Category: Media & Marketing Matters

In a blog entry of February 28, I said that the mainstream media was paying too much attention to the Tea Party movement.  I stated rather bluntly that at that point, the impact of the Tea Party was zero.  This statement came before the primaries in which Tea Party candidates have tended to do ill against other Republicans running for office.

Earlier this week, Carville-Greenberg released an in-depth study of Tea Party adherents that pretty much substantiates my view that the Tea Party has had little if any impact, which I now want to amend to say, no impact of its own.  I’ll explain that caveat later.   

The Carville-Greenberg study is very interesting and worth looking at.  Here, though, are the findings that support my contention that the Tea Party has had no impact of its own:

• 89% of Tea Partiers lean towards the Republican party.
• Only 5% of Teas report having voted for Barack Obama.
• Total Tea adherents are 25% of voters and 10% of those who give to political parties or attend rallies.

In other words, no matter what pundits might be saying, the Tea Party is not made up swing voters, but of people who were always going to vote Republican and never going to vote for Obama or most other Democrats.  So where’s the impact? 

Some might say that the Tea Partiers have moved the country right.  It is true that they have moved the Republican Party right by helping more right-wing candidates win.  But in the general election, the more right-wing candidate may not have the advantage in a battle for the swing voters who decide many elections.

While recent polls show dissatisfaction with President Obama, I believe our deteriorating economic conditions, and not an upswell in Tea Party adherents, has been the primary reason for the decline of the President’s ratings.  Again, the Tea Partiers never liked our President and so none of their votes changed in the recent surveys. 

The biggest impact of the Tea Party so far derives not in itself or its members but in its symbolic value to the mainstream news media, which from the beginning has given the Tea Party movement outsized coverage and exaggerated its influence.  In the infancy of the Tea Party movement, the mainstream media republished unsubstantiated and absurd overestimates of attendance at a ragtag Tea march in Washington, D.C.  In the recent primaries, the media gave outsized coverage to Republican races with Tea-tied candidates while in many cases ignoring the Democratic primary races.  Mainstream reporters essentially hushed up the verbal miscues of Rand Paul and Sharron Angle until after the primaries.  The result of placing the spotlight on the extreme right 25% of the country to the detriment of coverage of other parts of the political spectrum has been to move the debate right-ward on virtually all the issues under discussion in the media.

At the end of the day, we won’t know what the real impact of the Tea Party movement is until November.  Carville-Greenberg says that 94% of Tea Partiers are certain to vote, certainly a higher percentage than will vote among the core 25% that affiliate strongly with the Democratic Party.  But what’s new about that?  The core Republican constituency has always been more likely to vote than the Democratic core.  Elections have therefore usually turned on two dynamics:

• Who captures the independents
• Will the Democrats get their supporters to vote.

I’m predicting that the extreme positions of Tea Party candidates will drive centrists to Democratic candidates and compel many who would have stayed home to come to the polls to vote against the right-wing extremists. 

That doesn’t mean the Democrats will necessarily prevail and maintain control of both houses of Congress.  The most important issue remains the economy.  If I were the Democrats I would do two things: 1) Make sure that the Administration was pouring all discretionary money into job creation and help for the unemployed; 2) Before putting together any advertising budget for fall campaigns, make certain enough money is set aside to have lots of vans and drivers to haul voters on election days to the polls from every senior center, community center, YMCA, university and public library in every urban area across the country.

I know I’m not the first to point out the proclivity of the mass media to turn discussions of important issues into fights between people.  Instead of discussing the issues in a rational way or seeking to sift the truth from the obfuscation, the media prefers to focus attention on polls, slips-of-the-tongue, gotcha’s, false accusations and personal matters.

But could they trivialize the important issue of preserving and strengthening Social Security?  From the viewpoint of this left-leaning liberal, the current Social Security battle is between those who want to tweak what is a very financially strong system to make it stronger versus those who want to address the federal deficit by having the federal government default on the loans it has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund.

