You can tell a lot about a country from its public bathrooms.

I just got back from two weeks in Spain and one thing I learned is that you can tell a lot about a country from its public bathrooms.

Public bathrooms in the U.S., as compared to those in Spain or the Netherlands, put the lie to what Dick Armey said, as reported in the encomium to his de facto leadership of the tea-party movement in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

“Europe is governed by a concern for the collective…That’s what they care about.  What makes us different is that we begin with the liberty of the individual.  We got it right, and they got it wrong.”

Not exactly, Mr. Armey.  Sure some things are better in the good old U.S. of A. than in Europe, but not everything. 

Consider the public restroom.  Now I have been in some execrable bathrooms in Italy and France, but my last two trips abroad were to Spain and the Netherlands, and in both countries the stalls in public bathrooms were almost everywhere individual rooms with real locks and even door knobs; and when they were mere stalls, the stall walls ran all the way from floor to ceiling.  Even in the one or two public bathrooms in which there was wall space at the top or the bottom of stalls, it was never more than 3 or so inches, not enough room for someone with a wide stance to insinuate his foot and calf into his neighbor’s stall.   And in both countries, the toilets were always well stocked and very clean—even in bus and train stations. 

Seems to me that at least in Spain and the Netherlands, there is public respect for the individual reflected in the privacy they give everyone to do what is a very private action for most people.  In fact, most people feel at least some small twinge of humiliation when sitting in stalls with walls shorter than they measure and feet visible just inches away.  Or imagine high school students in so many public urban high schools today, who have to sit there without a door.  Of course, children can avoid the humiliation of no door merely by going to a private school. 

Now what happened in Dick Armey’s land of the individual that has led to our awful small and unprivate stalls?  My hunch is that builders hired engineers to put together standards based on what was the least expensive way to give a wall between people sitting in the bathroom.  That means developers and building operators lowered costs.

In the United States, individuality means “every man (and woman) for him (her) self,” or put more mechanistically, the opportunity to make as much money as possible for yourself by any means possible.

By contrast, the collectives running Spain and Netherlands foster individual self-expression, dignity and privacy. 

I’m not saying that Europe is better in all things, but that Armey is wrong to say that we have a superior society.  We could learn many things from the Europeans, such as mass transit and walking to get around in cities and on-time, high-speed trains to get between cities.  

And one thing that we can learn from Spain and the Netherlands is that individuality is more than a matter of equal economic opportunity.

It looks like a magazine, but it’s a 12-page ad

Last Friday’s USA Today, which my mid-town hotel placed outside my room the day before Halloween, held a Parade-like newsprint magazine called Health & Wellness.  This self-styled “practical guide to healthy living” has an October 2009 date on it and looks like a quarterly special of USA Today.

Except it’s not part of the newspaper. It’s one hundred percent an advertising circular produced by an organization called Media Planet, which must also purchase the positioning inside of USA Today.

Health & Wellness consists of a series of articles about nutrition, exercise and other aspects of staying healthy, in each of which only one or at the most two experts are quoted, typically executives of large organizations.  Each article is in fact an advertisement for the product or service of the expert quoted or of their organizations.  Every article starts off in a general problem-solving way so it doesn’t look or feel like a phony article that’s really an ad until about halfway in.  In most cases, there is a print ad for the product or service of about the size of the article on the same or facing page, which is always a sign of what PR and advertising professionals call “pay-for-play,” in which you buy an ad and get a story. 

I have always advised my clients not to pay for coverage because it’s really an ad and everybody usually can tell.  PR involves convincing the news media that a story is newsworthy, not paying them to cover it.  Virtually no responsible media outlet, including USA Today, is involved in pure pay-for-plays, although a lot of media have paid advertising sections that look sort of like the rest of the publication, except for the advisement on every page that it’s only an ad.

But nowhere on Health & Wellness is there any sign that it’s just an advertising supplement and not a special section of USA Today.

