Using Science to Cure Racism by Altering Perceptions

Wired has a fascinating story up about researchers at Brown University using Human behavior is profoundly shaped by perception; snap judgments based on very limited information (often visual) determine how close we stand next to someone in an elevator or whether we will hire them based on a job interview.

Harvard University's "Project Implicit" has a battery of tests one can run through to gauge how susceptible they are to unconscious biases. The general idea behind all of his is:

"The IAT is a tool in the development of theories of implicit social cognition, a body of results that suggest that many cognitive processes that affect behavior are unconscious in nature and are inaccessible to observation by the actor. These implicit processes affect perception, influence behavior, and color interpretation of past events." [Wikipedia]

It's exciting to think about what research like this could do when synthesized with other technological applications like the immersive environments provided by video games.

Imagine future where children, regardless of their geographic location or place in the socioeconomic strata, being immersed in virtual environments that expose them to realistic portrayals of people from other races and cultures - allowing them to shed the latent biases we're all (and I do mean 'all') currently lugging around.

MiBiz January 2009 Knowledge Roundtable

I recently participated in a MiBiz's January 2009 Knowledge Roundtable (along with what looks like most of the other members of the West Michigan Public Relations Society of America board). Overall the piece was good, but the demands of concision meant that most of my responses had to be cut down (which I completely understand) but unfortunately they were cut in such a way as to look incomplete (so I look somewhat scattered and inarticulate; or at least MORE scattered and inarticulate than I usually am).

Here's the piece. Below are my comments in their entirety.

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1. What skills do communications students need to learn to land good jobs? Are schools doing a good enough job of preparing them?

There are a number of skills; paramount among them is writing. Interpersonal communication skills may become more important than writing in the future as technology moves us away from text-based communication toward a more visual culture (some say Flickr is in the process of replacing blogging).

The skill of being able to learn (and it is a skill) is critical as well; often as communicators we are speaking on someone else’s behalf to an audience we must understand well to effectively reach - so the ability to learn on-the-fly about both sides (and the mediums through which you will be communicating) dramatically improves the effectiveness of the communication process. This is especially important given how diverse our world is and how rapidly change happens. Students will also need to know how to think critically, how to problem-solve, and how to be creative (which is also a skill that can be taught).

Students will need to know how to use technology and how to think about using technology, though noting this almost goes without saying because of how tech-saturated youth culture already is (it’s basically second nature to “digital natives”).

Unfortunately I don’t think most schools do as well as they could at formally preparing students with some of these skills (especially the non-traditional ones), however they do informally provide the forums and opportunities for students to acquire and develop them.

This reality is symptomatic of the fact that our entire education system (K-12 included) is somewhat outmoded; it’s designed to respond to the needs of an industrial economy and as a result does not focus on the skills and disciplines that will define the emerging global economy (which will require skills like learning, ideation, critical thinking, problem solving, etc.). As a result of the Internet and the ubiquitous technology available to us, it is a waste of time to have students memorize the exact year the Magna Carta was issued (1215, incidentally; I just looked it up on Wikipedia). Rather, we should be teaching them how to locate that information, and how to think critically about it when they do find it.

Moreover, we’re too exclusivist about how we provide higher education. Our pedagogy too often responds to only a handful of learning styles well because it’s been acceptable if a large percentage of the population avoids or washes out of higher education. But if you look at educational attainment rates over the past 50-60 years, we’ve gone from 10 percent of the population having a bachelor’s degree to nearly 30 percent (a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma). In the knowledge-based global economy, a life-long pursuit of education is imperative to every worker. To remain competitive, the U.S. must have a highly-educated population - and higher education needs to provide more support services and new ways to teach those outside the top ten percent.

Humans learn surprisingly well through a hands-on approach of trial and error, which is why I see video games as one of the most promising avenues for education in the future (but that’s another essay for another time).

2. How can communications practitioners help guide the educators to create the most effective educational programs?

The best way for communications practitioners to help guide educators to create the most effective educational programs is to participate in the process. They can do this by becoming faculty (even part-time) or by involving themselves with the programs at their local higher education institutions (through offering internship and professional development opportunities for students or just through engaging in dialog with the program heads). Additionally, professional organizations frequently have commitments to help build educational programs in higher ed., which is one of the reasons why I’m on the board of the West Michigan Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

3. With the maturation of the Internet age and the era of constant access to publics, how is the profession changing? What non-traditional skills will become commonplace in the next decade?