But New York Times reporter, Robert Pear has found a way to turn it into a battle between two personalities, Stephen C. Goss, Social Security’s chief actuary who has worked for the Social Security Administration (SSA) for 37 years, and Michael J. Astrue, the Bush II-appointed Social Security Commissioner.

Keep in mind that the news impetus for his article in this past Sunday’s Times is the fact that two Congressional committees begin hearings on Social Security this week.  In the article, Pear raises none of the issues that may be under discussion at these hearings.

Instead, Pear’s lengthy article:

• Quotes a number of Democratic Senators and Congresspeople on how great an actuary Goss is and the need for the Chief Actuary to be independent
• Details examples of past tensions between the two men, all about power struggles and bad performance reviews
• Reprints a “nice-nice” comment from SSA’s spokesperson.

But nowhere in the article is there any discussion of what opinions these men hold.  Let me repeat: But nowhere in the article is there any discussion of what opinions these men hold.

The entire article boils down to a personality squabble, and not the important policy differences that must exist between a man who has worked all his life to keep Social Security solvent and a political appointment by an avowed enemy of Social Security.

Pear is able to share an example of an actuary and a political appointee clashing over an issue, but its six years old and concerns a different actuary, the one whom a Bush II administration official threatened to fire if he provided Democrats with his cost estimates for the new prescription drug benefit.

Despite an easy-to-access public record, Pear is unable or unwilling to come up with the substantive differences between the men and talks only of the struggle itself.  I spent about 30 seconds on the Internet to discover in the recent past Goss has said such things as Social Security is solvent for at least 25 years and that in its projections, Social Security could comfortably raise the estimated rate of return for the money it loans the federal government.  Another quick search revealed that since becoming Commissioner Astrue has rarely missed an opportunity to say something negative about the future of Social Security.  For example, when the first baby boomer applied for Social Security, he said, “We are already feeling enormous pressure from baby boomers being in their peak disability years …”  

Now why would Pear not discuss the issues from the point of view of these apparent adversaries and instead of  focusing on the fact of their disagreement alone?  It’s hard to come to any other conclusion other than the obvious:  Pear wants to move the story of Social Security away from issues and to the same old dreary personality battles that pock election and legislative coverage.

It’s called trivialization of the news and if there were an award for it, I would certainly nominate this article for 2010.

Myths take root as belief only after constant repetition over years.  In the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s we believed that government could solve many problems, often with the help of the private sector.  Anti-tax sentiment was low, and school districts had no problem raising taxes if need be to support quality public schools.  In the 70’s, majorities were against capital punishment and in favor of stricter gun control laws. 

All that has changed (and to my mind, for the worse), but it took years of hammering home some basic messages to turn the public on each of these positions, years of engraining these messages into the minds of the public. 

To state the obvious, one of the major vehicles for indoctrinating the public is the mass media.  Yesterday’s lead story running under the masthead on page one of the Pittsburgh/Greensburg Tribune-Review is a casebook example of how reporters color stories so that what is presented as objective using the tools of objective reporting is really a piece of propaganda.

The headline mouths a distortion: “Americans may be slammed by shocking tax hike.” Now when Congress passed tax cuts and tax breaks in 2001 and 2003, it wrote into the law that these cuts and breaks would expire after 2010.  To call the expiration of these temporary measures a tax hike is a misnomer.

BTW, I do not question that the expiration of these measures will shock many taxpayers when it hits their pay stubs, because many Americans just don’t routinely follow the news media or keep up with law changes that affect them. 

The writer builds his article on three types of information:

• Details of the temporary measures that will expire, such as child tax credits,  capital gains tax reductions and the temporary phase out of the inheritance tax (which The writer calls the “death tax,” even though it is not a tax on the act of dying but on the estates of only the very wealthiest citizens once they have died).
• Quotes from experts at think tanks and associations.  The experts give factual statements with no analysis, but all of them are associated with think tanks that are known to be right wing.  By virtue of having their experts state part of the factual basis of the article, the right-wing think tanks gain credibility.  In a sense, by disengaging them from their typical biased opinion or distorted analysis, the writer “mainstreams” them.
• Other quotes from other people that begin in the bottom two-thirds of the article.  It is in these quotes that the writer presents virtually all of the right-wing’s decades-old talking points, even when they don’t make sense. 