Want to have some cheap cynical laughs? Peruse this chart of the headlines, topic and organizations quoted for some of the articles in Health & Wellness:

Headline Topic Expert Quoted
“Focus on Food and Nutrition” Get advice from a registered dietician President, American Dietetic Association
“Dessert Fans Rejoice: The Benefits of Dark Chocolate” Health benefits of dark chocolate Director of Nutrition, The Hershey Company
“Healthy Snacking: Ignorance is not Bliss” How to have snacks but still stay healthy Chief Marketing Officer, The Snack Alliance
“Eating for Your Health Doesn’t Have to Mean Missing Out” Meat is a good part of a well-rounded and healthy diet No expert quoted but on the facing page is an article on corporate responsibility and the hero of the case history is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
“Managing your Pain Without Drugs” How to overcome back and joint pain with heat and exercise President, Battle Creek Equipment Company, which makes therapeutic heat relief systems.

Media Planet describes its strategy for it customers thusly: “Your advert, placed in an environment in which the reader already has an interest, will incite a stronger impulse to buy…” Translated into English that means, “We’ll make your ad look like a real story and thereby give it greater credibility and fool a lot of people.

Blaming bacteria for the genocide of the American Indians

Recent research has given a more nuanced picture of the decline of the American Indian.  Two facts—and they are facts—seem to have captured the imagination of the reading public and the media:

  1. That many American Indian societies in North America were already in decline when the Europeans arrived.
  2. That the diseases the Europeans brought with them killed millions of Indians (as opposed to the Indian Wars, economic warfare and the depredations that follow the uprooting of whole nations from their long-time homes).

My evidence is only anecdotal, but my sense is that these two facts are used to the exclusion of all other facts in current discussions in the news media of the decline of Native American civilization.  And while both of these facts are true, writers of all persuasions cite them in a wide variety of contexts nowadays, far more than we hear about racial genocide and property expropriation as causes for the decline of Indian civilization.  By reporting these relatively recent discoveries of historians, the intelligentsia is in a sense saying, “It’s not our fault about what happened to Native Americans.”

The latest example is in Steven Stoll’s otherwise fine piece that opens the November 2009 issue of Harper’s in which he discusses at length William Ruddiman’s demonstration that the Little Ice Age supports the view that man has had an impact on global warming and cooling for about the last 10,000 years. 

Stoll reports that about the time of the Little Ice Age, which took place roughly from 1300-1700 C.E., there was an enormous increase in pandemics throughout the world.  About North America, he says:

“When Hernan Cortes invaded the Valley of Mexico in 1519, his armies brought smallpox, influenza and mumps, setting off among never-before-exposed people a series of devastating infections, that, as the diseases moved north and south, killed between 50 and 60 million over the following two hundred years.  The destruction of life cut so deeply into Indian societies that many never recovered their earlier populations.” 

Note the subtext of the statement, which silently absolves the Europeans of guilt in the decline of the Native Americans and their civilizations.  Afterall, we can’t be blamed for the germs we carry.  (Except of course, for General Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who knowingly gave Indian tribes blankets infected with small pox.)

Interestingly enough, Stoll’s discusses the decline of other nations, e.g., France and Italy, from disease during the Little Ice Age, but reports that all eventually regained their former population.  The reason for the difference in the fates of the French and the Native North American nations is so painfully clear that it makes one wonder why Stoll ever writes the sentence: “The destruction of life cut so deeply into Indian societies that many never recovered their earlier populations.”  The article would have been better without this extraneous explanation, but then it would have been without the important ideological subtext that we’re not to blame for what happened to Native Americans.

More stupid PR tricks from Mylan

Don’t the executives at Mylan Inc. ever learn?  The company has filed another lawsuit against The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, related to a series of stories that the Post-Gazette ran a few months back about an FDA investigation into allegations that Mylan employees were overriding automatic safety controls.  As it turns out, Mylan took care of it, the FDA’s investigation cleared Mylan and no one was hurt.

But Mylan hurt itself by the way it managed the story.  Even after the FDA said that it had not yet completed its investigation, Mylan’s chief executive officer, Robert Coury kept insisting that the investigation had indeed been completed; he was of course mistaken.  (I should disclose that Jampole Communications worked on a project for Mr. Coury that did not involve public relations or media relations more than 10 years ago when he was a financial planner.)  Because of Mylan’s insistence on its initial version of the story—that the investigation had ended—instead of coverage on two news days, the story received coverage on five or six news days.

