nine gallons per day to go back and forth from work = $36 per day just for gas.

I can’t imagine that at least some of those people, and the merciful among their bosses would want to alleviate that.  So, all of a sudden, telecommuting looks less scary, maybe necessary, and perhaps something that will be embraced in a rush.

That’s what Computerworld’s blogger Mike Elgan thinks:

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

The last remaining barrier to the general acceptance of “extreme telecommuting” is purely cultural — it’s our irrational clinging to obsolete rules for how we work. As the cultural barriers fall, more of us will be freed to work from wherever we please, something which mobile technology and Internet communication already enables.

To me, that’s the silver lining in high gas prices.

Seth Godin, writing about the higher standards business meetings and conferences must meet to make it worth the (increasingly expensive) trip puts the onus on managers to make going to the office a value-added experience, or else:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

How long before companies in places like Los Angeles adopt this kind of thinking?  I’m not sure they have a choice.

There’s probably money to be made in telling managers how to manage a virtual workforce, because a lot of companies will need to make this shift soon or they’ll lose valuable employees.

(A different version of this post appears on my personal blog, From the Desert to the Sea…)

Tags: telecommuting; conferences; Los Angeles

There must be an interesting tale behind this week’s Rolling Stone cover story (link is to an excerpt only) about the Eagles.

According to the rules of celebrity marketing, the timing is a little off.  The Eagles have been touring since March.  Their new album, Long Road out of Eden, came out last October and has already sold more than 6 million copies. Usually cover stories are timed around the launch of new entertainment product when they’re news, not a few months later.  True, they just played New York.  Perhaps that aroused the interest of provincial Manhattanphile Jann Wenner, the magazine’s founder and publisher.

I suspect the Eagles pushed to have the story written, offering as an irresistible enticement to allow access to a writer from the magazine’s peak years, with whom they later feuded. The cover appearance, a PR coup, was surely negotiated.  What was the Eagles’ agenda?

My instincts tell me that despite the new album’s financial success, it hasn’t had the kind of cultural impact the Eagles expected. It was a much bigger deal in the media when the band first reformed back in 1997, toured and put out a live album.  And, of course, in the 70s, the pop-music spotlight was always on the Eagles.  They refined what became known as the California sound: Laid-back, countrified, introspective and a little sinister. Their Hotel California album was treasured not just as a set of songs, but as some kind of literary masterpiece.

The reason for the new disc’s muffled impact has to do, I think, with the band’s decision to sell it via a partnership that seems to run counter to the left-wing political stances with which the band is usually associated.  You can’t buy Long Road Out of Eden anywhere but at Wal-Mart. Until recently, you could only download it off Wal-Mart’s website or the Eagles’ own, although you can now get a download from Amazon. It’s still not on iTunes, and if you find a copy at another music store, it was probably purchased at Wal-Mart and marked up for resale.

Since I don’t live near a Wal-Mart, I was only vaguely aware that the Eagles had ended a nearly 30-year break from making a new studio album.  I don’t listen to much pop music on the radio anymore, but if I did, I’d have been unlikely to hear a single from it.  When other acts from the same era put out new music — Bruce Springsteen, the Who, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones — it seems like a much bigger deal because you see their promotion everywhere, online, in stores and on TV. The consequence of selling Long Road to Eden exclusively through Wal-Mart is that the album is a kind of hiding-in-plain-sight secret to many music fans.

Undoubtedly some fans (and detractors, of which the Eagles have always had many) avoid Wal-Mart, because that’s what progressive-minded people are supposed to do. From WakeUpWalMart.com, a labor-sponsored site:

Well, there are two visions for America: Wal-Mart’s America, where profits come before people, and our vision, where people come first.

• In Wal-Mart’s America, workers are paid poverty level wages even when they work full-time.
• In our America, workers are paid a living wage with proper health and retirement benefits.
• In Wal-Mart’s America, wealthy companies shift their health care costs onto taxpayers like you and your families.
• In our America, corporations live up to their responsibility and provide their employees with adequate and affordable health care coverage.
• In Wal-Mart’s America, suppliers are forced to make their goods cheaper even if it means shipping U.S. jobs overseas.
• In our America, we value U.S. jobs and companies that buy and sell “Made in America.”
• In Wal-Mart’s America, women are paid less than men.
• In our America, women and men are treated equally - fair pay for everyone.

