10/18

Who knows why people do such things, but this fellow did.  He might have been looking for his 10 minutes of fame.  He might have been eager to please his interrogators so he told them what they wanted to hear.  He might just have lied for the fun of it.  Whatever the reason, he set back the investigation and wasted hundreds of man-hours.

All this proves again how careful we need to be when collecting facts.  Witness testimony is barely reliable anyway, but when someone has an agenda, testimony easily tips into falsehood.

I have learned over the years never to rely totally on what one person tells me about anything.  Especially in the business world, witnesses knowingly or not, emphasize things that benefit them while neglecting to mention the things that do not. 

I cannot count the number of times I have been told about how wonderful a product is.  It does everything but stir the soup, I am told.  However, when one gets under the lid and begins to look at details, the product is frequently unfinished, riddled with compromises and unable to work the way the product manger says that it does.  It does no good to anyone to accept the product manager's story.  If you do, you have a Microsoft mess.  Every Microsoft release is the best one yet with NO bugs and wonderful new features.  We have learned over the years to accept that Microsoft lies and always has from the earliest days when it promised a satisfactory version of Windows "soon"  that did not show up for years.

It is hard to guard against making it up, but that is a  job of the PR practitioner.  We need to detect bullshit before reporters do.

10/17

The lesson?  Americans are interested in learning about politics on TV news.  Conventional wisdom has been that Americans don't care for politics on TV, but the study showed that it was the way the question was asked in audience surveys that biased the answer.

Put another way, if you cover politics on TV, you lose ratings.  All people want are news about rapes, robberies and murders with a little "boobs n' butts" thrown in.  Of course, behind this theory are TV consultants hired to help channels boost their ratings, and TV consultants rely on standard audience surveys.

What is the problem?  TV consultants' surveys have specific questions about different kinds of news consumers want, but when it came to politics the question was "How interested are you in news reports about issues and activities in government and politics?" 

Here I will quote the Los Angeles Times:

The less specific the question, the less useful the answer, according to polling professionals. In this case, the question was so general it was meaningless.

The two researchers, funded by the Pew Research Center, tested specific questions about politics and found interesting results.  Using the general question, 29% said they would be interested in reports on politics.  Using a specific question of how interested they would be in "news reports about what government can do to improve the performance of local schools," the percentage interested was 59%.  The same shift happened when they asked how interested survey respondents were in reports on what the government is doing to keep the public safe from terrorists.  And they got a similar result when they asked about political activity focused on reducing health care costs. 

The researchers arrived at two general conclusions:  TV audience research has been faulty, and TV journalists should work to make political stories relevant to their viewers rather than to the politicians they cover.  None of this is surprising except for asking why it took so long to find out. 

PR practitioners can take both lessons to heart.  There are too many  junk surveys turned out by practitioners who have no idea how to frame questions correctly and less idea of statistical validity.  Secondly, practitioners issue container loads of press releases annually that are filled with meaningless jargon meant to impress clients but not readers. 

I don't expect TV stations will jump on this research quickly nor do I expect PR practitioners to take the advice to heart.  Some things never change.
 

10/16

That's why I was happy to read yesterday that three British appeal court judges overturned a privacy complaint leveled by model Naomi Campbell against the the Daily Mirror, a Fleet Street tabloid.

Campbell has apparently made a point of telling the media that she does not use drugs of any kind like other models.  Then the Daily Mirror snapped and ran a photo of her leaving a drug addiction center where Campbell had been under treatment.  Campbell was furious, claimed invasion of privacy and won initially against the newspaper a small sum for damages and $310,000 to pay court costs.

The judges at the Court of Appeal ruled for the newspaper  and said its reporting was justified in the public interest.  The reasoning was interesting.  The court said Campbell had gone out of her way to boast that she was drug free when she was, in fact, addicted.  Lord Phillips, the senior civil judge went on to say the following, "Where a public figure chooses to make untrue pronouncements about his, or her, private life, the press will normally be entitled to put the record straight."

That should be a lesson for publicists who like to "spin."
 

The article detailed the series of public relations disasters that Pitt has stumbled through since this time last year.  Those who know him say he is concerned with substance first and with how it plays second.  Unfortunately, he works in a town where perception is as important as substance, and he has been on the wrong side of perception from the beginning with his now infamous remark of making the SEC a "kinder, gentler" place for corporate America. 

Those familiar with the SEC under his predecessor say that former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt was a bomb thrower rather than builder.  But Levitt is epitomized as the chairman the SEC needs.  Pitt is painted as everything the SEC doesn't need.  Pitt knows the position he is in, but he can't seem to change it.  The end game, of course, would be for him to resign, which is what Democrats hope for and Republicans fear. So far, Pitt has hung in and been the target of anger, including a Democratic Senator and a Congressman who called on him to resign when he backed off naming their preferred candidate to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (AOB) 

The AOB nominee, in fact, told everyone he had a lock on the job before he was named.  That was not a smart move, but the candidate was not excoriated.  Pitt was.  It made no difference whether Pitt was in his rights to dump someone claiming a job he had not been formally offered. 

Working against Pitt are unaccountable moves that left many shaking their heads.  He suggested at one point that the SEC be made a cabinet-level position.  While one can make a case for Pitt's point of view, the suggestion was ridiculous, and Pitt got the scorn he deserved. 

It seems now that PItt can do nothing right on the PR front.  He is in a losing game with little chance of turning it around.  I suspect his best move is to shut up and go about his work as best he can.  Sometimes disappearing in office is not all bad.

10/14

My seven-year-old daughter had her heart set on going on camping with her girlfriends.  For one reason or another, the trip had been put off all summer.  At last, we scheduled it for last weekend.  Little did we know that a major storm was going to hover over the Northeast starting Thursday night and rain constantly until Sunday morning.  Actually, the weathermen didn't know either because they said the rain would let up Friday night and be clear by Saturday.  We had decided to leave early Saturday morning. 

On Saturday morning, we woke to rain.  I called one of the fathers who sounded tentative.  I didn't want to seem to be backing out, so I said I would go.  He said that OK he would go too.  The third father also didn't want to back out so he agreed to do as well.  So, we waited until 11 a.m.  Meanwhile, the rain didn't let up.  Nevertheless, we packed two cars, three girls and three dads and left.

An hour and a half later we were at the campground, and it was pouring.  We scrambled to set up our gear while watching the sky.  The rain did not let up.  We were soaked , the girls were not having fun and we had to rig a cover for the fire just to keep it going.  Then we waited and waited some more.  The rain became intense.  About 3:30 Saturday afternoon, the three girls were playing in an increasingly wet tent.  Three dads were under a tarp and watching water pour off of it, and it was clear we had done a dumb thing.  So, we struck camp, came home, set up the tent in our family room and the girls camped overnight in the house. 

Somewhere along the line, common sense should have told us to stay home Saturday, but none of us wanted to "chicken out."   Ever wonder how dumb decisions are made in organizations?