Tag: journalism

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Business Ethics, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, General Commentary, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1 of this post, I shared a video of a dolphin rescuing a dog, asked whether you thought it was real or fake, and then told you my answer, with seven reasons why. If you missed it, please click on this paragraph to read it.

Why This Matters: A Metaphor for Something Much Deeper

Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Isn’t it just some people having fun making a feel-good film?

Answer: I do marketing and strategic profitability consulting for green and social change organizations, as well as for authors and publishers–and I’m also a lifelong activist. This combination of activism and marketing gives me another set of lenses to filter things, as well as a magnificent toolkit to make the world better. My activism also brings a strong sense of ethics into the marketing side.

Both as a marketer and an activist, I pay careful attention to how we motivate people to take action–to the psychology of messaging, One category for this post is psychology; click on that category to get posts going back many years. I worry deeply about our tendency as a society to crowd out facts with emotions. (I also worry about another tendency, to crowd out emotions with facts, but that’s a different post.)

And this is an example of crowding out facts with emotion. While this particular instance is innocuous as far as I can tell, we see examples of overreach on both the left and right, and they work to push us apart from each other, talk at each other instead of seeking common ground, and push real solutions farther and farther out of reach.

My inbox is full of scare-tactic emails from progressive, environmental, or Democratic Party organizations. Because I’m in the biz and understand what they’re doing, I leave most of them unopened. I just searched my unread emails for subject lines that contain the word “Breaking” and came with hundreds, including this one from a group called Win Without War:

Subject: Breaking: Trump ordered tanks in D.C.

From this subject line, you’d expect some horror story about peaceful protestors facing American military might. It could happen. It has happened in the past–for example, the 1970 Kent State massacre that left four Vietnam War protesters dead and nine more injured by Ohio National Guard  soldiers’ bullets. (The shootings at Jackson State College in Mississippi 11 days later were committed by police, not soldiers.) And protestors in countries with totalitarian governments have often faced tanks; if you want to see courage, watch the video of a man stopping tanks with only a flag, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989–WOW!)

An unarmed man with a small flag stops four Chinese tanks in Tiannanmen Square, Beijing,
An unarmed man with a small flag stops four Chinese tanks in Tiannanmen Square, Beijing,

It’s a clear attempt to generate hysteria, to have people perceiving tanks in the streets with their guns pointed at dissenters.

Only in the body of the email do we find out what’s really going on:

Shel —

Last night, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump has ordered a giant military parade with tanks, guns, and troops taking over the streets of our nation’s capital. [1] This is the kind of parade that dictators around the world use to intimidate their enemies and, more importantly, their own citizens.

This is what authoritarian dictatorships look like.

But Trump can’t change the fact that we still live in a democracy — which means Washington, D.C.’s local government gets to have a say before Donald Trump’s tanks roll down its streets.

Note the use of mail merge software to appear personal. Does that really fool anybody anymore? But OK, even when you know it’s a mail merge, it still generates at least a small warm fuzzy.

More importantly, note that the actual content is totally different from the expectation in the headline. We can argue the foolishness of Trump wanting a military parade (I think it’s foolish, and an expensive attempt to stroke his ego)–but in no way is this the same as attacking demonstrators in the streets of Washington, DC.

The right wing is at least as bad. I don’t subscribe to their e-blasts, but I found this juicy example (with an introduction and then a rebuttal by the site hosting this post) in about ten seconds of searching.

And then there are DT’s own Tweets, news conferences, and speeches, both during the campaign and since he took the oath to uphold the constitution as President of the United States (an oath he has been in violation of every single day of his term). They are full of lies, misrepresentations, name-calling, bullying, and fear-mongering. They are hate speech. I will not give them legitimacy by quoting them here; they’re easy enough to find.

As a country, we are better than this..

How You Can “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Sensationalist Fear-mongering

Before sharing any news story or meme, run through a series of questions to help you identify if it’s real.And if it passes that test, pop on rumor-checking site Snopes and check its status. For that matter, go through a similar questions for advertising claims.