If it were possible, the profession has become even more of a “24/7” job due to the immediacy of the Internet. Transparency has gone from a lofty ideal to a practical imperative because of how difficult it is to conceal anything in an era when everyone has a blog and a web-accessible videophone in their pocket. Communications is more profoundly affected by globalization than other disciplines (but, conversely, has become more valuable to organizations - creating new opportunities).

More significantly, though, there has been a paradigm shift away from anonymous, mass communication and toward very targeted, intimate communication that many communicators haven’t quite grasped yet (which shows up in the clumsy attempts large organizations are making at trying to use social networking platforms).

It is difficult to say with accuracy which non-traditional skills will become commonplace in the next three years, let alone the next decade. Based on what we’ve seen so far from the decline of the traditional mass media and the rise of social networking platforms (like Facebook and MySpace), interpersonal communication skills (relating well to others on a one-to-one basis) will be invaluable. It’s also likely that fields like library sciences will be highly important given how critical it will be to sort and sift through the petabytes of data we’ll all have to wade through on a daily basis.

4. How would young professionals outside of the communication field benefit from more training in or exposure to communication skills?

Given how intrinsic communication is to everything that we do, they would benefit in every conceivable way. It’s virtually impossible to have any job that does not regularly involve some form of communication (even someone in a cubicle who writes code all day would find communications philosophy helpful in making their code more parsimonious and effective).

5. Given the current economic turbulence, how can professional communicators make their value known in the workplace and, more importantly, make the case for the importance of their jobs?

Ironically, communications professionals tend to be very lax at managing their own reputations and their department’s reputations (likely because they’re so focused on managing the reputations of others).

Nothing conveys value like doing quality work and being gracious and responsive to the requests of co-workers and stakeholders (good, old-fashioned customer service) - so one must start there. Related to that, communicators should get out of the office and physically circulate around their organizations (especially if they’re large) and talk to departments about their communication-related needs. In addition to learning about new opportunities (and threats) - you can raise your profile and be of service by “cross-pollinating” and connecting one department to another (I’m continually surprised by how many overlapping interests I find).

Another regular practice for communicators is continually benchmarking against competitors and other organizations similar to one’s own. Being able to demonstrate that a practice, policy or organization structure is utilized by another successful organization can be very compelling.

In addition, communications pros must make sure to “close the loop” on their projects by cataloging and analyzing what worked (and more importantly, what didn’t work) and making available that information and formulating plans to improve the next time around.

Another easy way to demonstrate your value is to repurpose/repackage the work you regularly do as a communications professional and syndicate it throughout your organization when it might be valuable to others outside the profession. So, by way of a really simplistic example, if you’re in PR, you’re regularly scanning the media - so put together a report of articles relevant to the industry your organization is in and publish/circulate it.

File Under "Duh": Consumers Distrust Corporate Blogs

This shouldn't be surprising:

Study: Consumers Distrust Corporate Blogs
Dec 9, 2008 | By Brian Morrissey | Adweek

"For the last several years, new marketing experts have implored corporations to "join the conversation," namely through blogging. One problem: several years into the blogging phenomenon, not many consumers trust their blogs. A Forrester Research study found that only 16 percent of consumers trust what they read on blogs, a trust level below such hallmarks of veracity as direct mail and message board posts. Of all information sources, including traditional and interactive media, corporate blogs finished dead last in consumers' eyes." [Source]

Watching all of the writing and training seminars that are going on right now about incorporating social media into the mix of channels that corporations use to interact with their consumers is amusing because the approach most corporations are taking is so fundamentally-flawed. They're woefully unprepared for the level of candor, intimacy and two-way communication that is inherent to blogs, microblogs, and social networking sites.

What needs to be understood is that these media require a highly personalized approach - and that the approach is a permanent, 24/7 commitment. If you're going to interact with your audiences through these media, you can't turn it off when it becomes uncomfortable or difficult - and if you do - the cost to your credibility will be higher than if you never embarked on the path to begin with.