Here are just some of the negative stories Mylan generated about itself:

And Mylan’s latest move, to sue The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also hurts Mylan, especially its standing with consumers who buy generic drugs; remember these folks endure a steady stream of advertising touting the innate superiority of brand-name drugs.  Why remind them that the FDA recently investigated?

Filing and publicizing these lawsuits probably qualifies for any top 10 list of “Stupid PR Tricks of 2009.” 

The lawsuits only keep the story of the two employees overriding a safety system in the news.  The fact that Mylan came out pretty much smelling like a rose in the FDA report is lost in the hubbub over the lawsuit, which will revolve around the Post-Gazette’s right to pursue a story and its accuracy of facts.  In both these areas, the newspaper stands on very solid ground, but even if it didn’t, I would have advised Mylan not to pursue a lawsuit because the publicity could never be 100% positive in favor of Mylan. 

Mylan would have been better off moving away from the incident altogether.  I would have advised the company to do a positive PR campaign based on the safety of its manufacturing process.

When left is conservative and right is liberal.

In her weekend story about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nominee for California governor, Associated Press reporter Juliet Williams shows how so-called mainstream reporters confuse the basic terms of political discourse by accepting the long-term labeling propaganda of the Republican party.

Here’s the paragraph I want to analyze:

“The telegenic mayor tried to connect with voters at town hall forums across the state, but never finessed his message.  He excitedly skipped from topic to topic, promising never to blunt his left-leaning positions on gay marriage, the environment, immigration and universal health care to win votes.”

Environmental regulation and universal health care are both left-leaning positions because both involve more government regulation and, in the case of the environment, more constraint on the individual.

But shouldn’t support of gay marriage and immigration rights be positions of the right?  Afterall, to outlaw gay marriage and hamper immigration both represent government interference through regulation plus constraint of the individual, two things that the right-wing vehemently oppose.  In fact, uninhibited individual rights and minimal government regulation are two of the foundation stones of the right-wing.

The third foundation stone of course is promulgation of a certain value system that reflects the aspirations that the religious among the upper classes set for the working classes during the industrialization of the second half of the 19th century, a.k.a. the Victorian value system.  As Paul Starr depicted in detail in “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” some 25 years ago, the Victorian era is also when physicians supported passage of laws restricting abortion as part of a program to drive out the competition.  This value system has no place for gay marriage, even if that means committing the abomination of regulating private activity. 

The New York Times was perhaps more accurate in its version of Newsom’s politics:

“His political views were unlikely to play as well across the far-more-conservative center of the state than they did in the Bay Area.”

To be precise, it’s left versus right, and liberal versus conservative, but the news media throws right and conservative into one pot and left and liberal into the other.  So because right-wingers are swimming in the same soup as conservatives, they are opposed to gay marriage when in fact, they should be in favor of it.

Yes, Mr. Neuharth, the Media Does Color the News

In today’s USA Today, Al Neuharth, the founder of our national MacPaper, chimes in on the controversy that has ensued since some Obama Administration officials said what seems to me to be res ipso loquitor, which in Latin means “a thing that proves itself”: that Fox News colors its presentation of news so much that “it is not really a news station,” as David Axelrod put it.

Neuharth’s main point is that one should not pick a fight with “someone who buys ink by the barrel,” which of course ignores the fact that any large organization, be it a government or a large corporation, also either buys ink or buys the people who buy the ink through buying ads or setting the topic and tone of coverage through the large amounts of information they provide to the news media.

But what I would like to examine today is Neuharth’s ancillary point that “most of you understand the difference between news and views.”  He’s just wrong, and not because people are dumb or undiscerning—they are not—but because the media can be so subtle and unrelenting in their conflation of news and opinion.  Most people just want to read and listen to the news and don’t have the time to spend analyzing the fact content nor the rhetorical devices being employed to color the facts with opinion.

