Category: Media & Marketing Matters

Girl Scouts now teaching their girls ways to waffle about bad news, not exactly character-building.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The Girl Scouts in several states are recalling batches of Lemon Chalet Crème cookies because they taste a little funny.  The manufacturer, also sometimes known as a baker, says the cookies are safe but “may contain oils that are breaking down.” 

Now the Girl Scouts are not calling it a recall, but a “quality withdrawal.”  I don’t know who the organization is attempting to fool with this squeamish euphemism, but they’re only kidding themselves. 

Most but not all stories in the news media on the recall so far use the term “voluntary recall,” often in the headline.  See, for example:

Some media report that the Girl Scouts call it a “quality withdrawal,” which only underscores what a silly expression it is because people see or hear it next to the accurate term, “voluntary recall.”

To state the obvious, the Girl Scouts use the term “quality withdrawal” in an attempt to communicate that the cookies are safe to eat, but just taste a little funky.  But “quality withdrawal” says nothing about taste and it doesn’t take away from the fact that the cookies have been recalled.  Moreover, most people with jobs work in the world of large organizations in which safety is often equated with quality or considered an attribute of quality.  That means that when they hear or read the term “quality withdrawal,” they may likely think of safety in any case.  In other words, many people won’t understand the distinction the Girl Scouts and its manufacturer are trying to make.  Many will be ticked off by this silly attempt to massage language.

The “suits” who decided to call it a “quality withdrawal” instead of what it is, a “recall,” have done the Girl Scouts a grave disservice.  I think most people will react poorly to the expression because they will see it for what it is: mealy-mouthed and weasel-worded corporate newspeak at its worst.

I don’t believe that this ineptly duplicitous approach to taking responsibility is consistent with the mission of the Girl Scouts of the USA, which describes itself as “the world’s preeminent organization dedicated solely to girls—all girls—where, in an accepting and nurturing environment, girls build character and skills for success in the real world.”     

If the Girl Scouts had asked me what to call it, I would have said “a voluntary recall because the cookies, though safe to eat, don’t taste right.”  The phrase is short, easy-to-understand, accurate and, most importantly, takes responsibility in a mature fashion.

 

USDA food pyramid elongates as much as Pinocchio’s nose and for pretty much the same reason.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The people who make advertising decisions for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) must either have a sick sense of humor or an unconscious desire to admit that they’ve twisted the purpose of the food pyramid from helping people make good eating decisions to supporting food manufacturers.

The USDA is now running a series of public service announcement TV spots in which following the food pyramids help Pinocchio to grow into a real boy. 

The idea of using a pyramid to represent the ideal in healthy eating is brilliant in concept:  A pyramid is a series of triangular blocks one piled on top of the next, with each successively higher one smaller.  The food pyramid uses the lower blocks to represent food groups like carbohydrates of which people should eat more and higher blocks to represent to represent the food groups like meat of which people should eat less.  Look at the pyramid and you know exactly how to eat a healthy diet.

But as Marc Bittman (whom I trashed for his Thanksgiving anxiety piece in the New York Times) accurately points out in Food Matters, the food pyramid was tainted from its first public appearance as a USDA communications tool in 1992.  Although the first pyramid did get all the proportions right (6-11 daily servings of carbs; 2-4 or fruit; 3-5 of vegetables; only 2-3 from the vast group comprising meat, nuts, poultry, beans and eggs and sparing use of fats and sugar), nowhere did the pyramid mention that the carbs should all be whole-grain.  Bittman notes that it would thus be possible for someone to eat only highly refined carbohydrates, which metabolize like the sugar we are advised to avoid.  Bad for people, but good for food processors.

Today’s pyramid is a disgusting depiction of how special interests can sabotage the public interest.  Instead of blocks that use the pyramid’s shape to symbolize nutritional eating, the pyramid comprises a series of vertical bands, some slightly thicker and some slightly thinner, extending from the base to the apex of the pyramid.  We are supposed to eat less of the food from the thinner bands, but it’s so hard to tell the difference. 

But in fact the visual impact of the pyramid structure is completely lost.  The branding power of being able to see shapes that have immediate meaning is completely lost.  Instead we have a cheerfully colorful geometrical form that tells us nothing about nutrition.  We can of course read the fine print by clicking on the various bands, but instead of seeing in one image a strategy for healthy eating, we instead get a collection of unrelated factoids.