Student's Free Speech Rights Infringed Upon by School District Over Facebook Group

It's apparently a busy time for online civil rights issues:

Student Who Created Facebook Group Critical of Teacher Sues High School Over Suspension
By David Kravets | December 09, 2008 | Wired.com

"Katherine Evans, a former Florida high school student who was disciplined for "cyberbullying" a teacher on Facebook, is suing the school principal on allegations of violating her free speech rights. [...] The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred." After people's comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Evans was removed from her from advanced placement classes "and forced her into the lesser-weighted honors classes." The lawsuit alleges the black mark on Evans' permanent record is "unjustifiably straining her academic reputation and good standing." [Source...]

The school is totally in the wrong on this; it's a clear violation of the precedent set forth in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (and likely other precedents, though the school might try to argue it's protected by Morse v. Frederick which would be illegitimate since it's not illegal to say you don't like someone AND it wasn't done during a school-supervised event). Students have free speech rights - and the fact that this group was created out in the ether of the Internet and not scrawled on a bathroom wall or passed out in a flyer on school grounds even further undermines the school district's already-weak case against Evans. Teachers are just going to have to grow thicker skins.

She didn't make any libellous comments, and she was expressing a genuine opinion using her real identity (which eliminates the possibility that she would even be violating the absurdly-strict [unconstitutional, and unenforceable] provisions of the "Violence Against Women and Justice Department Reauthorization Act of 2005").

Unsolicited Bulk Email at Michigan State University

Recently, MSU student Kara Spencer organized an email campaign to contact nearly 400 Michigan State University faculty she thought would be sympathetic to her complaint about the university's decision to shorten the semester by two days in spite of being told by an administrator that she would face disciplinary action for not getting prior approval to send out the bulk email.

She sent the email and after a Dec. 2 disciplinary hearing (where one of the charges against her - falsely representing/using the resources of a group - was dismissed) where she received a warning (instead of the suspension that was initially threatened).

Here's her original email, and the complaint filed against her. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has taken up Spencer's case and is arguing on her behalf (they have a 'file' open on their site where you can keep tabs on the developments). Fox News has seized a hold of the story (they love any excuse to beat up higher education).

As someone who works on the administration side of a higher education institution and who is an ardent advocate of free speech - I'm conflicted. I see the argument that Spencer should be allowed freedom of speech (especially since I don't like how the university handled the decision; it didn't allow sufficient time for students to comment on the change), but I also understand the pressure the administrators are under to protect both their network resources from misuse and their employees from being deluged by unsolicited emails.

My defense of the administration is that the right to free speech is not absolute and one needs to consider the larger ramifications of allowing unsolicited bulk email as well as the unrestricted use of campus networks and what precedents that sets. I would be interested to hear what FAIR thinks about some different scenarios or conditions:

• Does MSU have the right to determine how its networks are used?
  
  
• Does the method of communication used factor into the equation? For example, would Spencer's right to free speech include the right to use MSU's network to use a more intrusive method such as sending a bulk text message to the nearly 400 faculty on the list? What about faxes? What about robo-calls?
  
  
• If the university has a spam filter in place that would block emails like this (sent to hundreds of recipients from a Gmail address) - would that constitute a violation of the student's right to free speech?

In my opinion, Spencer would have been in the clear if she would have sent the email from off-campus (though she apparently used a personal Gmail account, it sounds like she used MSU's network to access it and send the email). Unfortunately, though, she agreed to the school's AUA and broke it of her own volition (despite being warned not to do so).

Text Messaging Reduced the Spread of the Novovirus at Hope College

UPDATE: Text messages reduce the spread of norovirus at Hope College
Posted By: Joshua Aldredge Posted By: Chris Fleszar | WZZM13 | December 5, 2008

HOLLAND, Mich. (WZZM) A text message proved effective in alerting thousands of students about last month's norovirus outbreak at Hope College. Hope College officials informed the Health Department they had a database that contained all of the students email and tex messaging addresses. 3600 students were notified at once. Students were asked via text message to reply to an email detailing their symptoms and how long they were ill. The Health Department says in the end about 540 students responded. Officials say the information was crucial for determining a plan of action and slowing the spread of the virus. [Source...]

It should be noted that Grand Rapids Community College was the first college or university in West Michigan to offer emergency SMS text messages to students and employees. Years later, a temporary CIO for the college staffed by a consulting firm learned that the college had been doing this and called it "the stupidest thing I've ever heard of."

Fortunately the college did not take his advice to drop the text messaging service it offers (but instead has invested in a more robust system which now serves over 4,500 users).

