(Untitled)
I've been thinking about spin and misrepresentation. And now I'm going to write about it. Wit' mah fingerz!
The recent Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was a 90 minute debunking of the concerns that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are heavily responsible for global climate change. It was presented and polished in a very ( Read more... )
The recent Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was a 90 minute debunking of the concerns that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are heavily responsible for global climate change. It was presented and polished in a very ( Read more... )
Now you know why all big companies insist that their employees never, ever, speak to the media: everything goes through PR experts who have tame* journalists, and who know how to play rival media outlets against one another.
That's good advice for private individuals, too. Never, ever, speak to the media. If you don't have the money to pay a PR agency, for God's sake keep your head down and hope that you're to small and uninteresting for the media to destroy your life with lies and sensationalism.
It surprises people, that I am totally bored with accusations that politicians use 'spin'... You do what you can to get the truth out, as it suits your case, and try not to get manipulated into lying - or into some statement that can be portrayed as a lie with suitable recutting and selective quoting. As the learned professor has discovered, nothing that any public figure says on any matter of substance is ever reported fully, and it is always distorted to suit some media baron's (or some PR agent's clients') political and commercial agenda. It wouldn't be reported at all if there was no political or commercial advantage in doing so.
If you're lucky, whatever it is that you said coincides with someone's agenda: but that, too, is a poisoned chalice because it might not suit someone else's, and they will start briefing journalists against you.
* Read: corrupt. They are being fed articles that they reprint verbatim as if they wrote the stuff themselves, in return for information, 'entertainment', and occasionally hard cash.
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Ah, but your blog is about what you think. And it's worth quoting: expect some traffic.
As for what I think... Thank F*** these guys weren't around in the 1970's when the dangers of smoking came out. Many people are alive and healthy today, who would be diseased, dying or dead if, in those days, tobacco companies had the budget, the media access, the propaganda skills, and the pervasive ability to distort the scientific agenda that 21st-century Big Oil is deploying today.
The world has changed - been changed, deliberately - and there is no impartial source of news and worse, no impartial scientific opinion: the few and fortunate scientists or doctors who can speak out in the public interest without fear of losing their research budget now face a megadollar media, political and scientific campaign to undermine their work. If they are not co-opted and protected by a rival political lobby then they will be hammered flat - and such allegiances are in any case the end of their scientific impartiality.
In such a world, even the educated and the patient must doubt their beliefs - we are little better-off than the ill-informed and hysterical fools who are fed their opinions by propagandists and the popular press.
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