Upworthy seems a good way to me to make your point. If you have something meaningful to say. And if you can make it visual. Preferably in an awesome way.
You don’t have to be a socialist to see that here is a point. Somehow.
I know I’m three years late but: yup, this is my new favourite series. “The Spin Crowd” – produced amongst others by Kim Kardashian – is a painstakingly researched documentary about the realities of PR.
This is a must-see for every serious student of communication. Debunking the myth. Setting the record straight. Telling it all. While cruising down Rodeo Drive.
Never before have we been given a more comprehensive picture of what communication is about. Here you get the answers. To the big questions. The ones that keep the pros awake at night.
– Why are people just OVERAWED when I tell them that I work with PR?
– Why does PR make the world a SOOO much better place?
– Where does my Master degree in Strategic Communication take me?
Available now. Thank you, youtube. Thank you for all eight episodes. This is Season 1. Sadly the series was discontinued. There is no Season 2.
Please watch the first episode.Treat yourself to 21 minutes of fast-paced action, brilliant dialogue.
And understand why I’m getting my lips done. RIGHT NOW.
Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor, lawyer, intellectual property-rights activist and clearly a genius (you can tell by the hair-style), gives a rapid-fire-talk about corruption, democracy, lobbyism and Lesterland. He’s got 734,810 viewers right now and you, young Jedi, should be the next. Watch this on TED Talks and be dazzled, outraged, inspired.
If you like the hair-style and want to see the man in real: Lessig is on the podium of the Debate in Lund on May, 29, 20.00, Café Athen, AF building, Sandgatan 2.
Do you think nothing escapes your attention? Well, test yourself. Would you have spotted the details?
Interesting article about brain research in SvD today: http://www.svd.se/nyheter/idagsidan/psykologi/tankfel-bakom-manga-av-vara-beslut_7880770.svd
By Anita Blasberg und Kerstin Kohlenberg (translated by endofthelesson)
(read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here)
The year is 2009. The Financial Crisis has hit media hard. Publishing houses and broadcasters downsize. Every third U.S. news-journalist loses his job. The few left don’t have the time to check facts. CNN disbands its science-unit. Weather forecast announcer Chad Meyers is the resident expert for climate change now. Meyers says: ‘It’s hubris to think we humans can affect global climate in such a way.’
endofthelesson: Klaus Kocks, the enfant terrible of the public relations-scene in Germany, coined the immortal phrase that the colourful flower of public relations grows out of the dung-heap of journalism (“Die bunte Blume der PR blueht auf dem Misthaufen des Journalismus”; ZAPP, 17.02.2010). Communication and media researchers in the Western democracies have repeatedly pointed out that the succession of ‘media crises’ during the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st hollowed out journalism to a dangerous degree. Journalism, in general, simply isn’t capable of doing the job the public somehow expects it to do anymore. But this is not just a post-democratic condition. Media crises are not a force of nature. There is a reason. And the reason, folks, is the simple fact that WE, the once-citizens and now-consumers, are not willing to pay. We’re not willing to pay the full price for quality journalism. Most of us, myself included, are not even willing to devote a decent amount of time and attention to quality journalism. It’s uncomfortable and unsettling to read about the rotten state of the world all the time. So I watch Prince Harry talking about flying the Apache gunship instead.
What is bad for readers and viewers is good for Marc Morano: Many editorial offices now pursue the strategy to neutralize every material statement with a counter-statement claiming the opposite. So, every statement by a climate researcher is counterbalanced by the statement of a climate-change denier – and that saves the press the trouble to provide an answer to the question who’s right and who’s wrong.
Marc Morano keeps a database of several thousand e-mail-addresses of journalists on his laptop. 19 different lists, sorted by categories such as ‘columnists’, ‘TV moderators’, ‘supra-regional science editors’ (‘not as accessible as the others’), ‘local newspaper’ (‘always take something’).
It’s November, 17, 2009. Michael Mann celebrates Thanksgiving with this family. At 9.57 pm a person with the pseudonym ‘FOIA’ blogs on a blog called Air Vent. FOIA reveals the address of a server from which one can download 1000 private e-mails of the most prominent climate researchers world-wide: Michael Mann included.