Multiple Studies Find Political Leaning of Faculty has no Influence on Students' Political Views

Professors’ Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not
By PATRICIA COHEN | New York Times | Published: November 2, 2008

"An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students. This conviction not only fueled the culture wars but has also led state lawmakers to consider requiring colleges to submit reports to the government detailing their progress in ensuring “intellectual diversity,” prompted universities to establish faculty positions devoted to conservatism and spurred the creation of a network of volunteer watchdogs to monitor “political correctness” on campuses."

[...] "If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. (Bruce L. R. Smith is the third co-author of the book.) When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”

A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.

“There is no evidence that an instructor’s views instigate political change among students,” Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently conducted research on politics in higher education, write in that second study."

As an adjunct faculty member, I've occasionally run into the accusations of bias in the faculty (though fortunately not against me). It's good to finally see some quantitative numbers to back up what most educators have known for years. Virtually all of the faculty members I know (and that I've ever had as a student) have always taken great pains to be fair and impartial in their handling of politics whenever those issues come up.

Often times they'll seek to avoid or narrowly-confine political discussion in class, I think, because they're well aware of the inequitable distribution of power in the student-teacher relationship and don't want students to feel intimidated (either by a professor's status as 'learned' or through reprisal in the grading process).

I've observed that many faculty seem to enjoy playing the "Devil's Advocate" just to stimulate debate and critical thought in class when a discussion becomes too one-sided (which sometimes surprises the student who had counted on the professor to back them up as an ally on a particular point given their interpretation of that faculty member's political biases).

The most skilled can make it impossible to gauge what their political leanings are; arguing just as effectively and persuasively for all sides (I can think specifically of Mr. Mott back in High School - who was able to remain completely opaque, despite the best efforts of students to figure him out). I attempt to toe this line, but I confess that I think my own abilities fall sort of this standard.

A Hurdle for Citizen Journalism: Lawsuits

As the Poynter Institute notes, lawsuits against bloggers are on the rise going from four in 1997 to 89 in 2007. While the number seems small - it's a disturbing indicator of what will likely be a rapidly-increasing trend as advertising revenues continue to decline and the mainstream media is increasingly unable to return the higher profits demanded by stockholders (forcing staffing and budget cuts to news departments).

Corporations, having lost their bid to turn the Internet into a medium like the conventional media (where wealth controls one's level of access) by overturning Net Neutrality, are invariably going to seek out alternatives to preserve the control they exert over the traditional mass media. That means lawsuits; and frivolous lawsuits at that - knowing that bloggers lack the legal protections afforded to journalists do (being shielded behind the masthead of a newspaper that can afford to fight off "junk" lawsuits alleging defamation or copyright infringement).

This is one of several major hurdles to "citizen journalism" being able to take over in the wake of the declining quality of the mainstream for-profit news media. Another hurdle often cited is the lack of formal training for most bloggers (who do not frequently observe the standards journalists do which are designed to preserve objectivity in reporting).

It will be interesting to see what happens as this trend worsens. Will citizen journalists band together to form a consortium (which might maintain legal protections for member journalists who pay dues and agree to adhere to a certain set of standards)? Will legislation be introduced (or will case law be interpreted) that grants bloggers immunity from this sort of suit? Time will tell.

Regardless of the outcome, it will be interesting to observe what happens - and it will bear directly on how the First Amendment is interpreted in the forseeable future.

New Yorker Cartoon Flap is COM 320 in Action

There’s been much ado about the recent New Yorker cover featuring an inflammatory depiction of presidential nominee Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. For brevity I’ll refer to the Wikipedia description of the illustration (on the off-chance you haven’t already seen it twenty times on the TV news):

“The magazine's July 21, 2008 cover sparked criticism with its depiction of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama dressed in traditional Muslim garb and his wife, Michelle, in military-style camouflage and carrying a machine-gun, standing in the Oval Office with a portrait of Osama Bin Laden hanging on the wall. An American flag burns in the fireplace in the background.”

New Yorker Editor David Remnik explained the intent behind the cartoon in this interview:

"The intent of the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected in public opinion polls. […] What we set out to do was to throw all these images together, which are all over the top and to shine a kind of harsh light on them, to satirize them. That’s part of what we do."