Rolling Stone has also worked hard over the years to burnish its progressive image, with at least one political article per issue, 99 percent from a hard-line left-wing perspective.  This 2006 Paul Krugman piece, which cites Wal-Mart’s low wages and benefits as an example of economic inequality, is typical.

Today, Wal-Mart is America’s largest corporation, with 1.3 million employees. H. Lee Scott, its chairman, is paid almost $23 million — more than five times Roche’s inflation-adjusted salary. Yet Scott’s compensation excites relatively little comment, since it’s not exceptional for the CEO of a large corporation these days. The wages paid to Wal-Mart’s workers, on the other hand, do attract attention, because they are low even by current standards. On average, Wal-Mart’s non-supervisory employees are paid $18,000 a year, far less than half what GM workers were paid thirty-five years ago, adjusted for inflation. And Wal-Mart is notorious both for how few of its workers receive health benefits and for the stinginess of those scarce benefits.

But the magazine’s take on the Eagles’ Wal-Mart deal is surprisingly sympathetic and unironic.  In a portion of the article not available online, the deal is explained this way:

Irving Azoff, the Eagles’ manager for four decades, figured out that the band was an established brand with an established audience with a habit of buying albums, not downloading. The Eagles therefore had no need of a record label’s starmaking machinery. He cut a deal directly with Wal-Mart to sell the double album for $11.88 — less than a normal first-run single CD — while the Eagles collected twice the normal royalty rate (four dollars)….

“Whatever you might think, the money is secondary to the Eagles,” says Azoff.  “They’re going to cash the checks, but they don’t sit around at night plotting to go with Wal-Mart because we’re getting more money. It’s great to see the record company relegated to the back seat. We make more money for 45 minutes of one show in Kansas City than our entire iTunes royalty.”

And that’s all Rolling Stone has to say about the Eagles and Wal-Mart — a kudo for sticking it to the record companies.  The rest of the magazine story is about the band’s history and how its members interact.

So, tell me if you think I’m wrong, but I suspect the Eagles now feel like the Wal-Mart deal cost them a chance at respect and influence.  The title song for the new album is a full-on protest song, with lyrics that squarely attack the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq.  I’m sure they had high ambitions for it:

Music blasting from an SUV
On a bright and sunny day
Rolling down the interstate
In the good ol’ USA
Having lunch at the petroleum club
Smoking fine cigars and swapping lies
“Gimme ‘nother slice of that barbecued brisket!”
“Gimme ‘nother piece of that pecan pie”

Freeways flickering, cell phones chiming a tune
We’re riding to Utopia; road map says we’ll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it’s a long road out of Eden…

Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage, and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda
Now we’re driving dazed and drunk

Went down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way
He said, “It’s hard to stop this binging once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste”

Behold the bitten apple - the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it’s a long road out of Eden 

Wal-Mart is generally not where shoppers go to hear that kind of invective.  And I think that bothers the Eagles, not financially, but in their egos.  So they reached out to Rolling Stone, I  suspect, in hopes of having their pecan pie and eating it, too; to make the new album’s release more of an event. I wonder if it’s going to work out like they hope.

Tags: Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden, music, PR, Rolling Stone, Wal-Mart

What does a PR person owe their client or their boss when they are no longer being paid to speak for them or keep their secrets? The question comes up, obviously, with the publication of Scott McClellan’s memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

President Bush’s current spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Bush “he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years; and (is) disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts he never came to him or anyone else on the staff that we know of.”

Perhaps that’s because McClellan sees things differently now.  Perhaps he was always repulsed by the “deception,” but was just too chicken to say anything.  McClellan seems unwilling to take a clear stand either way.  Instead, from what I’ve read so far, he wants to be able to analyze the Bush Administrations failings from afar, like a pundit.  As if he was never personally involved with it.

McClellan’s memoir is not a particularly flattering portrayal of the role a public relations professional plays in a high-profile organization.  He seems to feel that, as a spokesman, he can excuse himself from responsibility for his clients’ deeds and his own words, as if his participation didn’t matter. In McClellan’s view, he’s at liberty now to join with the same critics of the Bush Administration’s honesty that he used to parry at daily press briefings.  In trying to go easy on himself, however, he is undermining whatever remaining credibility the PR industry can claim for itself.