This chart presents the quotes in caps and small and what the major message is in caps:

The writer could have just as easily taken a leftist approach and quoted some experts talking about the need to close the deficit while funding important government programs, or experts saying that we have historically low taxes for any industrialized country after about 1900.  Or, he could have taken an even-handed approach and centered the discussion on what experts are saying about specific tax cuts set to expire, alternating the view of those in favor of extending the temporary cuts and those against it.

My point is that every day now for years, we have been bombarded by these right-wing ideas, not just in the wing-nut media, but in the mainstream news media as well.  Even when the media gets the facts right, as this article mostly does, the underlying assumptions that are conveyed are the same talking points that Ronald Reagan had on the note cards at which he kept glancing in his debates with President Carter in the 1980 presidential election.

The constant beating of these messages into all of us has moved this country to the right.  Sadly, this movement has been correlated with a disintegration of our strong fiscal position, a net transfer of wealth up the economic ladder, a decline in our basic infrastructure, an erosion of civil liberties and a loss of esteem in the rest of the world.

In an article titled “War on Public Workers” in this week’s Nation, Amy Traub connects a lot of recent blips on the news media screen to draw a picture of what she accurately calls a new class war against government employees. 

Traub does an excellent job of citing some of the usual suspects such as Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, the editor of U.S. News & World Report, the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot, the Heritage Foundation and Reason Magazine and their calls for cutting the salaries and pensions of state workers or loosening the stranglehold that public unions supposedly have on state and local governments. 

Traub demonstrates that, as she says, “the lavish lifestyle of public workers is a myth,” but notes that by “attacking public workers, they can demonize ‘big labor’ and ‘big government’ at the same time, while deflecting attention from the more logical target of Middle America’s rage: the irresponsible Wall Street traders, whose risky, high-profit business practices brought down the economy, and the lax regulators who let them get away with it.”

We all get angry when we hear executives get hundreds of millions, destroy the company and the employees end up with partial or no pensions.  In the case of public employees, the people getting rich, or richer, because of underfunding pension needs are those who have paid less in taxes over the years.  Now that’s all of us, but remember that tax cuts everywhere during the last 30 years have primarily helped the wealthy.

Several days after Traub’s article appeared, Roger Lowenstein made the “let’s go after the public unions” argument in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine.  His topic is the pension funding shortfall faced by an alarming number of states and municipalities.  He admits that shortfall is the fault of the employers—in this case, government—for overestimating how much money the pension fund investments would make and underestimating how much they would have to put into the funds every year to keep them solvent.  Yet Lowenstein wants the workers to pay the price of the employers’ folly.  For example, he says: “…legislatures need to push the boundaries of reform. That will mean challenging the unions and their political might.” 

And now the front page of this morning’s Times holds a story by Steven Greenberg about four elected Democrats, two in New Jersey and one each in California and New York, who are trying or talking about trying to reduce the pensions, benefits or salaries of public unions.  The story is pretty much an encomium to the personal courage these politicians are supposedly showing.  The article quotes Gary N. Chaison, a professor at Clark University, saying that some Democrats now consider it a “badge of honor” to fight the unions. 

But quoting Chaison is an example of expert selection to prove a point.  Chaison’s thin body of academic work focuses on what happens when unions merge, yet, as his Wikipedia article points out, he is frequently quoted in the news media because he always says something pessimistic about the future of unions.  In other words, he says what the writers and editors want readers and viewers to know.  

I wanted to put Traub’s discussion of the class war of wealthy right-wing interests against public workers into the 30-year war that the right wing has waged against unions in general, starting as so many of these Conservative movements have done, with Ronald Reagan.  Although once president of a union, as a politician and elected official, Reagan did all he could to make it more difficult for unions to organize and to shrink the power of unions in politics and the economy. 