The way this story has played out illustrates how rich, fluid and textured our methods of communication are. Trying to convey that reality is the goal of a course I've taught at GVSU; "COM 320: Vision and Culture."

One of the principles of communications philosophy that parsimoniously describes the conflict is that of "discourse communities," which are defined by Kostelnick and Hassett (in "Visual Language, Discourse Communities and the Inherently Social Nature of Conventions," 2003) as groups of users of particular codes who maintain a 'collective enterprise' in the use and understanding of those codes. Plato observed that written language "rolls around" (IE that it is flexible and is modified as it passes from user to user). Kostelnick and Hassett argue that visual language is even more fluid than written language due to the greater variety of context it can draw upon to create meaning. Therein lies the rub.

The readership of the New Yorker is a discourse community. To that discourse community (established as readers absorb the content of the magazine, thereby familiarizing themselves with various concepts like the 'right-wing media'), certain concepts and how they are represented visually become coherent and intelligible. When the symbols are interpreted by members of the discourse community, there is no problem.

When the symbols are cast out into the mainstream they can be freely interpreted by people of other discourse communities without the benefit of a translator from the New Yorker to provide the context that conveys the original meaning. The irony is that the mainstream media, in chastising the New Yorker for creating an esoteric satirical image that could be misunderstood by the masses, flung the image out to a vastly larger segment of the masses.

As Kostelnick and Hassett describe: "like a white-water river surging over the rocks, [visual language's] relentless and seemingly chaotic presence demands our attention, while at the same time conceals its underlying foundation."

Starbucks More Like Ahab?

In pursuit of ever-higher profits (apparently its white whale), Starbucks has made a couple sizable gaffes in recent years that threaten its brand identity as a high-quality, socially-conscious purveyor of coffee.

The first was to stop paying attention to customer service (a common problem for companies that rise too quickly too fast). So serious was the decline, that Starbucks closed all of its locations for three and a half hours on February 26, 2008 to retrain employees in customer service. The company also (perhaps unwisely) turned it into a media event which was much-lampooned in the media.

The second was to engage in union-busting; firing a worker here in Grand Rapids and another in Spain - actions that recently generated a world-wide protest. For a company that has taken various other actions in pursuit of a commitment to fair labor practices, environmental sustainability, and purchasing its product from fair trade producers (though it only amounts to around six percent of the total coffee Starbucks purchases) - this move could be especially damaging as it stands directly counter to the company's purported brand identity (and thusly, the views of the audience they've courted while building the brand).

Though it's hard to parse out what is stimulated by the suffering economy, there are already potential signs of potential consequences for Starbucks' actions; they've been losing market share to McDonald's line of specialty coffees, and the company just announced that it will close 600 locations in response to falling demand.

It will be interesting to see what measures the company takes to rebound. Now that the fast food world is in the specialty coffee market, one would think that Starbucks would want to concentrate even more on the core identify of its brand (IE a high quality experience and social responsibility) to differentiate itself given that it cannot compete on price and availability with chains like McDonald's.

Fighting Back Against PR Spam

A few months ago, Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson blasted public relations companies for spamming him with irrelevant media pitches - echoing the sentiments of many other journalists. As an act of punishment, he also posted the email addresses of the spammers on his blog (thus opening them up to becoming targets of spam themselves from data-mining bots that would, ironically, deliver them to the lists of other spammers).

The move caused something of a stir in the PR world, as some of the domains blocked belonged to some of the biggest names in the world of public relations firms.

The issue has resurfaced again as blogger Matt Haughey has done the same thing, publicly admonishing PR spammers. The interesting note is that Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has had enough too, and went the extra step of setting up a wiki site so that journalists and editors can post the domain names of notorious public relations spammers to make the process of blocking that spam easier (as it can be directly uploaded into a spam filter's blacklist).

Though I work in PR, ultimately I side with the writers/editors. In this day and age, with access to the Internet and services like Bacon's online, there's really no excuse for the "shotgun" approach to press releases. Everything is personalized now (as the suffering broadcast and print media are learning) and the dinosaurs need to take note or slip further into the inky black tar pit of irrelevance.

Sure, it's tough as a PR pro to say 'no' to a client that wants you to blast everyone in the world with a release about their product (it's even harder to talk them out of a release altogether when they have something that is not at all newsworthy), but you have to do it for their sake and yours. It hurts your reputation and theirs to hit unreceptive audiences with an irrelevant message, which could turn them off to future messages from you that are spot-on.