From the excerpt in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal:

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured.

My friends and former colleagues who lived and worked or are still working inside that bubble may not be happy with the perspective I present here. Many of them, I’m sure, remain convinced that the Bush administration has been fundamentally correct in its most controversial policy judgments, and that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it is undeserved.

Only time will tell. But I’ve become genuinely convinced otherwise.

His use of the word “genuinely” is revealing.  Before he’s 100 words into his story, he’s defending himself from a charge he knows is coming:  That his publisher and his publisher’s publicist convinced him to manufacture controversy and disagreement with his former boss because that would sell more books than another dime-a-dozen White House memoir.

Does McClellan persuade us that the scales “genuinely” have fallen from his eyes?  The test I would apply to his words is to compare what he claims to believe now with what he would have had to believe when he was in the White House.  If this is a genuine conversion, his own mistakes, misjudgments and areas of ignorance would be central to his case.

Unfortunately, what I found in the WSJ excerpt was an unwillingness to look at himself critically.  McClellan writes:

Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it.

Is this what “good, decent people” do?  If they shun the truth, doesn’t that make them liars?  No, says McClellan, because

Most of it is not willful or conscious.

Yikes.  Our government is run by a bunch of sleepwalkers? Robots programmed to lie?  What he’s describing is epistemologically tricky.  If you’re not conscious of lying, then by definition you’re not lying.  A liar must have intent to deceive. According to Scott McClellan, neither he nor anyone he knew acted with such intent.  He could have been lied to, and innocently conveyed the lie; but if someone has lied to you and callously used you as an instrument to convey the lie, you can hardly call them “good and decent.”

You could say, “I should have checked out the story more. I thought I was telling the truth, but I ignored information that was available that would have shown me that I was transmitting lies.” That would at least suggest he bore some responsibility for the deception, by choosing to avert his eyes from an easily discernable truth.

But that’s not what McClellan says.  Instead he comes up with this:

Rather, it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.

As I explain in this book, Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign, a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin.

He uses the metaphor of “a game” to describe various manipulations of the truth.  Can you play a game you don’t know you’re playing?  No.  Games have rules.  Games have strategies.  You can’t play a game successfully if you aren’t following the rules and aren’t aware of the strategies.  You don’t play a game, any game, without intent.

What this almost sounds like is the kind of excuse liberals are accused of making for inner-city criminals; that they’re a product of their environment, that the culture is to blame.  In Scott McClellan’s view, therefore, personal responsibility is out the window, especially his own.

Let’s look at how he analyzes this culture, this set of social norms encouraging deception, this “game.”  He apparently sees it as something new:

Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measures of success.

What did he think before writing this book? It’s not as if he was a budget analyst or a flood-control engineer. He was a flack.  Very few flacks work for government who don’t come out of politics or at least have a rudimentary comprehension of it.  They wouldn’t survive otherwise.  And anyone who knows anything about the relationship between government and politics would know that there hasn’t been a president since George Washington who successfully divorced his political interests from the act of governing.

For McClellan to claim this as a new insight is disingenuous.  His mother was an elected official in Texas.  When he went to the White House, he knew exactly what he was getting into.

McClellan tries to define the “permanent campaign,” a political innovation he claims came out of the Bill Clinton years.

That means shaping the narrative before it shapes you. Candor and honesty are pushed to the side in the battle to win the latest news cycle…

So many buzzwords, so little time:  Narrative and news cycle.

I find McClellan’s use of the vogue word “narrative” as grating as I find it when Daily Kos uses it.  All it really means is telling a coherent story, and trying to prevent your opposition from telling theirs by undermining it.

Political pundits and operatives have been talking about the “news cycle” since before Bush’s father took office.  The idea was born around the regular cycles of daily publication and nightly news, in which new batches of news were released 24 hours after the previous batch. You wanted that day’s headline or top TV story to be the story you hoped to tell. You wanted your quotes near the top, and your adversary’s quotes in paragraph 16.

Nowadays, no one is sure what the frequency of a news cycle is.  It has become fashionable to say “the news cycle is 24 hours now,” but what does that mean?  That there is a news cycle in each of those 24 hours?  For all practical purposes, there is no “news cycle” anymore, just a continuous stream of information and political posturing.