There are all kinds of lies, including lies by omission, by careful selection and pruning of facts, by false comparisons (conflations), by changing the subject to something irrelevant, or in the case of the food pyramid by the placement of facts on the page.  Saying that the combination of food groups we should eat has a pyramidal relationship to each other and then arranging the pyramid to conceal that relationship is a form of lying to my mind very similar to saying that refined sugar is natural or touting fat content for foods as a means to pretend that it makes them good for dieting.

In short, the USDA is a puppet for food processors.  And we all know what happens to the noses of puppets like Pinocchio when they lie. 

If the mainstream media is so leftwing, why does it love the Tea Party and exaggerate its influence?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Which publications would be considered more representative of the so-called liberal and leftwing leanings of the mainstream news media than New Yorker and the New York Times?  Yet both persist in giving enormous coverage to the Tea Party, much more than this small band of political entrepreneurs deserves compared to other third parties that have actually had a real impact on U.S. politics. 

First on the Tea Party’s impact:  It’s zero. 

We know its self-appointed leaders tried to defeat a Republican Congressman in upstate New York, with the result that the district went Democratic for the first time in decades.  As far as the Scott Brown election to Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat goes, the only demographic analysis available only shows that people in the suburbs voted in greater numbers and people in the cities voted in fewer numbers relative to the 2008 presidential election.  That reflects long-term trends throughout the country and has nothing to do with the Tea Party.  An easy way to quickly understand how meaningless the Tea Party really is, except to news media, is to compare the extensive coverage it gets compared to the paltry coverage afforded a third party that actually did something:  the Greens, which swayed the results of the fateful 2000 election by attracting more than 2 million liberal votes from Al Gore. 

And yet the mainstream news media continues to bend over backwards to exaggerate the number of Tea Party followers.

Let’s start with the Ben McGrath encomium to the Tea Party titled “The Movement” in the February 1, 2010 New Yorker.  McGrath deftly uses selective facts and rhetorical tricks to legitimize the Tea Party and make it seem more important than it is.

 For example, he uses a common trick of fiction—to speak from the mind of a character —to give credence to the idea that close to 2 million people marched on Washington with the Teas, and then discuss the significance of that number, i.e., it’s greater than the attendance at President Obama’s inauguration. 

Of course, it’s all a fantasy that McGrath has spun, but he uses a variation of the literary technique called “free indirect discourse” to gently elide from the point of view of an objective reporter into the head of a hypothetical Tea party adherent.  Free indirect discourse is when you slide from the mind of the narrator to that of the character without using quotation marks or statements such as “he said” to tell the reader you changed points of view.  It’s so subtle that only a careful analysis of the paragraph would leave one with the conclusion that the writer knows that the correct number of marchers was well under 100,000.  Here is the paragraph, with the slide to the Tea mentality in bold and italics:

“Politics is ultimately a numbers game, and the natural excitement surrounding 9.12 drove crowd estimates upward, from an early lowball figure of sixty thousand, reported by ABC News, into the hundreds of thousands and across the million mark, eventually nearing two million—an upper limit of some significance, because 1.8 million was the figure commonly reported in mainstream or “state-run” media outlets as the attendance at President Obama’s Inauguration.  ‘There are more of us than there are of them, and we know the truth,’ one of the Kentucky organizers, who had carpooled to D.C. with a couple of co-workers from an auto-parts warehouse, told me.  The fact that the mainstream media generally declined to acknowledge the parallel, regarding the marchers as a loud and motley long tail of disaffection, and not a silent majority, only hardened their resolve.”

On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times (at least according to the website; our paper never came, thanks to 18 inches of snow!), Kate Zernike reports on the Tea Party convention, which drew 600 people.  That’s fewer people than attended the graduation ceremonies of my son’s high school!  Zernike buries this dismal turnout in the 18th paragraph of the story.  To all but the persistent reader, the impression is of a big gathering.

Coincidentally, when the New York Times covered the 2008 Green party convention to nominate its presidential candidate, 8 years after toppling Gore, the reporter never did mention how many people showed up.  The only number we got was 532, the tally of delegates voting, which typically would be a much, much lower number than the number attending the convention.

As a regular reading of Nation will show, there are many left-wing grass roots efforts across the country, but they are ignored by the main stream media.  By covering the Tea Party despite its small size and relative lack of significance, the main stream news media drives the political conversation in the country rightward. 

NPR the latest media to get on the walkaway bandwagon.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

National Public Radio has hopped on the media bandwagon of advocates of just walking away from a house that’s underwater, i.e., worth less than the mortgage.

NPR aired a story this morning that justified and gave credence to the view that the one-third of all home owners across the country who owe more on the property than it is currently worth should just walk from their mortgages, especially those who can afford to keep paying the monthly note. 

The reporter did articulate the position that people have a moral obligation to pay their debts if they can, but it was clear that his sympathies were with the walkers.  For example, he identified the University of Arizona study that says that on a cost-benefit analysis, more people should be walking away from their mortgage.  Now anyone who heard the story (or read this blog) can get the survey online with a little effort. 

But for the study he references showing that 4 our of 5 homeowners think it’s immoral to walk away from a debt if you can pay it (and thank goodness for that!), he provides no citation whatsoever.  The listener has no idea who said it or how to find it. 

Press releases about hundreds of studies come out each week and the news media determine which ones they will insinuate into public consciousness and which ones they will lay on the gargantuan academic trash heap.  So when the news media picks up on some and not others, we have to ask: why? Why are NPR, the New York Times and other mainstream media giving so much ink to the odious idea of walking away from a debt you can pay?

Again, I believe it’s because they are representing the interests of investment banks and the real estate industry, which instead of being regulated would prefer for the average person to adopt their immoral ways, which include such odious but evidently legal actions as securitizing mortgages that they know are bad and then selling them to an unsuspecting public.  Or how about his one: creating special companies for investments so that they can walk away if it goes south and make their partners—investors all—bear most of the cost.

I wonder if the media trying to goad people into walking away from their obligations realize that once people learn to walk away from the place in which they play out their private dreams that they’ll be able to walk away from every other kind of obligation with a free conscious.  The result could be a significant breakdown of our economic order or a descent into an all-cash society.

My small study may demonstrate that ads for shady products dominate talk radio.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Every media outlet has its share of advertising for shady products that don’t perform as promised.  Colon treatments, male enhancement treatments, hair loss treatments, speculative investments, Internet business ventures that don’t require you to work, companies claiming to help people get out of debt, lump-sum structured settlement companies, companies that sell you incorporation materials or other information readily available for free—these are some of the shady products and services most frequently advertised in print, TV, radio and Internet media.

Now I’m not talking about legitimate products or services for which deceptive claims are made, but those which have no inherent value, are harmful, or for which the value is much less than the inflated price.  Sometimes it’s a fine line: for example, as much as I dislike most of the products for sale on home shopping programs and infomercials, they mostly inhabit the world of the legitimate.  So do ambulance-chasing attorneys, since they perform a legitimate function (except for those whose practice is solely based on taking a third of the client’s money for doing nothing but filing papers and settling with the insurance company).

No, I’m talking about the out-and-out scam products, although some are legal, or at least legal enough.

My perception as a mass media critic is that while the ads for shady products pockmark all media, it is only a big problem for one, and it’s not the Internet! The Internet is a vast unregulated garden of both delights and deceptions, which means you can find just about any and every scam online, but they’re drowning along with everything else in an endless ocean of web pages.  And ads for shady products are also really at the margin of programming in television and print media.

But listening to talk-oriented radio over the past 25 years has always given me the impression that the shady product dominates this media segment to such a degree that if radio stations did what they should, which is to raise the standard of the ads they accept for commercial products and services, then talk radio could not raise enough advertising dollars to support continued broadcast.

To test this hypothesis, I asked my assistant Colette to listen to three local talk radio stations in Pittsburgh for a three-hour period and record all the commercials.  I asked her to listen to the three types of programming that dominate talk radio:

  • Sports talk:  “Mike & Mike,” an immensely popular national morning sports talk show on ESPN.
  • Conservative talk show hosts: The “Rush Limbaugh” show.
  • All-news: An all news radio station that does not broadcast National Public Radio during drive time.

Colette surfed back and forth between the three programming formats, listening to each a total of 60 minutes, so we could get a randomized sense of advertising on talk radio.  To really be sure of the results, though, we would have to listen for many more hours and in more than one market.  And to really drill down into the reality of talk radio advertising, we would have to record the data by type or programming and time of day.

The results of our small test, however, are so stunning, that they just about demonstrate the enormous importance of the scam product to talk radio:

Colette recorded 31 ads during the three hours of listening of which 16 were for scam products and 15 were for legitimate products.  Thus, slightly more than 50% of the revenues produced during this three-hour randomized spin around the universe of talk radio came from scam products and services, including:

  • Debt settlement company #1
  • Debt settlement company #2
  • Debt settlement company #3
  • Unpaid tax settlement  firm #1
  • Unpaid tax settlement firm #2
  • Stock tips by email
  • Lump sum payment for a structured settlement
  • Investing in gold #1
  • Investing in gold #2 (the company with which Glen Beck is associated)
  • Personal identity protection (the company that has been in the news for its shady claims)

What surprised me is that during this listening period, Colette heard no spots making health claims.  My anecdotal memory tells me that those spots mostly run on afternoons, weekends and overnight, but we would have to extend the study to test that hypothesis.

To claim that one cold year disproves global warming is to ignore a heap of scientific evidence.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I asked my assistant Colette to look for any articles online or in print that claim that the current cold winter disproves global warming.  She found a number of such claims made; here are some examples:

To say that the weather this year or this week disproves mountains of data about warming trends in the world over the past few centuries is a kind of arguing by anecdote, the anecdote being the weather you are experiencing today. 

What you see of course always makes a more powerful impression than what you read about, but in this case I think the writers are using immediate experience because they want to ignore, and they want the public to ignore, a preponderance of evidence that represents the immediate experience of literally billions of people for hundreds of years.

Weather will fluctuate from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year, and even from decade to decade, but global warming is about a general tendency that is decades old and is now rapidly changing the ecosystems of most living things.  If we ignore it, we lose the ability to slow it down and to insulate humans and other living things from what could be devastating effects.

If you ask the questions a certain way, you can use the answer to prove what you want to prove.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Over the past few weeks, the news media have been full of reports of surveys from The New York Times, CBS News and Quinnipiac University which reveal that President Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, especially among whites.  The Times and CBS polls both report that Obama ended his first year in office with the lowest approval rating of any president among whites in the years that these surveys have asked the question.

Let’s not question the results of these surveys, but rather look at how they were constructed and what they don’t tell us.  The survey questions ask specifically about how Obama has handled key issues, e.g., health care, the economy and terrorism (on which the president gets his top scores).  But the survey does not ask why people don’t approve of the job President Obama is doing in any given area.  How many don’t like Obama because his economic stimulus plan represents government intervention and how many don’t like it because he didn’t invest enough in job-producing activities? 

This approach allows the mainstream news media to continue tacking right in setting the agenda for discourse, helped by Quinnipiac’s spokesperson who asserts that the main reason for Obama’s low ratings is that he has lost the support of the moderate white male, moderate in this case meaning right of the decidedly centrist president.  Yet the survey offers no proof of this assertion, because the survey does not go deep enough into the reason people oppose the president. 

Take for example Charles Blow’s article titled Lady Blahblah on the January 16 Op/Ed page of the New York Times, which discusses the surveys in connection with Sarah Palin taking a commentator’s job at Fox News.  Blow assumes that many if not most of the white disapproving of Obama are waiting to watch Palin on Fox. 

I think in this case, Blow blew it. 

I live in a city that’s more than 70% Democratic in a blue state and most of the white people I know are disappointed with Obama, but for these reasons:

  • He has not pulled enough troops out of Iraq.
  • He is sending more troops to Afghanistan.
  • Guantanamo prison is still open.
  • He is not doing enough to help victims of the recession and create new jobs.
  • He has not aggressively pursued more regulation of the real estate and banking industries.
  • He has not more aggressively pursued health care reform.

None of these people are going to listen to Palin.  But none of these surveys distinguish this group from whites to the right of Obama.

Understand that I am arguing by anecdote, but I do it not to prove that the disaffected are left of President Obama, but to suggest that no one has yet proved that the disaffected are right of the president and ripe for picking by the Tea and Republican parties.  The media and most public forums just make this assumption in their analysis of the polls and for one reason: to keep moving the terms of discourse rightward.

Corn Refiners Fight Myth that Sugar is More Natural

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) has been running ads on prime time TV in which one mother begins to chide another about serving a fruit drink with corn syrup and the other mother rattles off a few confident assertions that the drink is natural and that corn syrup is a natural product made from natural corn.  The other mother stands corrected and takes a swig.  The ad ends with a call-to-action to find out more by going to sweetsurprise.com.  The CRA is not mentioned in the narration although I’m sure a teeny-tiny version of its logo is somewhere on the ad.

When I saw the commercial I mistakenly thought that whoever sponsored it was telling another big lie by trying to make us believe that sweetened drinks have attributes of organic or health foods, when in fact, they provide little nutrition and lots of empty calories.  

I hate big lies so I was angry.

That is, until I got to the website.  Now I’m just amused. 

The CRA is not trying to say that corn syrup is an organic or healthy food; merely that corn syrup was as natural, tasty and nutritional as cane sugar.  And of course it is, which is about like saying the 2009 Detroit Lions played football as well as the 2009 Kansas City Chiefs did.

It was at that point that I remembered that many makers of processed food products were touting cane sugar as a natural ingredient which is to lay claim to be healthier for you.  In fact, a number of products have changed their formulations and replaced other sweeteners with cane sugar and advanced the claim that they were now a “natural product.”

Of course saying that using cane sugar makes a product healthier is a lot like touting that the low fat content of a processed food is good for dieting, even though the only factor that figures into weight loss is calorie consumption (if you ate only fat but limited yourself to 1,500 calories a day of it, you would likely drop a few pounds a week).

The broader issue goes beyond cane sugar and corn syrup.  Both are always bad in beverages, and the processed food which contains either or both is typically not as good for you as making something from scratch, or eating something that has not been processed.  Experts and studies often list processed food and calorie-laden drinks as two of the causes of the obesity challenge we currently face in the U.S. and much of Europe.

So in this case, the pot is telling the truth when it says that it’s as black as the kettle.

The best way to pay me for my blog is to read it.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Several people have recently posted comments that wonder why I’m not getting paid for my posts.  I do appreciate their concern and their desire to put a financial value on my blogging.

In the United States, of course, the natural assumption is that people do most things for money.  In fact, as I’ve noted in previous blogs, money has to a great extent replaced all other means to determine if something or someone is successful, worthwhile or artistic. 

In the case of my blog, though, I do it for the pleasure of organizing and writing down by thoughts plus the joy of sharing with my readers.  I have had a very successful advertising business for more than 20 years now and I’ve made a lot of money.  Instead of trying to make more of the green, I feel happier spending some of my free time on this blogging adventure.  In addition, eventually many of my posts will end up in books I am slowly writing on communications theory and propaganda in a free society.

But for the time being, I am gratified that I have picked up so many followers in these first five months of blogging.  The knowledge that people are reading my material is all the reward I need.   

Having said that, I can suggest something to readers who absolutely feel as if they really do want to “pay” for reading my blog.  You could always pick up a copy of my book of poetry, Music from Words, either from the publisher, www.belldaybooks.com, or from many online bookstores, including www.amazon.com.  You can also buy it in almost any bookstore, but you’ll probably have to have the store order it from the warehouse.  If you don’t read poetry, you could always give it to someone you know who does, or an English student you know.

That’s it for the commercial.

Best wishes to all my readers for a creative and insightful 2010. 

How the news media helped to spread the lies of this passing decade.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Yesterday I characterized the last decade as “The Lying Zeroes” because so much of the activity of government, business, other institutions and individuals either created lies or was based on lies.

The news media turned out to be a primary vehicle for spreading lies, and in stating this I am including the Internet, all websites, blogs and chat rooms, as part of the news media.  In fact, the most obvious reason for the rapid spreading of lies during “The Lying Zeroes” is the enormous growth of Internet news media, with its currently very low entry fee for becoming a carrier of information to the public.  Websites, chat rooms, blogs, social networking pages and now tweets are ways to spread lies.

But the news media’s contributions to “The Lying Zeroes” go beyond technology.  Here are some other woeful media trends that helped to create or communicate lies:

  • The consolidation of media so that the ownership of mass media outlets is in fewer hands, leading to fewer editorial voices, especially on talk radio, now dominated by right-wingers who lie (not all right-wingers do) and who over the past 10 years have replaced a far wider set of opinions voiced by local radio personalities.
  • Getting too cozy with government sources, which led to Judith Miller’s false reports in The New York Times about weapons of mass destruction and the misleading reporting from the Iraqi war front.
  • Not fact-checking government sources, which allowed Dick Cheney and others to keep spreading false reports of Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda.
  • The “Matt Drudge” technique, which involves quoting another news source on assertions that turn out to be false so that you can tell the story you want to tell without first actually checking facts.
  • The use of balanced reporting to conflate the factual statements of one group with the unfactual statements of other groups, as in the recent healthcare debate or most public issues involving science.
  • The shrinking of mass media.  With fewer reporters out there, more are relying on government statements, the reports of others and news releases for their information.
  • Continued lower standards related to the truth content in commercials, not just by politicians but by a huge range of charlatans offering hair growth, greater virility, a way out of pressing debt problems, magic cures and unbelievable investments.

There is nothing we can or should do about the proliferation of media, and therefore lying, on the Internet, except to maybe establish more organizations to serve as Internet “truth sheriffs.”  But the established mass media really should clean up its act by raising the standards of its reporting and demanding that its advertisers tell the truth.