Random blog posts about research in political communication, how people learn or don't learn from the media, why it all matters -- plus other stuff that interests me. It's my blog, after all. I can do what I want.
Showing posts with label public relations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public relations. Show all posts
Okay, this chart below says it all. I trended newspapers and television in books scoured by Google's new ngram viewer. It's not a great reproduction, this image, but as you can see the red (television) intersects with newspapers (blue) in the late 1960s, at least in mentions in books scanned by Google.
Okay, that was fun. What else can we do? My colleagues down the hall will love this one. Below I look at journalism (blue) versus public relations (red). I find it fascinating that PR cranked it up in the 1950s and 1960s, in book mentions, and then slipped back again. Why? Some smart PR professor will no doubt let us know, or maybe do some research to explain this odd burst of attention that later slips back.
I love The Atlantic. I get an actual hard copy in the mail every month -- ya know, the kind with ink on paper. Brief piece out on what'll happen to journalists fleeing a dying biz, often into PR, and whether this a good thing.
A NYT story on passalong pr (my term). It goes like this. Coal producers and power companies have a trade group that hires a lobbying firm that hires a different lobbying firm that has a brainiac staffer who sends fake letters to lawmakers pretending that they're from nonprofit groups opposed to climate change laws. The brainiac gets fired, we're told, thus absolving anyone else of responsibility. So you pr guys out there, remember to hire someone to hire someone who then gets some low-level schmuck to fake stuff and then fall on his or her sword. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing, especially when you make stuff up in order to persuade people.
More PR -- Kinda
PR, or lobbying, or trying to influence opinion, whatever it's called there's also a good story about pharmaceutical company hiring ghostwriters to gin up fake research reviews to say good things about their hormone replacement therapy. This is about as bad as it gets in academe, faking research or at least faking a review of the research. It came out as part of a lawsuit.
Third Person Effect and Driving While Yakking
Summit coming soon on driving while distracted, the new phrase to describe talking or texting on that annoying cell phone while trying not to kill someone while driving.
So how the heck do I work the third-person effect in all this? First, a brief definition: The third-person effect means we think media content doesn't affect us, but it does affect others. In a way this is reported in a story today about the potential of new laws aimed to stopping people from driving while, yup, distracted. Deep in the story, a survey by AAA that found "58 percent of drivers consider other motorists talking on a cellphone to be a very serious threat" and 87 percent think texting is dangerous. But ... and here's the third-person ... 67 percent said they had yakked on a phone while driving, and 21 percent had texted. Sheesh. To summarize, do as I say, not as I do.
A Story NOT from the NYTimes
Okay, the stuff above was drawn from today's NYTimes so I feel obligated to draw something from another source just so I can pretend I'm a balanced, reasoned, Renaissance kind of guy. In this one, it kinda sums up the military's relationship with social networking. This piece here says that while the Marines have banned Twitter and Facebook and other sites for one year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will continue to Tweet, thank you very much. Wall Street Journal version here. Below, a video version of the story:
Remember those old models of the molecule? Protons were positive, electrons were negative, and neutrons were undecided, usually all in balance to create a stable molecule.
Now think of an attitude in the same way, except rarely is it in balance. For most of us, any attitude object -- a person, a place, a company, nearly anything at all -- comes with positive, negative, and neutral bits of information, the result rarely if ever coming out equal. If I dislike Dancing with the Stars (and I do), then I'll list more negatives than positives.
This is where attitudes meet knowledge. And this is also the realm of PR.
As PR guru Karen Russell would happily note, I'm not a PR guy, I'll never be a PR guy, and PR is all the better for it, so I'll keep my PR discussion to a minimum and instead focus on attitudes and knowledge and how difficult it can be to change an attitude through the use of information. It comes down to this -- misperception is awfully hard to change.
Let me give you a recent example.
During the recent presidential campaign there was a rumor out there that Barrack Obama was Muslim, despite all information and facts to the contrary. Who stuck to that belief? People who already had reason to believe the worst about Obama, mostly conservative Christians and hardcore Republicans. The attitude overwhelmed knowledge. Indeed, putting out "true" information will sway some people but not those who are already attitudinally predisposed to be against you -- which is why I'd make a lousy PR person. It'd drive me nuts.
There are ways to attack this, I suppose. One is parody and humor, to make fun of the misperception. That's a tricky tactic and it seems to work better for younger people than for older people. I'm sure there are differences in the kind of client you represent, both in their openness to such a dangerous strategy and whether it'd really work or not. Some companies would never accept such an approach, simply because it flies against their tradition. Pitch this campaign and you'd be out the door and looking for clients elsewhere.
Simply putting out "true" information, that doesn't work either, not for the hardcore believers, but you might add a few "protons" to their molecular attitude, soften their perception a little, but you have to be careful here too. Attacking the misperception as something held by idiots, that's gonna backfire, or so predicts most theories of persuasion. People love to counterargue, both internally and with others, and by forcing them into this counterargument you often push their attitudes to an even greater extreme. The research on attitude extremity is neat and gets right at this, but it's not something we spend a lot of time looking at in mass comm.
As an aside, we do know from the social psych literature that making someone generate arguments against their position tends to soften their attitudes -- the "walking in someone else's shoes" approach.
So it all comes down to protons, neutrons, and electrons, except in this case we're talking attitudes and not molecules. Each bit and piece of information goes into our head, gets mixed up, and we apply some personal algebraic formula to arrive at an overall attitude. Knowledge can influence attitudes, but more often it goes the other way around, and that makes it damned difficult if you're trying to generate positive attitudes about someone or some thing.