What happened? Unknown hackers accessed the server of the climate research unit of the University of East Anglia and downloaded private e-mails and documents. Everything stands ready for inspection in the net, just in time for the UN Climate Conference starting at the beginning of December 2009 in Copenhagen.
At that time, Marc Morano was sitting in the back of a rented car driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. His mobile phone rings. He is in California to agitate against a new environmental law. An acquaintance tells him about the hacked mails. Crazy stuff, some of it! In one e-mail, Michael Mann writes that he uses ‘a trick’ to conceal sinking temperatures.
A trick? That can only mean one thing: that the whole business of global warming is a gigantic fake.
Soon the seeming ‘scandal’ has a name: Climategate. Marc Morano puts a so-called feeder onto his webpage. The program alerts him to everything that is written about the researchers’ mails. He collects headlines and assembles them on his own page climatedepot.com – linked to 1,700 other pages. ‘The greatest scandal of modern science,’ he types. Other bloggers link his texts with other texts. These are then linked to others. Like a man possessed, Morano works through the night. Until Climategate has spread through the Google-Universe like a dense web. In only two weeks’ time, the story of the allegedly corrupt climate researchers spreads to 25 million internet pages all over the globe.
Few journalists have bothered to read the original e-mails, but nearly all gratefully accept Morano’s interpretation: ‘The last nail in global warming’s coffin.’ Fox News goes on day after day about the ‘Waterloo of global warming.’ The British newspaper Daily Telegraph warns its readers: ‘If you hold stock of renewable energy companies, divest NOW!’ Even the well-regarded magazine The Atlantic writes disgustedly: ‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering’.
The World Climate Conference in Copenhagen ends inconclusively. No results. President Obama’s long-awaited climate protection act fails in the U.S. Senate. A couple of weeks later, in spring 2010, congressional investigation committees acquit the climate researchers fully and completely. The incriminating passages were taken out of context. The ‘trick’ Michael Mann wrote about pertains to the perfectly admissible solution of a statistical problem. The data contain no irregularities. This news, too, makes it into the media. But it is confined to the back pages.
Not even half of the U.S. population believes in global warming anymore.
intheloop/endofthelesson. This the third part of a new mini-series (Part I here, Part II here) which touches upon a couple of issues in StratCom. Firstly, dirty tricks. We’ll point out some of the time-honoured ploys that are frequently em-ployed in StratCom when actors run out of arguments – predominantly on the tactical level. This is for emancipatory and educational purposes only, of course: Kids, don’t try this at home. Second, we’ll talk about strategy – something that strikes us as not unimportant in the context of strategic communication. Expect to meet good ol’ Clausewitz, but since it’s hard to discuss strategy in abstracto, we’ve decided to do it in concreto, i.e. by commenting on a case: The Climate Warriors. The idea here is, moreover, that StratCom-scholars and students can make a tiny tiny contribution. Not by refuting the arguments, but by pointing out the too-familiar tricks. Believe it or not: practitioners have made their contribution already: http://www.desmogblog.com, run amongst others by PR practitioner Jim Hoggan, was voted into the Top 25 of TIME magazine’s best blogs of 2011. Third, we’ll address the concerted attack on the credibility of science. It is worrying, we believe, that powerful forces in society are actively undermining the credibility of scientific knowledge by means of more or less cleverly crafted StratCom. And we’re not talking about the credibility of postmodernist literature theory here, but about largely uncontroversial or undisputed results in the natural sciences. Climate change denial, our fourth issue, is the prime example, but there are others: the rise of religious fundamentalism and its denial of evolutionary theory; the fact that research on what makes humans happy and content (e.g. more equal societies) is constantly ignored by policy-makers; the way economics has declared itself value-free and has at the same time become highly ideological, etc.
Enuff talk. Here’s the case. The following is our translation from German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, Nov, 22, 2012 – you can read the original here. We have asked to acquire the copyright for the purpose of this blog.
By Anita Blasberg und Kerstin Kohlenberg (translated by endofthelesson)
(read Part I here and Part II here)
Nine years later, in autumn 2012, Marc Morano says: ‘We managed to stop the climate bills within three years of time.’ He says it with pride – like a schoolboy who boasts about a home assignment well done. The location is the Capital Grill, an exquisite steakhouse in a Washington suburb. Padlocked wall-cupboards used to harbour the expensive cigars of regular guests.
‘That was the time when you were allowed to smoke in restaurants,’ Morano says, rolling his eyeballs. Morano doesn’t like when politics intrudes into people’s private lives. He doesn’t like to hear that smoking may harm his health, or that the rain forest may be in danger, or that overpopulation of the planet may constitute a problem.
‘Ideology’, he says.
Morano loves his family, the four kids, his wife Jennifer. He loves his big Victorian house with the beautiful garden. He loves his big, heavy SUV. He likes to live life his way.
The first thing Morano does after being hired by Senator Inhofe is to rebuild the website of the Environmental Committee. He collects everything that denies global warming. The more a text agitates against climate change, the more prominently it is placed. The internet is a treasure-trove of such texts. Things are going well for Marc Morano.
But then, the year is 2006, ex-presidential candidate of the Democrats Al Gore releases the documentary movie An Inconvenient Truth. Gore shows pictures of glaciers melting away, of deserts spreading, of cities flooded. And he works the same way Morano works. Gore has a message and he formulates it so that everybody gets it. With the one difference that Al Gore is not backed up by heavy industry. He’s backed up by scientific consensus.
An Inconvenient Truth
endofthelesson: An Inconvenient Truth is conveniently on vimeo. If you haven’t seen it, if you have 90 minutes to spare and think Al Gore has a cool haircut, go ahead and wreck your day.
intheloop/endofthelesson. This the second part of a new mini-series (Part I here) which touches upon a couple of issues in StratCom. Firstly, dirty tricks. We’ll point out some of the time-honoured ploys that are frequently em-ployed in StratCom when actors run out of arguments – predominantly on the tactical level. This is for emancipatory and educational purposes only, of course: Kids, don’t try this at home. Second, we’ll talk about strategy – something that strikes us as not unimportant in the context of strategic communication. Expect to meet good ol’ Clausewitz, but since it’s hard to discuss strategy in abstracto, we’ve decided to do it in concreto, i.e. by commenting on a case: The Climate Warriors. The idea here is, moreover, that StratCom-scholars and students can make a tiny tiny contribution. Not by refuting the arguments, but by pointing out the too-familiar tricks. Believe it or not: practitioners have made their contribution already: http://www.desmogblog.com, run amongst others by PR practitioner Jim Hoggan, was voted into the Top 25 of TIME magazine’s best blogs of 2011. Third, we’ll address the concerted attack on the credibility of science. It is worrying, we believe, that powerful forces in society are actively undermining the credibility of scientific knowledge by means of more or less cleverly crafted StratCom. And we’re not talking about the credibility of postmodernist literature theory here, but about largely uncontroversial or undisputed results in the natural sciences. Climate change denial, our fourth issue, is the prime example, but there are others: the rise of religious fundamentalism and its denial of evolutionary theory; the fact that research on what makes humans happy and content (e.g. more equal societies) is constantly ignored by policy-makers; the way economics has declared itself value-free and has at the same time become highly ideological, etc.
Enuff talk. Here’s the case. The following is our translation from German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, Nov, 22, 2012 – you can read the original here. We have asked to acquire the copyright for the purpose of this blog.
By Anita Blasberg und Kerstin Kohlenberg (translated by intheloop)
(read Part I here)
The year is 1998. Mann is 33 years old. A young researcher who dreams of explaining oscillations in global climate. Together with two colleagues he starts to collate temperature data from thousands of years, analyzing ice core samples, tree barks and probes of corals. The researchers are astonished as they finally see the results in a graph. Until the year 1850 earth’s temperature curve runs almost horizontal. But from the moment humankind begins to burn coal, oil and gas, the curve skyrockets.
A strange chart, Mann thinks: It looks like a lying hockey stick, with a long straight shaft and an upright standing scoop. Mann and his colleagues publish their findings in the journal Nature: ‘The hockey stick’, as their chart is known from now on, catapults them onto the front page of Time Magazine. Michael Mann, shy and unprepared, features in the most important news broadcasts of the country.
The hockey stick proved that climate change is human-made. In the beginning it convinces the conservatives, too. The influential republican senator John McCain and democrat Joseph Lieberman cooperate to draft a bill in order to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide. They call it Climate Stewardship Act, a bill for climate responsibility.
The National Academy of Sciences, Americas’ most prestigious academic society, confirms the findings of Mann’s study. 928 climate change-related papers published between 1993 and 2003 arrive at the same conclusion: global warming is caused by humans. The editor in chief of the renowned journal Science calls it the most remarkable consensus in the history of science.
‘The hockey stick’, says Mann, ‘was the worst that could happen to heavy industry.’
Going around on the playground again and telling children that Santa isn’t real. Got something nice for Christmas? A new printer maybe? Well, you’d better get a new printer from time to time because the things are programmed to self-destruct. That’s what makes economy work, I guess. One of our students, Elin, drew my attention to this rather interesting documentary about planned obsolescence, i.e. the deliberate shortening of the life-span of products — and the pyramids of waste piling up in Third World countries as a consequence. Here are some links to the full documentary if you have an hour to spare.
intheloop/endofthelesson. This the beginning of a new mini-series which touches upon a couple of issues in StratCom. Firstly, dirty tricks. We’ll point out some of the time-honoured ploys that are frequently em-ployed in StratCom when actors run out of arguments – predominantly on the tactical level. This is for emancipatory and educational purposes only, of course: Kids, don’t try this at home. Second, we’ll talk about strategy – something that strikes us as not unimportant in the context of strategic communication. Expect to meet good ol’ Clausewitz, but since it’s hard to discuss strategy in abstracto, we’ve decided to do it in concreto, i.e. by commenting on a case: The Climate Warriors. The idea here is, moreover, that StratCom-scholars and students can make a tiny tiny contribution. Not by refuting the arguments, but by pointing out the too-familiar tricks. Believe it or not: practitioners have made their contribution already: http://www.desmogblog.com, run amongst others by PR practitioner Jim Hoggan, was voted into the Top 25 of TIME magazine’s best blogs of 2011. Third, we’ll address the concerted attack on the credibility of science. It is worrying, we believe, that powerful forces in society are actively undermining the credibility of scientific knowledge by means of more or less cleverly crafted StratCom. And we’re not talking about the credibility of postmodernist literature theory here, but about largely uncontroversial or undisputed results in the natural sciences. Climate change denial, our fourth issue, is the prime example, but there are others: the rise of religious fundamentalism and its denial of evolutionary theory; the fact that research on what makes humans happy and content (e.g. more equal societies) is constantly ignored by policy-makers; the way economics has declared itself value-free and has at the same time become highly ideological, etc.
Enuff talk. Here’s the case. The following is our translation from German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, Nov, 22, 2012 – you can read the original here. We have asked to acquire the copyright for the purpose of this blog.
By Anita Blasberg und Kerstin Kohlenberg (translated by endofthelesson)
Marc Morano spreads doubt by the click of a mouse. He sits in the back of a black Lincoln-Town-Car-Limo and operates his most important weapon: the laptop. Outside, the autumn forests rush by. Morano uploads the newest headline: “Environmental Protection Agency accused of experimenting with humans.”
The limo fetched Morano half an hour earlier from his large house in a Washington suburb. Now it’s gliding towards the studio of Fox News. Marc Morano is in for his next op.
Next week, on Nov, 26, the world’s heads of governments and their ministers for environment meet in Doha on the Persian Gulf for the UN World Climate Summit. They want to decide new initiatives again global warming. Morano wants to stop them.
Morano is not a climate researcher. He is neither capable of calculating atmospheric pressure nor is he good at analyzing temperature data. Morano is a PR manager. His talent is to communicate message so that everybody gets it.
SK: UNCUT 