One of the more popular posts on this site is one I put up on ghost writing ethics. It’s still getting lots of regular hits even after several months.

But yesterday I saw a posting on Salon about a squirrelly little ghost writing project by the McCain campaign. And I was actually kind of stumped as to whether it’s unethical, or just one of those things that feels totally wrong, but isn’t technically unethical.

It goes like this:

an intern writes a “letter to the editor” in whatever assumed identity she wants

she makes up all the details, none of which are true… for her

the details would technically be “lies” if the letter was signed either by her or with a fictitious name

But here is the squirrelly bit:

the campaign shows these letters to actual real people, and if the letter sounds like something they would have written themselves, then they sign it and send it in

[the article does not say whether any incorrect details are corrected to reflect the truth of the new "author"]

but in fact, there is now a real person willing to put his or her name to a piece of fiction, to drag it back into the realm of “truth”

So, my dear friends in PR land… assuming that all the “facts” square with the “author’s” reality, is this ethical?

My gut reaction is that as long as the person is real and there are no lies in it, relative to the real life of the signed author, then it’s not unethical.

Squirrelly? Yes. Cheap? Yes.

But technically unethical? No.

And you would say… ???

And the kind of “lie” I am referring to is not about economic growth, or tax cuts paying for themselves, or nowhere bridges, or the war in Iraqnistan… it’s a big lie, the worst biggest lie, the lie that the person speaking actually believes what they are saying, and that we should believe them because they know what they are talking about.

In fact, they spin wildly from one p.o.v. to its direct opposite without missing a beat.  As if they never believed what they said in the first place, and can be trusted only to spout whatever meaningless bullshit happens to best support the position of the moment.

This kind of gyration creates a lasting, gut impression among the public that any talking head, on any issue, for any organization can’t be trusted to tell the truth… only to fudge the stats and game the refs.

Whom does it help to undermine the idea that objective reality even exists? No one, least of all our own profession, which REQUIRES objective references and authoritative sources to establish credibility.

By undermining shared reality, these people undermine the validity of PR itself.

Why do they even get airtime?

Stepping back from all the broo-ha-ha over the “experience factor” in the Palin VP pick, as well as the irony of announcing the choice at “Nutter Center,” McCain’s choice fatally punctures one of his key talking points:

It should finally put to rest the idea that McCain is a man who will “stand up to his own party,” which is a line I have heard from many moderate, sensible Republicans (with lots of money) who want to rationalize voting for him mostly on the notion that he’ll (further) lower their taxes.

Picking Sarah Palin is a clear pander to the most extreme wing of the GOP: she’s an ultra-right, creationist, gun-toting, evangelical, Big Oil Mama who does not believe global warming is man-made, subverts science when it conflicts with policy, and uses the levers of government for personal vendettas (!)… albeit in a charming, small-town, pulp-fictiony kind of way.

Take away the Bible and she’s Dick Cheney in a dress.

If you believe that’s the decision of a straight-talking centrist who can stand up to his own party, then you’re being buffaloed in the worst possible Alaskan way.

GET A LOAD OF THE BOAT’S NAME…

Hmmm… wasn’t Utopia 1 good enough? The original “Utopia” must not have been all it’s cracked up to be.

Ditto for Utopia 2.

Clearly these people are having trouble finding happiness.

Well maybe “third time’s a charm!” Somehow I doubt it. After all, money can’t buy…

Utopia: It’s like potato chips; you can never have just one!

The latest Olympic development is not just that the Chinese government falsified a gymnast’s birth date on her passport, but that they went back and altered PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED NEWSPAPER REPORTS about her age!!

Columnist/Blogger David Flumenbaum has posted copies of an article from the China Daily that was altered (after publication) to reflect Chinese officials’ version of the facts.

I reproduce them here, but for David’s analysis and more documentation please read his post.

The newspaper article as it originally appeared…

And now… as it’s currently seen online….

In Orwell’s 1984, in the bowels of the enormous Ministry of Truth…

What happened in that unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms.

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular [issue] of the Times had been assembled and collated, that [issue] would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files instead.

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

Day by day and almost minute by minute, the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction of the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct…

All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Wet Noodle: IOC’s Rogge Sells Us Down the (Yellow) River

The Chinese government got caught because they did not track down and alter other official documents (posted by Dave) that contradict the falsified news reports. But you can bet it wasn’t for lack of trying.

