Benjamin Webb is a wannabe tyrant, why public relations is viewed badly and the BBC is crazy

Dear Benjamin Webb of Deliberate PR, as per the BBC,

The reason why PR executives have such a bad reputation is because everyone knows they exist entirely to manipulate people.  Which is what your article is - sheer manipulation, trying to pretend that their job isn't to make us pay too much for shit we do not need is somehow for the good of society.  Which is bullshit and we mostly know it, even as we continue to be addicted to it.

It does not matter how many times manipulative PR fuckwits such as yourself assert that mass media puts the powers in the hands of the majority.  Nonsense.  The majority has no say whatsoever in what advertisements are thrust upon it.  No one says to me, "Hey, Chris, what do you want to see on that billboard?"  A small group of rich, mostly white guys (such as yourself) in offices in places like New York and London decide what advertisements we see, that all of us see.  They do not poll us for our opinions, they shape their advertisements to manipulate us for the purposes of greater profit for their clients.  We know this.

Benjy even quotes Edward Bernays, who said in his book, okay, this is it's real title, I'm not making this up, and Bernays is considered the inventor of modern advertising . . . the book's name is Propaganda, and Bernays writes, "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

(This is not taken out of context.  Bernays says this stuff all the time, about how it's the duty of rich guys to manipulate public opinion for their own good.)

Benjy goes say that Bernays didn't consider this corrosive to society.  Well, that's the problem.  Sure, Bernays applied it to helping the NAACP but the idea that it's okay to have a group of people out there who form an "invisible government" isn't an anti-democratic idea is the problem because it is massively, intrusively and obviously anti-democratic.  That Bernays, himself, used it for good doesn't mean it's a good idea to have a shadow government manipulating the masses and there are, of course, TONS of examples of PR being used malevolently.  Because I don't like bringing up the Nazis so much, though any discussion about PR and shaping political consciousness is truncated without talking about Goebbels (whom, I note, you do not mention, Benjy), I feel no trouble at all in bringing up the Iraqi War, which was sold to the American people using big Madison Avenue PR firms, based on lies and fear-mongering. 

Basically anyone can come up with their own examples of how PR leeches manipulate people because it is the common experience of people living in industrialized nations to be bombarded with a constant stream of propaganda, er, I mean, PR.  How can one say that the PR firms that are selling us lies about, say, global climate change aren't the enemies of democracy simply because there are other firms saying the exact opposite?  That just makes you mercenaries, which is a real insult - that you'll do anything for money, no matter how destructive.

Then this thick-witted moron says, okay, again, I'm not making this shit up, "If anything, PR now needs to go back into the shadows, which probably sounds more sinister than intended." 

Here's a hint, Benjy, if you end your paragraph admitting that sounds fucked up, there's a pretty good chance that it is, in fact, fucked up.  It sounds exactly as sinister as it is and your failure to realize this is a giant part of the problem.

Benjamin Webb, the thrust of your article is this - stripped of all it's manipulation and ego.  You say that advertising should return to the shadows to better implement Bernays' desire to form a hidden, unseen government that directs democracy, and you say that modern technology will help PR guys do this.  Yes, exactly, that is why we hate you.

As to the BBC, well, if this is a subversive attempt to show what a terrible group of people PR people are, good work!  I don't think that, though.  You're not, precisely, a subversive paper.

So, in the more likely event that this is serious, shame on you.  Seriously.  What editor reads this and goes, "He has a good point.  Maybe we should throw out democracy and give our government into the shadowy tyranny of PR flacks."  It's a position that is so stupid, so crazy and bizarre and grotesque, that . . . well, okay, it is of a piece with the other stuff you write.  Touche.

But, still an example of why editors are fucking jokes if this sort of thing passes muster at what is thought to be one of the best news agencies in the world.  Just absolutely bizarre and shocking, except it is also of a piece with their clumsy editorial policy of cowardice.

More BBC nonsense - their inability to understand what "murder" is

The BBC has a story, "Leaked report reveals Pakistan failures on Bin Laden", that says something everyone knows - a lot of people in Pakistan helped protect Bin Laden.  Duh.

But one of the things they say is, "A version of the report leaked to al-Jazeera says the killing of Bin Laden by US forces was a 'criminal act of murder' ordered by the US president."