Here are some high points in the 30-year history of anti-unionism by the Republican Party, certain businesses and the right wing chatter-pros at think tanks, academic journals, business associations and the wing-nut media:

• Reagan’s breaking of the air traffic controller’s union.
• Reagan’s reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board and other regulatory agencies, which then began to make decisions and promulgate new regulations that made it harder for unions to organize.
• The charter school movement, which while declaring itself a movement to return control to parents really has had the breaking of teachers’ unions as its primary goal from the very beginning.
• The news media’s war on baseball since free agency and the ascension of the strong players’ union.  Notice how year in and year out, football (with its very weak union) can do no wrong, whereas everything even a little negative about baseball gets blown out of proportion.  For example, the media has never made a fuss about the ubiquitous presence of steroids and other performance enhancers in football, while crucifying baseball in general and every baseball player ever discovered to have taken performance enhancing drugs. 
• The decision of the Obama Administration, unlike the Clinton Administration after 12 years of Republican rule, not to roll back 8 years of Bush II’s phase of the war on unions.  His Secretary of State, for example, embraces charter schools.  

The war on public workers so vividly described by Traub, is the latest chapter in the wider war on the union movement.

The question, of course, is why the right-wing is so obsessed with crushing unions?  The ideological pureness of unregulated free market thinking aside, I think its part of the bigger 30-year class war declared by Reagan and his followers against anyone who isn’t wealthy.  One thing that virtually every item on Reagan’s domestic agenda had in common was that they all tended to transfer wealth up the economic ladder from poor and middle class to the wealthy.  Think of it—lower taxes, smaller government, more government services performed by private contractors, fewer unionized workers.  Whatever other impact each may have had, they all took and still take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the wealthy.

I think virtually everyone outside the Joe Barton family would agree that Tony Hayward has failed as the operational leader of BP during the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

From the media reports, it seems as if “Wayward Hayward” eats three square meals of “fillet of foot” every day.  Watching Mr. BP commit faux pas after faux pas for weeks on end has left me wondering if “foot in mouth disease” is fatal.  When I close my eyes and slowly chant the words “Tony Hayward,” I now get a vivid image—almost an hallucination—of Clarabelle honking the horn of a tricycle too small for him, scurrying herky-jerky among tightly packed rigs in an oil field.

All joking aside, from the standpoint of a public relations professional, Hayward has failed miserably as a corporate spokesperson because he did not represent the company in much of what he said.

Let’s start with some basic PR theory.  In the current world of easy litigation and clashing special interest groups, one of the primary job responsibilities of chief executive officers is to represent the company.  If the CEO does it well, like Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, it can help a company enormously. 

Representing the company means talking to the news media and appearing at public meetings.  CEOs of even mid-sized companies generally have a communications staff which has as one of its key responsibilities making sure that the CEO has all the facts in hand he or she needs to represent the company to the news media or public.  The CEO is not a sales executive, but always has sales numbers.  The CEO is not a HR person, but always knows how many people the company just laid off or hired.  The CEO doesn’t do research, but knows what the next products to be commercialized are.  The CEO knows all this because other company employees tell the PR department, which churns it into easy-to-understand bullet points.

When a CEO speaks in a crisis situation, he represents the company, not himself.  But too often with the news media, and especially in front of Congress, Hayward answers were clearly from him and about him, and not from and about the company that pays him millions a year to be its most visible leader.  Time and time again, he would plead ignorance about matters that someone at BP surely knew something about.  He would say he didn’t know about the engineering, instead of saying “My engineers in the field are telling me….”  It made him look stupid and made BP look stupid for putting him in charge.

We may never know why the BP PR mavens and mavenesses advised BP and Hayward to keep it personal, but it may have been a trick to avoid revealing a lot of damaging information.  As it is, most news media have reported that BP cut corners to drill the well that burst.  There have also been reports that BP took shortcuts that led to two other less damaging accidents within the past few years. Even BP’s fellow oil companies ran a bus over it a few dozen times when it came to the subject of safety precautions for deep water drilling.  In short, it’s very possible that BP knows more but that what it knows is very damaging, and so it decided that the best way not to reveal what it knows was to pretend that Hayward was speaking for himself and just didn’t and doesn’t know enough.