The questions will vary by the situation. Here are a few to get you started:

  • Does the post link to documentation? Are most of the linked sites reputable? If they advance a specific agenda, does the post disclose this? (Note that THIS post links to several reputable sites, including NPR, New York Times, history.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, CNN, Snopes, and my own goingbeyondsustainability.com and greenandprofitable.com. Yes, I am aware of the issues in using Wikipedia or Youtube as the only source. I am also aware that Google gives them a tremendous amount of “link juice” because on the whole, they are considered authoritative. For both those citations, I had plenty of documentation from major news sites.) Strong documentation linking to known and respected sources is a sign to take the post seriously.
  • Does the post name-drop without specifics? See how the Win Without War letter mentions the Washington Post but leaves out the link? Remember that ancient email hoax citing longtime NPR reporter Nina Totenberg? Name-dropping to buy unsusbstantiated respect is not a good sign.
  • Are the language and tone calm and rational, or screaming and sensationalist or even salacious?
  • Is the post attributed? Can you easily contact the creator?
  • And last but far from least, the most important question: Who benefits from the post’s point of view ? What are their relationships to the post’s creator? (Hello, Russian trollbots!). Don’t just follow the money. Follow the power dynamics, too.

I could go on but you get the idea. Please share your reactions in the comments.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Consumer Issues, Environment, media-general, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , ,

Do you have seven minutes to watch a sweet film about a dolphin rescuing a dog who is swept off a boat in shark territory? (If you don’t, you can skip some great dolphin footage and start 2 minutes, 20 seconds in, as the dog goes over the stern, and cut off at 4:45, after the animals have made their sweet farewells. Surely, you have 2 minutes and 25 seconds you can spare. And feel free to turn off the sound. It’s just music, and repetitious music at that.) Makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over, right? Personally, I love videos about interspecies friendship, and I’ve seen a bunch of them over many years.

Screenshot from the video of a dolphin rescuing a dog.
Screenshot from the video of a dolphin rescuing a dog.

Now: do you think this is an actual event, a recreated actual event, or fiction? Why? Please share your thoughts in the comments before reading further. Then scroll down and continue to see my answer–and my reasons.

 

 

Now read my take on it:

I’m pretty sure it’s fiction. And I’m concerned that there’s no text with this film, and no credits at the end–in other words, no accountability. I have no objection to filming heartwarming works of fiction. I love that sort of thing, from Frank Capra’s “You Can’t Take it With You” to “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Life Is Beautiful” and “Jude”. But all of these are clearly marketed as story, not fact.

In my opinion, this film is specifically designed to make most viewers believe this was a real event.

And I have trouble with that. I feel its “story-ness” should be disclosed, and we should also know who produced the film. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first, here’s how I reached my conclusion.

Why You Can’t Necessarily Trust Your Eyes

Because I’m trained in journalism and have worked for decades in marketing, I ask hard questions about what is and isn’t real, what people’s motivations or agendas are, and how to filter information based on what’s really going on versus what the speaker or writer or photographer or filmmaker is trying to get you to think is going on.

If you watch any crime movies from the 1930s through 1950s, there’s a pretty good chance that the detective will turn to the suspect and shout, “photos don’t lie!” But here’s the thing: THAT is a lie. Photos can lie in what they choose to include or not. A famous example: the close-ups of a statue of Saddam Hussein being felled by a jubilant (and apparently huge) Baghdad crowd were discredited by wide-angle shots showing only a couple of hundred people, many of them US soldiers rather than locals. The close-ups were propaganda, not truth, even though the photos themselves were real and unretouched. And even in the 1950s–for that matter, even in the 1850s–there was a whole industry around photo alteration. This was true in film as well; ever hear the expression “left on the cutting room floor”? The technologies of photo editing and film editing go back to the earliest days of photography and filmmaking.

In today’s digital world, tools like Photoshop and video editors have transformed those doable but difficult tasks into something incredibly easy, and only an expert will be able to tell. So in this era, we can never trust that a picture or a movie is accurate unless we were there when it was shot. Thus, unfortunately, we need to bring a certain amount of critical analysis when we view any video, any photograph.

And through this lens (pun intended, I confess), when I watch this video, I immediately discard any idea that we’re watching real-time true-story footage.

Why?