Well, yes, when you send in your special forces into a country we are supposed to be allies with and those people then shoot an old man dead, yes, that's a criminal act of murder.  That's just fact.  It doesn't matter of it's Bin Laden or a sweet little old lady - the US President ordered troops into a country we are supposed to be allied with and they killed someone.  The designation of "enemy combatant" - even were it not a farcical term - does not give Obama the legal right to order executions in a foreign country with whom we are at peace.  What the US did is, indisputably, a criminal act of murder if you're actually bothering to go by the normal standards of international law.

(If you don't see that, do a little thought experiement and imagine how outraged people in the US would be if China send commandos into Nebraska where they then killed a murderer of Chinese people.  We wouldn't care if the guy was guilty.  It would be an intolerable violation of our sovereignty.  Everyone knows that China has no right to send soldiers into the United States to kill people, no matter who that person is, no matter if the Chinese government had designated that person an enemy of the people.  Just because Pakistan can't retaliate doesn't change the law.  It was just as illegal and immoral for us to kill Bin Laden in Pakistan as it would be for Chinese soldiers to kill an admittedly guilty person on US soil.)

The inability of newspapers to say things that are obvious and true is quite amazing.

BBC headline: "Egyptian interim leader calls for calm". Translation: "Forget the coup that happened and accept your new overlords".

The language of newspapers is, to me, fascinating.  So, the Egyptian Freedom and Justice Party, with nearly half the seats in the Egyptian Parliament, "has accused the army of staging a coup".  To me, that's fascinating.  The BBC isn't calling the coup a coup, it's just reporting that some people in Egypt are calling it a coup.  Why the hesitation to call a spade a spade?  When the army tosses a constitution in the garbage, arrests a legally elected head-of-state and then puts their own stooge in power, that's a coup.  That's pretty much the dictionary definition of a coup.  But they can't call it that, they merely "report" that people in Egypt are calling it a coup.

Then, in a move that stunned, well, it didn't stun me, the Egyptian army committed a massacre.  But the BBC asks, "Who fired first?"  How about this, BBC, who fucking cares?  Even if the official story is true and the protesters tried to charge machinegun nests to overcome the Presidential Guard barracks - where the deposed leader of Egypt was reputed to be staying - the army is still the bad guys because the committed a coup!  That fact, that illegal, constitution destroying fact, justifies action against the tyrants who deposed a legally elected leader.  Even if the army was attacked, by fighting back against people moving to secure the legal President of Egypt merely worsens their crimes.  That they shot kids in the process is just icing on the cake.

The the absurdity increases.  There are just layers of newspeak going on.  The White House has said it is not aligned with any political movement in Egypt but cutting military aid to Egypt is not in US interests.  So . . . America isn't supporting any political movement, just the Egyptian army . . . ?  It's bafflingly stupid. As statements go it's literally self-contradictory, it literally contradicts itself in the same statement, but the BBC does not deign to notice the absurdity of what the White House said or what it reported.

And this is one of the most respected new sources in the world!  But they refuse to use common language to describe events, they dutifully report on things that make absolutely no sense without also reporting that it makes no fucking sense.  That Washington is spewing out statements that make no sense is, itself, a story, guys!  It's a story that Washington is lying, saying one thing ("We don't support any political group in Egypt!") while doing another ("Giving weapons to the very army that performed the coup.").  That's relevant, but unreported.

It's fascinating and black humor all at the same time.

The BBC's offfensive lines

It happened, again, a story so bafflingly stupid that it makes my toes curl.  In the BBC, there is a story, "The offensive line", that is about crime and NFL players.  In it, they conclude - mind you, conclude - that because the arrest rate of NFL players is 1 in 47 (instead of 1 in 6 for their age and gender cohort) that NFL players behalf considerably better than the average person.

At no point does anyone consider, even briefly, any intervening hypothesis as to why NFL players should be arrested 1/7th as often as men of their age.  Such as, perhaps, that NFL players are not likely to be arrested because they're professional sports figures, not to mention rich.

I grant, that sort of questioning requires both the ability to ask questions and the desire to do research, but both seem in slight demand in newspapers.  Still, the idea that professional athletes, along with other rich and famous people, are given numerous breaks by law enforcement isn't a real reach, not to mention the ability to hide many crimes that comes along with wealth - when you live in a big house with good soundproofing on a large lot and all your neighbors do the same, well, not a lot of calls get made when you disturb the peace . . . or beat the shit out of your girlfriend.  (All NFL players are rich.  Their base pay is around $400K a year.)