It was a mistake, but I bet BP’s lawyers figured that the less it said, the less likely it would be sued, and that it was going to get a slew of bad publicity no matter what it said.  No excuse to throw gasoline on a fire, if you ask me.

Classic PR theory dictates that in a crisis, an organization tells everyone what went wrong as soon as possible and tell what it’s doing to fix it and why it won’t happen again. That often means firing the people who made the mistakes, and BP probably should have fired the people who took the shortcuts drilling the well and then announce a new set of standards to avoid the chance of a repeat.  Of course, it’s too early to say, but in BP’s case, that might have meant firing most of the senior management team.

When BP Chairperson Carl-Henric Svanberg earlier this week used the term “small people” to describe, I think, the average person without wealth, social standing or political connections, he was most certainly misspeaking. 

We can’t look into his mind, but there is no doubt that whatever his true feelings are, as the titular head of a large multinational company, Li’l Carl’s official position would always be to show respect to all victims of the devastating oil spill that his company’s sloppy cost-cutting caused.  It’s possible that Li’l Carl, a native Swede, was translating an expression from Swedish that does not have the taunt of an insult that “small people” does.  On the other hand, as my life partner Kathy points out, the very concept of “small people” seems less likely to be part of the Swedish ideology than the British or American, since Sweden has a flatter social hierarchy and a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Li’l Carl made a verbal error, no doubt, but what about those people and institutions who purposely misspeak, with the goal of misleading or enforcing their own reality on both the English language and everyone else?  Sometimes they expropriate a term and misapply it, and sometimes they make up a new combination of words.

Here are some recent examples:

• In May of this year, Spirit Airlines announced that it is now installing seats that can’t move backward or forward on some of its aircraft.  Spirit describes these new seats with less legroom than ever, as “pre-reclined.”  The use of the term “pre-reclined” is supposed to communicate that instead of taking something away from the passenger, Spirit is adding a new service—they recline the seats for you before you even step on board.  Of course, no one is buying it.  People still say they’re thinking about buying a “used car,” decades after luxury auto makers introduced the term “pre-owned.”  In the same way, all Spirit has done is call attention to its latest cost-cutting move.
• In a sermon delivered this past Good Friday, Raniero Cantalamessa, the official preacher of the papal household, equated the criticism over the priest sex abuse scandal with anti-Semitism.  Of course it is, Father Cantalamessa, but only if it’s a sin to be Jewish.  The good father was trying to say that the sex abuse scandal has been blown out of proportion, much as some unstated harmless peccadilloes of the Jews are blown out of proportion by anti-Semites.  Two problems: 1) Jews do nothing wrong merely by being Jewish, whereas abusing children sexually is inherently wrong; 2) The comparison is based on the false and unstated notion that there are some things inherently wrong with Jews.
• In March, former Texas Congressman Dick Armey called the founders of Jamestown “socialists” and said that’s why the town failed.  Sure thing, Dick, I understand that socialism is also why the 1962 Mets lost so many games.  Armey is completely wrong: as many historians point out, at the time, Jamestown was purely a business venture based on the principles of early industrial capitalism.  But for Armey, anything that is bad and fails is by definition socialist.   
• Also in March, The New York Times reported that Wahoo, a seafood restaurant in Islamorada, Florida, claims to serve only local fish.  When confronted by the fact that a lot of its fish comes from Viet Nam and elsewhere, the owner said that it’s local because he buys from a local distributor.  
• Finally, my personal favorite, from the June 12 issue of The Economist: in an article on what’s wrong and right about America’s right-wing, the writer describes Mitt Romney as a “self-made multi-millionaire.”  First of all, it’s probably not true, as his father was a successful businessman who served as head of a large multi-national corporation.  While I don’t know for a fact, I think it’s a pretty fair guess that Mitt started out with a few million to his name.  But beyond the error in fact is the false impression that the Economist is trying to create.  We are ideologically programmed, almost from first grade, to admire the self-made person like Andrew Carnegie who started in poverty with no social connections and rose to riches and fame.  The Economist wants to extend that admiration to Mitt, but it’s a rank distortion, because even though Romney made hundreds of millions through the purchase and sales of corporate assets, he is in no way, shape or form “self-made.”