7 Reasons Why I Think It’s a Fake

  1. It’s waaaay too slick. This is professionally shot and carefully edited, by a skilled camera operator using high-resolution equipment, tripods, and lighting to produce footage as good technically as anything coming out of Hollywood. In real life, this would have been shot on a cell phone, held in a hand that shook at least a little. It’s on a moving boat, after all.
  2. Much of the footage is underwater or behind the boat the dog was riding, yet no other boats are visible.
  3. When the dog slips off the deck into the water, no people are around. If anyone were filming an actual event, we’d see some kind of rescue attempt, and we certainly would not see the boat blithely continuing away, stranding the pet. At least the crew of the videography boat would get involved.
  4. It’s just too convenient that cameras happened to focus on all the key places. And yes, that’s a plural. There was one camera focused on the boat deck and later on the swimming dog, and at least one other one focused underwater at the dolphin and shark.
  5. If the shark were really close enough to attack the dog, it would have gone after the dolphin too. Giant sharks don’t care much about “collateral damage.”
  6. It strains credulity that the boat would be waiting, unmoving, in still water, just when the dolphin deposits the dog on the tailgate, considering there are plenty of waves in the dolphin-carries-dog footage.
  7. I’m suspicious of the site it’s on, something called TopBuzz, which I’ve never heard of. I didn’t notice at first when I clicked the link from a Facebook message that it had a monstrously complex tracking URL, too. Uh-oh! I’ve stripped those tracking codes out of the URL as here. To its credit, it doesn’t try to get me to watch all sorts of salacious videos, and a search for complaints brought up only questions about its relationships with content creators, not viewers. And I checked for viruses after having the page open for several hours while writing this, and it came up clean.

I’m also skeptical that this is a later recreation of a true event, although I’d grant that maybe a 10 percent chance. Why? Because much of the footage “documented” events with no witnesses. Unless one of the human crew is fluent in either dog or dolphin language, neither party could have told the story. And the dog might not even know about the shark threat. Certainly the humans in the boat that drove away would have no idea. Since we don’t know who produced this or how to get in touch with them, we have no way of knowing.

In Part 2 of this post, I talk about the deeper reasons why this matters, the implications for our democracy, and some guidance on protecting yourself against being hooked by false messages.  Click this paragraph to read it.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics: General, Green Business, localism/locavore, media-general, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m up to the part of Naomi Klein?‘s This Changes Everything where she talks about the interconnectedness of geolocalized people’s movements opposing “extreme/reckless resource extraction” (e.g., tar-sands oil, fracked gas and oil, mountaintop removal for coal). She dubs the movement “Blockadia.” She also casts very appropriate darts, just before this section, at the crazy idea that we should avoid climate catastrophe by throwing so much pollution into the sky that the sun can’t get through. Talk about a cure worse than the disease! Hard to believe some scientists are actually serious about this.

She points out that these technologies are far more intrusive and polluting and resource-intensive than the old-style mines and wells—and that the opposition often parses out as saving our water from destruction, modeling around the Precautionary Principle of not unleashing technologies we can’t control, and using the positive framing of protecting our water (very similar to the way I framed Save the Mountain 15 years ago—the successful movement to keep a nasty housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US). I have said for many years that we have plenty of substitutes for oil, but if the water is gone (or unusable), so are we.

Like everything I’ve ever read by Klein, the book is impeccably researched—including interviewing primary sources directly and even suffering through climate-denier conferences and similar events in person; pursuit of the truth can be painful, sometimes.

And she isn’t afraid to go after the movement’s sacred cows. She scolds some very prominent environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy for betraying their core mission in the service of their large extraction-industry funders—even putting an oil well into one of its nature preserves, where the bird it was set up to protect can no longer be found. And she finds Sir Richard Branson’s proclamations of concern for the planet to be at odds with his actions. (I’m hoping she’s wrong about him. Even if she turns out to be right—and she might well be—he has certainly used his considerable charisma to educate the public on climate change.)

Environmentalists need to take these accusations very seriously. We need to know who we fund, and what they do with the money. And we definitely need to build the movement that insists upon meaningful action to stave off catastrophic climate change—which would have been much easier 20 or 30 years ago, but, I believe, is still possible now.

However, I break with Klein over solutions. She has essentially no faith in the business community or in technology, and she seems to think that any time an environmental group partners with a polluter, that group is sullied. Maybe I’m less of a purist than she is. But I’ve just finished another wonderful book, The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge et al. Reading the two together was very interesting, because Senge’s book is full of great examples of NGOs and corporations working together to tackle problems in a very meaningful way, while Klein’s is the counterpoint of these partnerships leading to a failure to address the deeper issues.