I mean, every time I read a biography of a sports figure, I'm just stunned at the crazy shit they get away with, shit I am quite sure would get me arrested for everything from rape to assault if I did it.  Likewise, my friends who have been college athletes just have crazy stories of fights and crazy parties where the cops came by but, well, it's the college football team, so they just got off with a warning.  So, both in sports biographies and according to my personal experience, yeah, athletes get off real light from the authorities.

So, it isn't reaching to say that perhaps there's a reason why NFL players aren't arrested as much as their poorer, less famous cohorts.  Yea, verily, an obvious reason.  But why bother actually researching something.  It's much easier to find some raw data and write a couple of hundred words off the top of your head.

Bad news and the case of Morsi in Egypt

Generally speaking, the new reporting, newspapers, news TV and news blogs are bad.  I don't delude myself into thinking it was ever any good, generally.  Newspapers have always been owned by people who shaped their papers according to their interests - from William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch, from the New York Times to the BBC.

The BBC is where I am starting this little adventure.  In Egypt, they have had a lot of anti-democratic protests that have lead to the Egyptian army ousting the legally elected President of Egypt, suspending the Egyptian Constitution and installing a stooge.  As of me writing this, the BBC, nor any news source I've seen, has called this an anti-democratic military coup that demonstrates the lack of both democracy and the rule of law in Egypt.  The Egyptian army is now in the business of deposing civilian leaders as they see fit.  Egypt is a de facto military oligarchy, a banana republic, with elections and the rule of law a farce.

For some reason, the BBC - my primary news source - doesn't seem to recognize the banana republic nature of Egypt or the generally recognized belief that military oligarchic dictatorships are horrible forms of government even when they seem to be supporting populist causes.  That support is entirely coincidental.  Almost always, military oligarchies end up in civil war as either they shift from supporting populist causes to opposing them for their own gain and/or the colonels who run the military carve out their own private fiefdoms and start squabbling with each other.  The fact that Egypt is quite likely set on a course of protracted civil strife and/or warlordism is simply not brought up because, I think, the narrative that the recent populist uprisings in the Middle East - the so-called Arab Spring - are essentially benevolent and democratic in character, rather than the horrible clusterfuck that has made Egypt, in whole, an even worse place than when under more stable forms of dictatorship.

It's like when we in the West don't like a government, we have this incredibly, just shockingly naive view that any revolution is a good one.  Which is why in Afghanistan we supported al-Qaida and the Taliban, why we supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, why we supported the brutal Shah of Iran in murdering Mossedegh, why we propped Manuel Noriega's rule in Panama, the list just goes on and on.  We think that because we don't like a ruler that anyone resisting that rule must be a-okay.

We're currently making the same mistake in Syria, too.  Is Assad a tyrant?  Yes.  But there's a lot of reason to think the rebels are every bit as tyrannical as Assad and anti-West.  Oh, plus, it could start another cold war with Russia and China.  But here we are, supporting crazy religious zealots against a secular tyrant because we dislike Syria's persistent autonomy and it's unwillingness to line up as a client state of the US.

Likewise, we're praising the Egyptian army's impending warlordism and Egypt's civil strife even as the supposed Arab Spring turns more and more into an Arab Winter as sectarian violence grips the area.  Even as religious hostilities in Iraq increase, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan highlights how little power the Kabul government has, even as our missile strikes into Pakistan continue to destabilize that country socially and politically, as war rages in Syria, as demonstrations get violent in Turkey, the newspapers are essentially reporting that the destruction of the rule of law and the rule of colonels in a banana republic in Egypt are a good thing.

Reporting sucks today - the BBC editors and writers should be fired

I read two fairly horrible articles on BBC.com.  The first was "Big rise in new 'legal highs' - UN Drug Report" and the second was "Did our brains evolve to foolish follow celebrities?"

In the first about legal highs, the article is about the spread of designer drugs for whom no legislation exists and how the chemistry of drug designers works faster than law enforcement in criminalizing them.  The article goes on to say that this is bad because the new designer drugs are dangerous.  This is stupid in at least two ways.  One: it takes as a given that getting high, in any fashion at all, should be illegal.  Two: the facts are wrong.