Here are some ways that media can color the news.  It’s not an exhaustive list, just some of the more obvious tricks of the trade that come to mind at six in the morning:

  • Labeling, as Neuharth himself does by calling The New York Times and The Washington Post liberal, when in fact both newspapers prove themselves to be centrist to slightly right virtually every day.
  • Selection of facts, as again Neuharth does when he tosses off the names of TV personalities Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews and Lou Dobbs who are tied to certain viewpoints to make his point about news, instead of actually analyzing news reporters.
  • Expert selection, which National Public Radio does every day when it interviews E. J. Dionne and David Brooks to give their views, which in a world that could encompass opinions ranging from A to Z is akin to spanning that small territory between L and M.  By doing so, NPR narrows the field of discussion, and if you listen carefully you’ll realize that this narrowing takes the discussion slightly right of center.
  • Conflation, which is the equating of two things that are not equal.  My blog entries over the past few months examine several examples of this technique.
  • “Matt Drudging,” which is the quoting of assertions that someone else has presented as facts so that the reporter can present the false information as “a fact” without having to actually look into it. The best recent example was the right-wing news media quoting other sources to substantiate the ridiculous claim that 2 million people attended the so-called “Taxpayer March” last month.
  • Telling or reporting lies:  Let’s not beat that old but painfully bloody and expensive horse that has crippled our economy and brought misery to millions too much, but the best recent example of telling or repeating lies were the Bush administration claims, widely reported without proper fact-checking, that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that it is was ready to use.
  • Ideological subtext, which is using details of the story to make an unstated point.  Again, you can see several examples of ideological subtext in recent blogs.
  • Deciding what is and is not news.

My point is that much of what we call news is in fact dripping with opinion.

How to Work With a Marketing Agency

Jampole Communications celebrated its 20th anniversary a few months back and it got me thinking about the ways that agencies and clients interact.   Being a “communications guy,” I turned it into a set of tips for organizations on how to work with marketing communications agencies.  Here they are:

1. Judge agencies by their quality of thought.

A marketing campaign is a response to a business problem.  When an agency is showing you its portfolio, make sure you find out why it made the creative decisions it did.  If an agency cannot articulate the thought process that led it to create an ad, you probably don’t want to work with it.

2. Make certain the agency knows your industry and business.

Actual experience is less important than a basic knowledge of your industry and market.  In interviewing agencies, probe to make sure the firm understands how you make your product, to whom you sell, how your industry is doing, what the key industry issues are and who your main competitors are. 

3. Define communications problems in business terms.

Make sure that you and the agency are always tying whatever you do back to the achievement of quantifiable business objectives.

4. Know what you want to spend.

Many creative decisions hinge on budgetary factors.  All marketing communications programs require a critical mass of repetition; if the money isn’t there to achieve the necessary frequency, then less expensive alternatives must be considered.  No agency can begin to develop a plan without knowing how much you are willing to spend.  

5. Don’t have the agency do what you should be doing.

Depending on the size of the company and type of business, there are tasks best done with internal resources and other tasks best done by the agency.  Some examples from our past:  For a large utility company that had a wonderful communications department, we handled special technologies, which tended to come and go, so the staff could focus on the continuing business.  In responding to crises, we have frequently served as the spokesperson for a number of industrial and retail companies, but rarely for health care institutions, which have established and articulate spokespersons in the community; for health care, we would typically work behind the scenes.

6. Expect service from your agency.

A good agency knows how to juggle its assignments for and contact with various clients so that all feel that they are the most important client.  Expect your agency to provide appropriate and timely service, no matter how small your account is.

7. Understand what an agency charges.

Agencies are compensated in two ways:  Professional service fees and commissions on certain outside costs.  In addition, they are reimbursed for out-of-pocket costs, such as printing, photography, website applications software and advertising media placements.  Many agencies (for example, Jampole Communications) will reduce commissions on advertising and drop them altogether for other outside purchases.

Trust, but Verify Who Actually Said It.

Here are some of the more than one million pages of news media, books and websites on the Internet that cite Ronald Reagan as having said, “Trust, but verify.” Many of the citers are writing about politics or foreign policy, but the sample of links below show that the citation of Reagan as having said this slogan is far-reaching, and includes articles or documents about investments, the urban lifestyle, campus facilities management, auto dealerships and even web design:

The problem is, while Reagan said “Trust, but verify,” he was not the first to say it as most of these sources state or imply.

“Trust, but verify” is an old Russian proverb, as a New York Times editorial in 1987 and the Wikipedia article both point out.

Why would we have a collective failure of memory of who said it?  In this case, I think there are two causes:

  • The desire of our society in general to glorify presidents, and of the right-wing to glorify this particular president.
  • A cultural reluctance to cite not just alien sources, but our recent enemies, the communists. 

In my view, writers of non-fiction have an ethical responsibility to check their facts and write the truth.  If you want to say that it was a favorite Russian proverb of Reagan’s, fine, but makes sure you let us know that it was originally Russian, for the sake of truth.

And Now for Something Completely Shameless and Self-Promoting

Here’s another self-serving blog entry, but at least it’s about my poetry and not my business:

You can now view my complete September 20 performance at the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.  I read some old favorites from Music from Words, plus some new poems, hot off the grill!

And while I’m at it, some of you might be interested in how to purchase my work.  By all means, buy enough copies of Music from Words for all your friends and neighbors, at www.belldaybooks.com or www.amazon.com or at most brick-and-mortar or online bookstores. 

And here is a list of individual poems that have been published in the last year.  Please buy multiple copies of these issues of these journals (and tell them Marc sent you!):

  • Acapella Zoo #1 (Fall 2008): “The Walk Away”
  • Bagel Bards IV (Spring 2009): “That Night You Woke Up Laughing”
  • Journey (Spring 2009, Eden Waters Press): “A Modern Passion”
  • Jewish Currents Volume 64, #1  (Autumn 2009): “Uncle Freddy’s Home Movies”
  • Sin Fronteras #13 (Spring 2009): “Occam’s Razor”
  • Slant 22 (May 2009): “A Question Mark About the Mousterians”
  • Wilderness House Literary Review  #3 (2009): At the Cocktail Party

We return you to your regular programming…

Why Does Pop Culture Tell Us Children Hate to Learn?

Here’s another example of a reporter transmitting one of the foundation myths of our current ideology as communicated in the ideological subtext of news stories, magazine articles, ads, popular fiction and TV shows: that children are naturally uncurious, anti-intellectual and uninterested in science. 

It’s in a Baltimore Sun article by personal finance guru Eileen Ambrose that has made the round of reprints in other publications and websites this week:

“One of the big hurdles of teaching personal finance to children and young adults is how to do so without boring or confusing them with lectures about compound interest and annual percentage rates.”

Now why would compound interest and APR bore or confuse a child?  It didn’t bore or confuse me, or my brother, or my son, or virtually all of my cousins.  But then again, we all grew up believing that learning was fun and important. 

In situation comedy after situation comedy, in ad after ad, in newspaper article after newspaper article, the secret but not silent message in the subtext is that learning is not fun and that the normal child does not want to do it.  While it is a primary responsibility of the family to promote values, the great mass of media, programs and ads we call popular culture also has the ability to communicate what our values should be. 

Why would our mass media want to promulgate this value, which in the long run is harmful to people in a knowledge-based society in which those who educate themselves make much more money and report much higher levels of happiness in studies?

My view is that the dissemination of this anti-intellectual attitude reduces the possibility of social mobility because it makes those at the bottom rungs not value the very thing—knowledge—that will help them to rise.  I think that maybe a few of those who initially floated the view that “learning is not fun” decades ago did so cynically, to keep the poor down. But that was years ago and never included the great mass of thinkers and writers.  There couldn’t possibly be a conscious conspiracy today to promulgate this falsehood because there are just too many players, just too many sources of this pernicious myth.  So why does this anti-intellectual attitude remain so much a part of the subtext of our cultural documents?  I have no answer (at least not today), but it’s an area of social history worth exploring.