PR at its Worst
Posted on April 16, 2009 | Tags: pr, public relations
There’s a dark side to PR that no one talks about. And probably, you’re the victim of it every day and don’t even know it. But I believe there’s a lesson here to learn about the power of PR, even when used to manipulate.
I remember as a teenage student moving to Boston and witnessing the skill of a playing-card sleight of hand expert in Boston Garden. For a few dollars you’d play the game of selecting a card and guessing which hand it wound up in after it moved back and forth before your eyes. At a speed faster than the eye could track, what was there one moment was gone the next. What I thought I saw was only an illusion.
In the world of politics, this technique is used to sway populations into believing one set of ideas represents another. It’s PR at its worst.
Take the recent example of the National Tea Party that took place last night at hundreds of venues around the country. In downtown St Louis thousands of people gathered to protest the tax burden being created by the proposed federal budget.
Days before the event, a report was issued by the Department of Homeland Security warning of a growing movement of “right wing extremists.” A footnote attached to the report defined “right wing extremists” to include “groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority or groups and individuals dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
In other words, anyone who understands that the Constitution calls for a limited federal government that doesn’t usurp state authority or someone exercising their right of freedom of speech is a possible “extremist.”
Without ever referring to the group, this report set in place a chain reaction to discredit the Tea Party movement. It was intepreted on major news outlets and in the end, the uninvolved viewer or reader swallowing their daily news prescription without question, would associate the Tea Party rally with extremists.
In actuality, attendees at the Tea Party in St Louis spanned every ethnic and generation. There were men and women in professional attire, grandparents dressed in button down sweaters and a youngsters in jeans. There were Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Middle-Easterners. As we navigated the crowd, people smiled at one another. These were people you’d find living next door, working at your bank or servicing your lawn.
This was mid-America. Now redefined as “right wing extremists” if one is to use the definition in the DHS report of a group “dedicated to a single issue.” In this case, the issue is tax reform.
This technique to discredit favors no political party. Pitting one group against another is old enough to read about in history books. Its outcome, of course, is to allow power brokers to exercise their agenda while the masses fight each other. Similar tactics were used under the Bush Administration to quell those in protest of the Iraq War by casting anti-war sympathies as unpatriotic. Conservative media icons took the bait and passed the message far and wide. And even what is referred to as “the liberal media establishment” went along. Today, liberal media personalities slander those not in favor of government debt and largesse as out of touch radicals or poor losers. Under Ronald Reagan, these ideals were considered patriotic. Today, they’re “extreme.”
PR tools used at the top of the food chain manipulate press, leaders and populations. Define the strategy, create the messages, publish the messages, ally opinion leaders and repeat the message in as many ways and on as many channels as necessary to change behavior.
The Right does it to the Left and the Left to the Right. Just the other night I watched a conservative talk show host represent his own interpretation of a national news story as fact. The same occurred watching a liberal talk show host do the same. I stopped watching both of them.
It was interesting to note that the one local St Louis network news channel I saw last night carried no coverage of the Tea Party event. Thousands of people peacefully demonstrated on tax day but their lead stories were of a small fire and the flow of traffic at the post office.
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Thank you for this article. I’ve done a lot of work in PR, (though not recently), and I can totally see this.
What you said in this article needs to get out there and read by as many people as possible.
It’s good to know that someone sees this.
Sincerely,
Louis Steiner