The news cycle is a particularly irrelevant metaphor when it comes to political news.  Political news consumers live in a kind of virtual reality battlefield, a World of Warcraft in which the various news and commentary sources each occupy different parts of the landscape.  Each outlet reacts differently to particular news events, depending on their style and political bias. Rush Limbaugh will say one thing, but Keith Olbermann will say another, and both will ignore or distort stories that don’t conform to their ideology.

The so-called “mainstream” news sources are hemorrhaging viewers and readers, and their credibility is under continual attack. Some traditionally objective news outlets seem to have given up any pretense of even-handedness. It now makes more commercial sense to target a partisan audience with news that matches their preconceptions, rather than trying to be fair, which ends up annoying and alienating half your audience.

The buzzword for this is “cocooning.”  Blue people want to read blue news that reaffirms their blueness, and red people want to live where the sea and sky are red.  When a red person sees a blue news source, and vice versa, they expect to get outraged.  But since they would prefer not to be outraged, cocooned news consumers usually don’t venture out, and instead swap legends about what the other color says and does.  It’s all rather reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss book.

I digress, except to demonstrate that McClellan’s view of the political media climate–the one that’s so awful and  liable for our political woes–is strangely out of date.

After expressing his disappointment that Bush practiced the “permanent campaign” just as much as Bill Clinton did, McClellan discusses the press’ role:

The permanent campaign also ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who’s winning, who’s losing, and why…

This is true as far as it goes.  But any news editor would tell you, and would have told you 100 years ago, conflict and controversy excite the audience, and the absence of conflict and controversy bores them and makes them go elsewhere.   Without conflict, you don’t have a story and stories are what all news outlets are comprised of.

Is McClellan, whose entire career has been as a press spokesman, trying to suggest the media’s preference for conflict is a surprise to him?

The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation.

There’s lots of information out there, especially now, for anyone who wants it.  Every federal department has a website packed with information from which good stories could be extracted.  Scott McClellan’s job involved providing extensive daily briefings, during which he had every opportunity to enlighten us. But despite all this information and all this attention, he couldn’t make “complex and important issues” interesting enough.  Is that the press’ fault, or was he, perhaps, an incompetent flack?

At this point, you can almost hear McClellan’s editor saying, “okay fine, Scott, all this high-minded crap is okay, if not particularly original.  But when are you going to trash Bush?”So here’s his first shot: Continue Reading »

Tags: George Bush, loyalty, lying, permanent campaign, PR, publishing, Scott McClellan, truth, What Happened

The chairman of Countrywide, Angelo Mozillo, must be a frustrated high school English teacher.

Amid waves of foreclosures wrecking the financial fortunes of his customers, Mozilo zeroed in on the most important problem facing these soon-to-be ex-homeowners: Lack of originality.

Apparently clicking “reply” when he meant to hit “forward,” Countrywide Financial Corp. Chairman Angelo Mozilo ignited an online furor Tuesday by describing a mortgage customer’s plea for help as a “disgusting” example of form letters inundating the Calabasas home lender.

Mozilo’s e-mail rocketed back to the customer, Daniel Bailey Jr., who had asked Countrywide to modify the terms of his loan so he wouldn’t lose his home of 16 years.

Bailey said he took out the adjustable-rate mortgage without realizing how it worked and had been told incorrectly that he could refinance after a year. Instead, he wrote, “the bottom fell out” of the home-loan industry, and he was stuck with unaffordable payments.

Much of the language in Bailey’s message to Countrywide was borrowed from a form letter available at the website LoanSafe.org, a coaching service for troubled borrowers. Bailey, who says he operates a photo studio, posted his e-mailed exchange with the lender on a LoanSafe forum.

His original e-mail was sent to 20 Countrywide addresses, including Mozilo’s. Such mass e-mails have overwhelmed e-mail boxes at Countrywide, disrupting its operations and prompting Mozilo’s heated response, the company said.

“This is unbelievable,” Mozilo said in his e-mail. “Most of these letters now have the same wording. Obviously they are being counseled by some other person or by the Internet. Disgusting.”

So keep that in mind, Mr. Bailey and all you other pending bankrupts. In your desperate pleas for help — no copying!

Tags: Angelo Mozilo, foreclosures, mortage crisis, reply all