Now, why should it be taken that getting high should be illegal?  It is untrue, of course.  We are allowed to get high, legally, with alchohol and nicotine (I should, perhaps, add caffiene to that list).  These things are legal and regulated and they get you high.  Alcohol, in particular, has the power to get you as fucked up as any illegal drug -- the characteristic of the high is different than, say, LSD, but you can get yourself totally wasted by alcohol to a similar extent as LSD.  While nicotine lacks that kind of potential in the way the industrialized world generally uses it (though if you're fond of a hookah, you can get pretty goddamn smashed, I should add), clearly we are not systematically opposed to intoxication.  So why should we presume all other forms of intoxication are bad?  Yet, in a totally unspoken way, the article does exactly that.

Afterward, it just says that designer drugs are unsafe.  Really?  Let's think this through.

(One of the unsafe drugs mentioned is "bath salts", which is just sloppy journalism.  Almost no one takes bath salts because the high isn't very good and the crash is quite bad.  But after that guy freaked out here in Miami had started eating a dude's face, there was a bath salts scare.  Bath salts had nothing to do with the attack, but once a good scare is started it's good for sensationalism to bring it up.  Who cares if people don't actually use bath salts?  Bath salts are bad!)

Alcohol and nicotine can kill you.  In the US, alone, the CDC says that 60,000 die every year because they drink too much.  The CDC says that cigarette smoking causes twenty percent of deaths in America, 443,000.  Fifty thousand of those deaths are from second hand smoke -- fifty thousand non-smokers die every year because of cigarettes.

In 2010, a study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs ranked how dangerous various drugs were on a scale of 1 to 100, taking into account personal harm, harm to others, costs to society.  Alcohol got a 72, the highest score - this is above heroin at 55 and crack cocaine at 54.  Tobacco was right under cocaine at 25.  Cannabis rated a 21.  Mephedrone - one of the "dangeorus" designer drugs - rated a 12.  Ecstasy rates a 9.  LSD is down at around 7 and magic mushrooms a 5.

So, most illegal drugs are safer than most legal ones.  The dangerous mephedrone, meow meow in the article, is . . . pretty goddamn safe.  Safer than cannabis.  Ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms?  Single digits.

I question the report in several serious ways.  There is no real indication that cannabis harms the user.  So why does it rate above, y'know, in the same ballpark as cocaine and amphetamines?  And how does nicotine, causing so many deaths, rate lower than alcohol?  So, far from perfect.

Yet, many of the drugs we thing are dangerous - mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy - are very . . . well, safe compared to things that are already legal.  And mephedrone, one of the drugs the reporter specifically mentions, is much safe than the legal drugs of tobacco and alcohol. 

In short: there is no reason to presume designer drugs are dangerous.  That's just pure sensationalism created out of a fairly bizarre idea that being high on anything other than booze or cigarettes is somehow worse than being high on booze and cigarettes.  It's also just plain wrong and clearly no one fact-checked the article, so it's a failure on the editorial level, too, for a newspaper that is supposed to report facts.

The second bad article is about the effects of prestige on society.  The article opines that we should not care what underwear David Beckham wears - that Beckham's social prestige makes us care more than we "should" for extraneous things like his fashion choices.

What the article fails to really address is that this isn't happenstance.  We care what underwear David Beckham wears because someone make a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to sell us Calvin Klein briefs.  Left to our own devices, most of us would never, ever learn, or care to learn, what briefs Beckham wears and care about his prestige in his area of legitimate expertise - soccer.

The use of the prestige of celebrity to sell us things is not a maladaptation to the modern world.  It is an adaptation that is being consciously, actively subverted by advertisers to sell us crap we do not need.  Without the influence of advertisers, would the prestige of celebrity be so odious?  Is it bad to hold up David Beckham in considerable prestige due to his really incredible athletic skills?  Or to hold up Beyonce for her skill as an entertainer?  But what happens is this prestige, this false authority, is being repackaged by advertisers as a means to manipulate us.  It isn't just happenstance.  Someone is doing it.

When you fail to mention something so important in an article about how prestige is used to influence us - that there are a group of people consciously manipulating this psychological reality - then you've failed as a journalist.

Then I stopped reading the news because I remembered how horrible it is, generally.