And now that they know where their vulnerabilities are, how much you wanna bet that next time they’ll be a lot more thorough?

And what’s the likelihood that internet companies — even Western ones — will be subject to even stricter oversight and control over what’s chached and how those files are managed?

And just how cooperative do you think those revenue hungry Western companies will be?

If the IOC is any indication we might as well kiss it all goodbye. Here is what IOC president Rogge said to the Associated Press:

“The IOC relies on the international federations, who are exclusively responsible for the eligibility of athletes. It’s not the task of the IOC to check every one of the 10,000 athletes.” (story)

Gucci Blinders and an Hermes Gag

The interesting thing about self-interest, which free-marketeers tout all the time as the all-powerful saviour of humanity, is that it leads people to do dastardly things. And it leads other people, on the fringes, who benefit, to turn a blind eye.

Where is the IOC’s outrage? Where is the promise of an investigation? Where is the slap at the Chinese regime for its asaault on the integrity of the Olympics?

And where oh where is the thinking person’s absolute shock that they tried to get away with rewriting the past???

Rogge clearly sees no/hears no/speaks no evil… no matter what.

Down the Memory Hole

We are fast approaching a level of technological capability and proficiency that’ll enable the implementation, on a global scale, of exactly the kind of information and reality controls Orwell described nearly 60 years ago.

And we have seen quite clearly that:

a) there is no shortage of deft spin-masters who have no patience for facts or independent reality… (e.g., Karl Rove’s assertion that… “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”)

b) there is no shortage of self-interested lackey’s who will stand idly by, or even enable powerful people to re-make reality wholesale to suit their interests.

To quote Orwell…

“Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy… The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

When you look at some of the BS perpetrated by high-profile PR pros these days, Orwell doesn’t sound very far off the mark, particularly in the political realm. Could it escalate to the kind of continuous rewriting of the facts that Orwell describes?

Who knows. Who ever seriously thought it could go THIS far?

More important, I was there with my dear friend Cindy — a marketing whiz extraordinaire who is one of the savviest most down-to-earth people I know.

She manages to walk the finest of gossamer lines: being completely immune to hype and intolerant of contrivance, while being totally earnest and not the least bit jaded. (She is from the Midwest after all… as she says… “Get with it baby! It’s all happening in the Prairie!”)

After seeing Murakami, we walked across the hall, and as we entered the “Center for Feminist Art,” she rolled her eyes and just said, “No, no, no, no.”

Then, when we saw the big “HERSTORY” emblazoned on the wall, she let out a groan, followed by, “I. hate. this. It. is. such. bull. shit.”

Then, she related to me the following (her)story…

You Have Tits? I Have Tits!

Cindy told me:

So this woman colleague comes into my office and sits down, and she says: “Do you believe in women helping women?”

I told her that was a really bad place to start, but go ahead.

She said that she’d had this project on her desk for months, but that she’d been pulled in a dozen different directions, and she’d been traveling, and bla bla bla, and the project “got away from her”… and now her calendar was totally jammed, but she was up against a deadline and needed someone to take over pieces of the project to get it finished. And she knew I was really busy too… but could I help?… you know, because we’re both women and we should be supporting each other.

I said: “So let me get this straight. You think that because I have tits and you have tits, somehow that makes me obligated to cover your ass? I’ll tell you the same thing I’d tell any man who walked in here with the same question: NO”

Girl Power… ACTIVATE!

Right when we walked into the Murakami exhibit, Cindy was totally enamored. She laughed out loud: “I love it! He’s got quite the girl power thing going on.”

And boy does he. (no pun intended) One of our favorite pieces was entitled Second Mission Project ko2 — a powernymph who can fold her self up into a rocket ship:

Needle and Dread

By contrast, across the hall in the feminist wing, there is Egyptian-born Ghada Amer, who’s work is completely pickled in rhetoric. She embroiders erotic imagery onto canvass (and other materials)… for some reason thinking that sitting hour after hour laboring with a needle and thread is an effective way to “protest the tyranny” of housework.

Showing, at least, that she has a flair for irony. (no starch intended)

But in sum, the work is overwrought and hyper-intellectual, the kind of art where the concept behind it is more important than the aesthetics of the work itself. The work, in fact, loses a great deal of its meaning when shorn of political context. In effect, it cannot speak for itself because the artist is SHOUTING SO DAMN MUCH!

Ready, Set, Get Off!

Personally, Id rather be riding my rocket boobs to inter-galactic triumph than sitting around diddling my discontent with a needle and thread, which sounds a bit masochistic to me.

I get the fact that Ms. Amer grew up in different cultural circumstances — which were undeniably difficult, even dangerous, for women. And I get that she is addressing her experiences through her art.

My issue is that her aesthetic is masturbatory… and she’s too possessive with her creation… she’s gotta keep at least one finger in it at all times. So to speak.

She can’t give her work to the audience on its own terms and let the two of them go off and have their own relationship. She’s like a proverbial third wheel tagging along on a date — her political monologue constantly braying in the background. One gets the distinct impression that her inner agenda is to make her own “voice” the real center of attention.

I Showed You Mine…

I think this little juxtaposition sums up a key problem of our pandering, co-dependent, identity-base culture. It’s too self-conscious… dare I say self-obsessed?

It’s self-idolatrous, unlike “girl power,” which is an exercise in straightforward, unselfconscious, unmediated power that’s based within her person, rather than her political significance. Girl power is not contingent on anything.

Today’s “feminism,” however, is contingent on capitulation and validation by others. It’s the “I have tits you have tits” world of quid pro quos in which I am the center of my universe, and your obligations to me are assumed rather than earned. It’s enough to make you want to scream… in true shagadelic fashion… “Oh behave!”

Anyone with an ounce of “girl power” would have blasted through that project while sitting in First Class and sipping champagne, or gotten a budget for an assistant and delegated it months ago, or simply marched into the boss’s office and said “I need an extension”… anything other than making some wimpy passive-aggressive request that plays on guilt and the fear of being called a meanie if you don’t help a sister out.

That. is. manipulative. bull. shit. And if that’s all that’s left of feminism, then you can toss a shovelful of dirt on it, because when “empowering” is just another word for “enabling” then it’s pretty much useless.

Give me girl power any day… no pain no gain… feel the after-burn!

There, I showed you mine. Now show me yours… tell me what a sexist putz I am.

O’Dwyer’s re-ran quotes of Abernathy’s interview with Business Week about how to deal with China’s PR woes surrounding Tibet, and its overshadowing of the Olympics.

Ever the statesman, Abernathy said he’d “find attractive, English-speaking Chinese women and a ‘couple of sweet little 19-year-old gymnasts’” and put them on the talk-show circuit. Direct from Business Week:

“We’ll have the Chinese version of gymnast Mary Lou Retton do flips on camera but provide only noncommittal answers about the conflict. We’re here to talk about little Mary Lou’s flips, not geopolitics.” The idea, of course, is to change the subject. “You want to make people like the Olympics because it’s sweet little girls and athletes doing what athletes do best,” Abernathy says. “That way it becomes a personal thing and less of a geopolitical issue.”

Ok Jim… and while you’re at it, why not go ahead and pinch the stewardess’s ass when she goes by with the drinks cart.

Sailing Without a Moral Compass

If Abernathy had been skippering the Ark, our freezers would no doubt still be stocked with frozen giraffe steaks to this day. (Though the Serengeti might look a bit barren without our long-necked friends.)

Is there no depth to which the vaunted leaders of our profession will not sink? They’d probably sign on to market my grandmother’s ashes for fertilizer if they thought the campaign would get them a Silver Anvil.

The history of Tibet under China is one of horror… Labor camps for political prisoners. Public execution of dissidents. Thousands of monastaries destroyed. Millions dead and displaced. Natural resources plundered and the environment decimated. There is a mass of information available on the annexation of Tibet and the impact of Chinese rule (Just a taste here, here, and here).

And the picture isn’t pretty, despite apologists’ claims that the advent of indoor pluming and quickie-marts makes it all OK.

Not Relegated to Steerage

Abernathy’s comments recall an explosive expose of the white-shoe, giraffe-steak-eating lobbying business by Harper’s columnist Ken Silverstein in the July 2007 issue of that magazine, in which he writes:

How is it that regimes widely acknowledged to be the world’s most oppressive nevertheless continually win favors in Washington? In part, it is because they often have something highly desired by the United States that can be leveraged to their advantage, be it natural resources, vast markets for trade and investment, or general geostrategic importance. But even the best-endowed regimes need help navigating the shoals of Washington, and it is their great fortune that, for the right price, countless lobbyists are willing to steer even the foulest of ships.

In this gold-plated world of influence and money, all you have to do is roll up your retainer check and shove it up some sycophant’s butt, and then watch him waddle around spouting your message points until the money runs out.

Disclosure: I Put Tibet on the Map

A few years back I had a passionate email exchange with the publisher of map company whose politically correct maps were designed to give all peoples of the world their due representation — and for the most part the maps are ingenious and revolutionary.

But there was one problem. While one of his world maps showed disputed borders (e.g., Kashmir) as dotted lines, there was no border (dashed or otherwise) for Tibet. I argued and argued and finally he relented and put it in.

And now the map shows Tibet, in all its dotted-line glory.

What World Are They Living In?

So what freaking world are these PR hoo-has living in? Rather than using their super-powers for good, for truth, they are using them for obfuscation, cover-up of criminal behavior, and personal monetary indulgence.

This is why our profession is in the state that it’s in. No moral compass. No scruples. Craven mercenaries with pom-poms shaking their big jigglies at the media to distract them and change the subject from what is really going on out there in the wider world.

And make no mistake, there is a wider world. And there’s lots of stuff going on there.

The Critical Context

Michael Kempner (of MWW), to his credit, was the only sane one of the three PR people interviewed. He would push China toward open discussion of the issues. Perhaps to engage an international panel. In short, he recommended engagement rather than hokey, slight-of-hand-distractions.

But Abernathy and Mike Sitrick — like so many PR “leaders” — just proved once again how morally bankrupt this business has become. There is the money, and then there is the mission, and little other context enters the discussion.

They allow no legitimacy to the real-world context in which such a PR campaign might take place. In fact, they would actively work to de-legitimize the real-life context, not to mention the victims of violence and repression. Their suffering and death — of potentially millions of people — is written off in one-line message points.

It’s as unreal as it is inhuman. Monstrous really.

Thanks guys. That’s just the kind of publicity our profession really needed.

The key issue we will illustrate here is that the seed of most public relations disasters is bad behavior and poor decision making on the part of management.

These problems often fester at the operational level before they break into public view — which means that most of these situations could have been avoided if different decisions had been made, and the company could have gotten a better handle on the public mess if PR people had been involved earlier on.

This key observation is often overlooked in the never-ending and totally moot discussion of whether PR is subordinate to marketing.

Lesson #1: Multiple Guess

Imagine you’re a C-suite exec at an airline (i.e., any big company) and you find that in all likelihood one of your pilots (i.e., a senior manager) endangered the safety/life of a passenger (i.e., a customer) and potentially exposed the company to a federal prosecution. What do you do…?

a) give the pilot a raise…

b) give the pilot another drink…

c) promote him to CEO…

d) suspend the f*#kr without pay

The correct answer, or course, is C: promote him to CEO.

If you are going to stonewall and spend more time avoiding the issue in the NATIONAL media –looking like you’re protecting an attitudinal douche-bag rather than your own passengers, then what you’re communicating is that this is how your corporate culture operates. And who better to run the place than the bull-slingin’ cowboy who embodies that culture?

Lesson #2: Everybody’s All American

If you know that your planes need inspecting and that it will require flight cancellations, then your best option is to…

a) fly all FAA inspectors off to Honolulu for a complimentary holiday

b) shred the memo and chat up your boss about the White Sox

c) lobby the government to get rid of “burdensome regulations”

d) have the maintenance staff notify scheduling teams, who notify the executive team, which calls the PR department to tell them the company has a potential disaster on its hands that could hit the fan in about two weeks; then you anticipate the scope of the problem and come up with a comprehensive, proactive media/customer service plan to get you through potentially the worst image disaster the company has ever faced.

The answer of course is E: “No comment.”

A Scientific Fact: Actions Speak Loudest in a Vaccuum

When JetBlue was faced with a lawsuit of the “man bites dog” variety they should have known immediately that every local newscast and late night comedian would be all over the “man relegated to toilet” story within 24 hours.

So, in their first-round response, why was there no mention of an internal investigation? Why was the pilot not suspended? Why, in short was there no action? Why, even now, are they content to “let the appropriate legal process take place?” As if all action is out of their hands until the Feds weigh in.

And why the language about “investigating the lawsuit?” Let’s see about this lawsuit… ok… it’s 183 pages, on legal paper, times new roman font, 12-point type, space-and-a-half… How about investigating “the alleged incident.”

Why no mention of safety, or status of the pilot, or airline policy… Can they not see that their inaction SPEAKS FOR THEM???

Decisions… Decisions…

All too often, business people think of PR in the aftermath of a problem. But in reality, PR needs to be woven into the fabric of the decision making across the entire operational structure of the company.

Rather than thinking in terms of a narrow “inspection issue” and keeping it confined to its techincal staff, American Airlines should have considered how its incremental decisions could cascade out into its various constituencies — the exact same way it could cascade out into its flight schedule.

How you react to a lawsuit like the one against JetBlue will trump any and all of what you say about it. JetBlue needed to act like a hip, smart company that thinks like customers do — letting its image and communications priorities drive C-suite deliberations about what to DO in response, not just about what to SAY.

The REAL Difference Between PR and Marketing

This is not a hard problem people… it’s not an SAT question…

image: www.ohgodkillmenow.com

PR is about managing behavior and decision making. It is NOT simply about words and press releases and reactive spin. And it is NOT simply the sum of its delivery vehicles: internal, external, print, broadcast or even that blasted 2.o stuff.

Good PR — effective PR — is an analytical skill, a decision-making resource, and most of all an executive management mindset. And it needs to be integrated into the company at the operational level if it is going to deliver its greatest potential value.

That is VERY different from publicity, or reactive spin, or marketing comms, or any of the other narrow little boxes that people want to put PR into.

Now Be Good Reader and Share… PLEASE!?

Integrating a PR mindset helps make better business decisions — i.e., better decisions “for the business” according to what the business aims, and claims, to be.

So why is it that executives are do damned stubborn about adopting a PR mindset when it comes to decision making… and then expecting the PR staff to work miracles of spin once the damage is done?

Examples?

Advice?

I know at least 7 people read this blog… c’mon…

Anyone…..?

It’s tough to believe anything that comes out of the White House, given its seven-year history of… dissembling… a history in which Herr Karlmiester recreated reality to suit Bush’s political ambitions.

“When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ”

Karl Rove (10/04)

Fixing a Hole Where the Rain Gets In 

So when Bush cries, what “reality” is he aiming to create? Sympathy? Empathy? The pain of resolve? No doubt something as heroic as the man whom he mourns.

But what Rove failed to understand is that truly original narrative is almost impossible to write, and that people have been “studying what [they] do” for millennia.

Machiavelli nailed Bush to a “T” more than 500 years ago — pegging exactly what “reality” is being created, independent of the president’s intent:

“A prince must take great care that nothing goes out of his mouth which is not full of the [below]-named five qualities, and, to see and hear him, he should seem to be all mercy, faith, integrity, humanity, and religion.

“And nothing is more necessary than to seem to have this last quality, for men in general judge more by the eyes than by the hands, for everyone can see, but very few have to feel.

“Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in actions of men, and especially of princes, from which there is no appeal, the end justifies the means.

“Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and be praised by everyone, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances and the issue of the event; and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a rallying point in the prince.

“A certain prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never does anything but preach peace and good faith, but he is really a great enemy to both, and either of them, had he observed them, would have lost him state or reputation on many occasions.”

from “The Prince”

That rib-tickling comedian Marx brother… Karl, that is… said that when history repeats itself, it is first as tragedy, second as farce.

In the ensuing 150 or so years, lots of folks have wondered: What about the third time? And the fourth? And the umpteenth? How many times has this scene played out since Niccolo sketched it in 1505?

What history repeating itself creates is… a rut.

Bush, no doubt, will call it a “legacy.”

On the Huntsville TV station WHNT, most of the 13-minute story was lost in an 8-minute broadcast interruption. The station first blamed CBS, but the network ran full speed in the other direction, telling Harper’s:

“There is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama “could only have been an editorial call.”

Then the station changed their story and said it was a technical glitch on their side. No surprise that the blackout, in the very state where the prosecution took place, caught the eye of viewers and regulators alike.

“Stoopid” Rhetorical Outburst?

The station quickly tried to make amends, getting special dispensation from CBS to air the segment the next day, and a second allowance the following day. It ran promotional crawls during news shows. It posted the piece to its website.

But the big dogs were loose and sniffing for blood. The station was “bombarded” by complaints about sabotage, and the FCC is considering an investigation.

The station’s exasperated news director, Denise Vickers, posted a long detailed blog post about what happened. In the station’s defense she asked:

“Who would invite such a public relations nightmare on themselves??”

Hmmm… Coach, Walmart, Target, Facebook, FEMA, HP … the list is not short; need we go all the way back to “New Coke” or even “there’s no proof smoking causes cancer?”

My Transparency Can Beat Up Your Transparency Anyday

Crisis spokespeople should take note of two big “don’ts”…

1) Open-ended rhetorical questions are a poor choice for crisis defense.

2) Given the history of U.S. business’s recent PR disasters, claiming that no one would be stupid enough to provoke a PR disaster makes you look… well… a bit stoopid.

In her 1500-word blog post – no doubt vetted by management and legal – Vickers claims that the station experienced technical problems, but she never actually explains what those problems were. She alludes to a problem with a CBS feed the day before, but that is a red herring, considering that she admits it was not the problem this time.

It may yet prove to be an innocuous technical glitch, but the lack of “transparency” struck a raw nerve with the public.

Her post included these two telling comments from viewers, which raise the larger issues related to “transparency” of interest to this blog:

I have honestly gotten to the point where I question everything I read and hear. My cynicism has become most acute during these last seven years and networks like Fox News have conditioned me to expect the worst.

For me personally, after seven years of our current pitiful administration and it’s [sic] equally, willing to be deceived, pitiful supporters’ actions, I’m just not surprised any more by anything they may try to do in order to fool, scare, lie to, or keep from the American people. Sometimes (and unfortunately) honest folks get run over because of all the mistrust that the administration has caused. If you are some of those honest folks, then I sincerely apologize for making your life slightly more difficult. If not, well then I’m sure there are plenty who are keeping an eye on you.

This Is What We Mean By “Literal Mayhem”

Vickers was encouraged by viewers’ anger. For her, it was testament to their high expectations for free speech and journalistic integrity. She says:

My resolve is reinvigorated to do what the First Amendment protects journalists to do – give a voice to the voiceless and to seek the truth and report it as fully as possible.

But the only part of her entire blog picked up by Reuters was the dumb rhetorical question — the FCC threat got top billing. The FCC is using the entire incident for political haymaking. Bloggers are making unfounded assumptions based purely on suspicion. The public is exceedingly pissed-off, cynical, and in the mood to believe anything, nothing, and everything.

This whirlwind – with everybody believing his or her own spin and agenda – is a microcosm of our modern culture. And the pissed off people of Alabama un-pinched their noses long enough to put their finger on it. Spin stinks. Politicians and their handlers are most culpable. But in general, PR as a profession will be called to account for what the public mind has become: “conditioned to expect the worst,” in terms of manipulation and deceit.

This is one of the wider social consequences of PR. It goes well beyond skepticism, which is healthy. Our work engenders the purest form of cynicism, which is corrosive of the spirit, an assumption that people are basically assholes and up to no good. Guilty until proven innocent.

Cynicism also encourages intellectual laziness. If we disbelieve and dismiss everything equally, we abdicate the responsibility to engage in critical thinking and factual analysis.

I will say again: The consequences of what we do are societal and cultural. Our deliberate and continual undercutting of the idea of objective truth — or “truth” at all, never mind the “objective” part — is having tangible consequences with respect to the way people think and behave. In many cases it quite literally is causing “mayhem.”

Our profession needs to rethink its priorities and its approach to ethics, because there is a very unpleasant backlash brewing… Wherein we offer philosophical approach to thinking about PR, which highlights the ethical implications and responsibilities involved. I am interested to know how this strikes you:

PR is not just a business, or even a profession… PR is an epistemological assertion.