Calling Kaloogian's Bluff: Had Howard Kaloogian never heard of the blogosphere? That's alright, because the blogosphere had never heard of Howard Kaloogian until a couple of days ago, when the GOP candidate to replace disgraced and imprisoned San Diego congressman Randy Cunningham posted this photo to his website. Kaloogian claimed it was a photo taken on a recent visit to Baghdad, and that it showed (a) how normal life is for many ordinary Iraqis and (b) how the image of the Iraqi capital portrayed by the media is a negative distortion.
Only problem is, the photograph was taken in a suburb of Istanbul. It took progressive bloggers precisely 48 hours to find conclusive photographic evidence of Kaloogian's duplicity. That's the power of the blogosphere. That's also why the notion that posting information directly to the blogosphere is a way of avoiding scrutiny is so ridiculous. Going to the blogosphere invites scrutiny, and that scrutiny is more intense and less forgiving than anything the mainstream media can muster.
Beaupre is Buzzing: This is a long overdue plug for the Beaupre Buzz, one of a handful of PR agency-written newsletters that arrive in my e-mail periodically. Agency president Andy Beaupre produces a good quick read on a handful of topics, including this issue pieces about nightmare CEOs, self-flagellating PR people, and the explosion of corporate podcasting.
Young Accused on Sell Out: Who knew Andrew Young had any credibility left for corporations to co-opt? It was Young's firm—GoodWorks International—that issued a 75-page report exonerating Nike of charges relating to the use of sweatshop labor in its overseas plants shortly before an independent Ernst & Young report found evidence of widespread abuse (a good summary of the problems with Young's whitewash can be found here).
The hiring of Young has the potential to backfire big time if his history as a corporate shill becomes the story.
Failing Grade?: Donald Rumsfeld says he would give the U.S. public affairs effort a "D" or a "D+" and says the country is not doing well in the "battle of ideas." Which raises the question of how we're doing in the battle of guns and bombs and beheadings. What kind of grade would Rumsfeld give the U.S. in that realm? And how much of the failing grade can be attributed to his own advocacy of techniques that undermine any claim that the U.S. is there to build democratic institutions? Needless to say, no one asked those questions.
Did German PR Expert Advocate Lying?: I hope that either something got lost in translation, or that SpinWatch is simply twisting his words, but if there's any truth to this report of a speech by Klaus Kocks—former "chief spin doctor" for the German nuclear industry—then I'd hope to see a swift and uncompromising rebuttal of his remarks by a representative of the Germany PR industry.
Lawyers and PR People: Surely the Jeff Skilling defense team includes someone who understands the media, so how come it was a lawyer and not a public relations professional who wrote a recent letter to Fortune (published in the March 20 edition; I couldn't find it online) lambasting the magazine for assigning Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean to cover the Enron trial?
It may be obvious to Petrocelli, but it isn't obvious to me. Does he believe the book will sell more copies if Skilling is found guilty? That seems improbable. I suspect everyone who's interested has already read it. Is he implying that the two authors will be sued if Skilling is cleared? He must be more knowledgeable about First Amendment law than that.
To which the only appropriate response would appear to be: "Grow up." Is this the first time one of Petrocelli's clients has ever been the subject of media scrutiny? Does he really not understand that reporters are governed by standards dramatically different from those applied in the courtroom?
There may be a perfectly good case to be made that Elkind and McLean's coverage of the trial has been flawed. But all this letter does is make it clear that when it comes to the court of public opinion, at least, this attorney is way out of his depth.
That suggests an idealized view of journalists that I suspect Richard doesn't share. I know I don't. I think journalists are far less likely to "check the validity" of a PR person's claims than they are to simply ignore parts of the story that don't fit with their journalistic agenda. If you think journalists are interested in checking the validity of claims, go back over a few years of coverage of American politics. Reporters don't check claims. They repeat them, regardless of their veracity, and then provide "balance" by repeating the claims of the other side.
But more to the point, Borkowski seems to completely misunderstand the blogosphere, which actually does the fact checking job the mainstream media has abandoned. It's far more difficult to get spin or deception into the blogosphere than it is to get it into the mainstream media. That's the attraction for someone like Edelman: a medium where everyone gets to ask his or her own questions and make up his or her own mind, rather than being fed a story that a journalist has decided is the absolute truth.
It sounds to me as though Borkowski doesn't believe people are smart enough to make up their own minds without a journalist to tell them what to think.
The Post's Continuing Adventures in the Blogosphere: The Washington Post, already under fire from progressives after acting as a de facto public relations firm for the Bush administration for five of the past six years, drew even more criticism last week after it decided to hire a right-wing blogger to further strengthen its conservative credentials.
But the story took an interesting turn after it was revealed that Domenech—previously best know for his vicious personal attack on Coretta Scott King following her death earlier this year—was also a serial plagiarist. And so by the middle of the week, Domenech had resigned and the Post was presumably looking for another social conservative blogger, regardless of his or her politics.
Yet another example of the mainstream media's difficulties wrestling with a new medium.