Errol Morris and Lens Culture

I'm reading a profile in Wired about documentary filmmaker Errol Morris ("the Interrogator,"May 16, 2008, by David Samuels, p. 127) and instantly like him as a result of this passage:

"Morris was initially rejected by every college he applied to, and he was later thrown out of graduate programs at UC Berkeley and Princeton. He remains a failed graduate student at heart, delighting in the pure play of ideas, with the secondary aim of exasperating any responsible adults in the room."

I've decided that if I'm permitted to teach COM 320 "Vision and Culture" again at GVSU, I'm going to incorporate Morris' film "Standard Operating Procedure" about the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib) into the course because it covers precisely what we discuss about the perils of living in a "lens culture" with the illusion of truth captured within the frame of an image. This passage, describing his upcoming book Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?, sounds fascinating:

"Many of Morris' blog posts reflect his interest in the ways that photographs presented as pure, objective documentation of reality are often staged and manipulated, like those from Abu Ghraib. Morris answers his more lively and particular commenters at length, weaving together the comments and annotating them in a loopy, digressive, but rigorous way that a friend, writer Ron Rosenbaum, has identified as an entirely new form of essay."

It sounds like Morris may be paving the way for the type of book that I would like to write given that it's the medium I so frequently participate in. Very exciting.

Boolify Makes Learning to Use Search Engines Easy

One of the most important skills any student (or any professional for that matter) can have is the ability to use search engines to access the limitless potential of the Internet. In fact, it's far less important that students learn rote facts in school than it is that they learn how to FIND those facts (and how to think critically and apply them).

Enter Boolify (named for George Boole, who discovered a system for algebraic system of logic that is widely used in computer science). Boolify uses a visual drag-and-drop interface of puzzle pieces to teach people how to think about crafting Internet searches using Boolean operators. While you build your search, below the results are pulled from Google and displayed so you can monitor how each new component modifies the results. It's brilliant.

Boolify.org

Mother Jones Reports on PR Firms That Paid Former Spies to Infiltrate Activist Groups

Black Ops on Green Groups: Private Security Firm Run by Fmr. Secret Service Officers Spied on Environmental Orgs for Corporate Clients
Democracy Now! | April 14, 2008
"A private security firm spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and several other environmental organizations from the late 1990s until at least the year 2000, according a new investigation by Mother Jones magazine. The security firm was run by former Secret Service officers who infiltrated environmental groups, collected their phone records and confidential internal documents, and even went through their trash. The information was then passed on to public relations firms and corporations involved in environmental controversies. We speak with the reporter who broke the story, James Ridgeway." [More]

The public relations industry appears to have carved a unique niche out for itself as the go-betweens for corporations and entities that offer services that are either outright illegal, or at the very least deeply unethical. Their ability to act as an intermediary offers the corporations plausible deniability (they can just say that the PR firm was off the reservation), and it offers the service vendors yet another layer of insulation from public scrutiny. The most common form of this practice is astroturf groups, but counterinsurgency (well documented by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in Toxic Sludge is Good for You) and laundering political donations are also common. The latter of which was actually the basis for one of the storylines in the short-lived HBO series "K Street."

Despite all of the various recent ethical violations by Ketchum, they remain one of the chief patrons of the Public Relations Society of America which has criticized these practices, but done nothing to sanction its own membership for utilizing them. Lest one think that this sort of thing is an abstract national issue, I would remind you that this sort of thing is (allegedly) going on at all levels - even here in Michigan (as illustrated by this case study).

The Pimping of .EDU

It's becoming standard operating procedure for power brokers (be they corporations or politicians) to attempt to ape the qualities of positively-perceived institutions rather than to build a better mousetrap. Astroturf groups are a great example. Rather than improve standards and refine quality, corporate America will dumb down the definition of "organic" so their factory-produced, bioengineered products apply. Rather than actually commit to sustainable practices, corporations contort the definition of "green" so that their decidedly unsustainable practices apply.

Interestingly, "Intelligent Design" [ie creationism] is using this same tactic; trying to dumb down the definition of "science" so that anything applies - including non-falsifiable, cultural mythology.

This is another move in that same sad direction; trying to couch [deceptive] advertising messages in the credible sheep's clothing of educational institutions. Woe to the republic.