Beginning this December or January, I am going to make a special award to the most absurd bending of language of the prior year.  I’m calling it The Ketchup Awards, in honor of the condiment that the Reagan administration declared a vegetable for the purpose of evaluating the nutritional value of the federal school lunch program.  In a special blog or maybe two, I will list at least 10 finalists and make three awards:  3rd Place gets One Dollop; 2nd Place Two Dollops; and the grand prize winner will get The Full Squeeze.

If you would like to nominate someone for the first annual Ketchup Awards, just post it in a comment on one of my blog entries or email your nomination to ketchupawards@gmail.com.  Please include the phrase and the person or organization who said it in your nomination.  No need for any links, but keep in mind that we will have to verify the facts and a link will make this task a little easier.

This week has brought more proof that the news media, taken either as a large group of individual media or a much smaller group of large media conglomerates, are actively facilitating those who want to question global warming.

Stanford Research Institute’s Political Psychology Group, under the direction of the estimable Professor Jon Krosnick, released a study on either Wednesday or Thursday that shows that 74% of all Americans believe the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years and 75% believe that humans have been substantially responsible for the new heat.  An overwhelming 86% want the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution businesses emit.  The survey polled 1,000 people.

In both the news release about the study that was released on Thursday and the Op/Ed piece by Professor Krosnick the day before in the New York Times, the Professor analyzes other studies by CNN, Gallop and Pew that have, on the surface, shown greater public doubt on global warming.  Professor Krosnick demonstrates that these studies asked indirect or confusing questions.  For example, Gallup asked “Thinking about what is said in the news, in your view, is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct or is it generally underestimated?,” which is a question about media reporting not about beliefs in global warming.

How did reporting on this study fare in the news media?  If we count the release of the study as the day the Times article appeared, then on the second day the survey had 22 hits on Goggle News and the third day (today) had 37 hits.  If we count the distribution of the news release as the first day of the announcement, then the second day’s total was 37.

Let’s compare this coverage to the release of the George Mason University study that 50% of TV weather personalities don’t believe global warming.  You know, TV weather personalities, half of whom have never studied weather, the other half of whom are meteorologists who are not required to study climatology.  I’ve talked about this survey twice before, on March 30, 2010 and two days later.  This survey had second day Google News totals of 96 and third day totals of 108.   The news media actually perverted the goals of the study, which were to measure a barrier to communicating to the public effectively about global warming issues.

So depending on how you jigger the numbers, the news media have given from 259% to 290% more coverage to the misunderstood survey from the much smaller and lower ranked George Mason than it has given to the clear and precise survey by the much more prestigious Stanford University.  No offense to George Mason, but facts are facts.

Why do the news media persist in overplaying the statements of disbelievers in global warming and underplaying the statements of proponents?  Why is it even an issue?  Global warming is a fact.  The real issue is what countries, businesses and each of us individually is going to do about it. 

Some might say that my Google News results are skewered by the large right-wing news media led by Rush, Sean and Glen, but even if you remove these wing-nuts from the numbers, there still seems to be extensive coverage of “if it exists” in what is considered the “mainstream” news media.  Moreover, when you consider the small number of media owners nowadays and the way the main stream media cover the right-wing media as a story in and of itself, I’m beginning to believe that it may no longer be accurate to make a distinction between right-wing and mainstream media.

By keeping up the discussion on whether global warming exists, the news media slow down consideration of how to respond.  I’m sure many readers will remember how long the cigarette industry tried to stonewall the undeniable proofs that smoking or chewing tobacco products causes cancer.  I don’t remember the news media being quite so accommodating to the tobacco industry once the facts were in.  But then again, as much as the tobacco companies advertised and lobbied, the oil companies, electrical utilities and large manufacturing, metal extraction and chemical industries do more.