I also read almost daily reports in the sustainability press (GreenBiz, Sustainable Brands, Triple Pundit, 3BL Media, Rocky Mountain Institute’s Solutions Journal, and Guardian Sustainable Business, to name a few) of the amazing small-scale, eco-friendly technology innovations that give me hope. And I’m painfully aware that we knew all the way back in 1983-84 how to build a beautiful, modern, net-zero-energy home even in extreme environments, and that our failure to make this the norm is inexcusable.

Technology doesn’t have to be about extreme extraction, GMOs designed to absorb more pesticides, nuclear power, or blocking the sun. Science and engineering can actually be the climate movement’s friends. Unlike the crazy unproven schemes requiring billions or trillions of dollars and dozens of years to ramp up, these innovations often combine deep conservation, greater efficiency in harnessing clean renewable energy, and even the fascinating science of biomimcry to slash energy use, carbon footprint, and waste—right now.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, propaganda Tagged with , , , , ,
Old Movie Camera: How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today's?
How much real news went through these cameras? And how much goes through today’s?

When I’m in airports, fitness centers, and other places that force-feed TV news, I’m always astonished that anyone takes it seriously. Even in the 60s when they had real news staffs, it was so superficial. I read somewhere that an entire 1-hour newscast transcript would only fill a couple of columns on a page of the NY Times.

These days, it’s far worse than “if it bleeds, it leads.” Murder, mayhem, celebrity gossip, and an astonishingly small amount of actual news, and even less serious analysis. And those are the serious networks. Add in a serious case of propaganda and distortion and you can’t be surprised at how little most Americans understand their world, if they accept what’s fed to them by the medium they’ve chosen to “consume” the news.

Of course, the good news is that anyone who wants to educate themselves now has unlimited choices from around the world. My favorite newspaper these days is London’s The Guardian. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actual paper copy.

In the 1980s, I used to subscribe to a magazine called World Press Review, which featured reportage on the same story from 8 or 10 different papers around the world; it was like a one-stop course in media literacy and the nature of 1) matching message to audience, and 2) shaping the audience through the message. Since I made (and continue to make) my career as a marketer and a journalist, these were crucial lessons.

However, it was a monthly, and the stories were at least three months old by the time they got to my mailbox. Of course, technology has passed it by now, and I don’t miss it; we can easily get the same effect by viewing the same story on NPR, Fox News, Al Jazeera-English, the New York Times, Paris Match (which Google will even translate for you, sort of), and your local newspaper.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Diversity, Media Ethics, Publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Is this crazy? The News Journal, Wilmington, Delaware’s Gannett-owned major newspaper, offered blogger Kristopher Brooks a reporter job. He blogged about it. And the paper withdrew the offer—before Brooks even started work.

The termination came just one day after Jim Romensko, whose blog is must-reading in the journalism world, posted a story about it.

As both a business ethics expert and as a journalist/blogger who has been writing news and features for more than 40 years, I heard the story and looked at the press release (linked above). It was a bit over the top and certainly at odds with the mainstream journalism pretense of objectivity.

But cause to withdraw the offer? Not even close. One presumes that they knew going in they were getting an outspoken, opinionated *blogger* who would be quite likely to do something like that. They didn’t hire a straightlaced just-the-facts reporter. So unless they told him upfront, don’t blog about this or run it by us before you post, from a business ethics viewpoint, they crossed the line by withdrawing the offer.

From the view of the suits who run the paper, I totally understand why they wouldn’t want a perceived “loose cannon” or someone with that big an ego running around and injecting himself into the stories he writes. For every Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe who injects himself into the narrative, thousands of mainstream reporters toil in near-anonymity, writing pieces that only a seasoned analyst would be able to recognize as theirs—that’s what journalists are trained to do.

But if that’s what the paper was looking for, the editorial team that hired him should have run both sides of Brooks—the anonymous mainstream reporter and the flamboyant blogger—by the suits before making the offer. Once the offer was made, it should have been honored, barring a much more outrageous violation of journalistic norms (like being discovered making up sources).

Also—I say this without any knowledge of the paper’s diversity and hiring practices, just wondering out loud—I do wonder if a white reporter would have received the same treatment.

The stated justification (I’d call it an excuse) was that Brooks used the paper’s logo and quoted his offer letter without permission. If you believe that, I’ve got a nice antique bridge to sell you across the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. All they would have had to do was call him and ask him to take down the logo and not quote the offer. The first would take about 20 seconds, the second, a few minutes of changing quotes into paraphrases.

Wearing my journalist hat, I went and had a look at the rest of Brooks’s blog. Not surprisingly, he frequently lifts logos and other materials, as he comments on them—so the paper does not have any plausible excuse about not knowing he would use the logo. This is very common occurrence in the blogosphere; many bloggers comment on other news stories, and using a graphic element from the original story happens constantly. As a blogger (‘scuse me while I switch hats), I’m commenting on a story right now. It’s not my style to borrow the masthead where the story appeared, but really, is there a qualitative difference? In the blogosphere, use of a logo does not imply endorsement by the owner of the logo, so what’s the big deal?

Brooks also blogs frequently on the stories he covers as a journalist, and his role in them. Gannett cannot use the excuse of ignorance. Any competent hiring committee would have looked at the blog during the evaluation process.

Want more on blogs vs. traditional journalism? In my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I discuss business ethics, out-of-the-box public relations, blogs, and the new journalism climate ion some detail.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Unbelievably stupid quote from the agrochemical trade group Mid America Croplife Association, whose members include the likes of Monsanto, Dow, and other manufacturers of farm chemicals (oh, and can you spot the two grammar errors in those three sentences?):

Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.

This quote was in an e-mail to the group’s supporters, enclosing a classic-PR letter to Michelle Obama (or “Mrs. Barack Obama,” as the letter calls her–and for which one blogger took the authors to task), apparently authored by Bonnie McCarvel, Executive Director. You can see both MACA’s letter to Michelle Obama and the cover note here.

As a long-time believer in organic agriculture/sustainability and as someone who eats out of my family’s organic garden and a local organic CSA farm all summer and fall, I was all set to do a rant on the idiocy of this statement. But before jumping in, I Googled around, and decided to focus on some other lessons; that one’s been done about 24,000 times on the blogosphere already.

Lesson 1: Never say or write anything that will come back to haunt you. As MACA found out, you can’t assume an internal memo will stay internal. so say what you mean, mean what you say, and be prepared to back up your assertions.

Lesson 2: Backlash is quick and can be humiliating. Numerous petition campaigns have sprung up supporting Michelle’s desire to grow organic, and the already-shaky credibility of the pesticide industry might take a big hit.

Lesson 3: Old-school PR is no longer enough in a world where journalists no longer stand as intermediaries and gatekeepers between press releases and the public. From a technical PR standpoint, the letter MACA sent to Michelle Obama is quite good: full of reassuring language, on-the-surface well-reasoned arguments about the importance of agriculture, etc. But in a busy, harried world, it doesn’t get to the point; without the controversy, the recipient might not have even figured out (on the quick 30-second scan) that the letter was advocating chemical agriculture. Which hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from picking apart every nuance.

Lesson 4: Controversy and stupidity are just as sexy to the blogosphere as to traditional media. For all the carefully worded letter to Michelle Obama, what stands out (and is getting most of the attention) is the dumb quote in the supporter cover letter about organic gardening making them shudder.

Lesson 5: If the mainstream media wants to stay relevant, it needs to be visible. On three different Google searches on this story, including one for the exact quote from the cover letter, I did not see a single mainstream media result in the top three pages. The closest was a non-journalist’s blog quoted (apparently by a content-scraping robot) on the Wall Street Journal site, which was #28. Blogs and newsletters about gardening, sustainability, and progressive politics were all over this story, but the voice of traditional journalism was not being heard. I was actually beginning to wonder if the whole thing was an urban legend, until I finally tracked down the actual letter, on a local-foods blog. As newspapers are folding every week, as electronic news organizations are laying off staff, people will be asking why we need these trained and theoretically unbiased filters, if they’re AWOL on important stories (or if not AWOL, hidden deep under a rock). This will be a critical question. I’m of the strong opinion that we still need journalists to keep politicians and corporations honest, but journalism’s lack of presence on this and other stories makes that a much tougher argument.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail