Canuckflack
… Colin McKay has some thoughts about design, data management, retail quirks, government communications and oddities … and written in Canada!
Feb 16,2007
It’s tough to be a communicator in the employ of the government nowadays. Accelerating news cycles. Dwindling public interest in economic issues. Continuing distrust of the government.
On top of that, Ira Basen continues his quest to prove the public relations industry is the spawn of the devil. In a well-researched series for CBC Radio, Basen speaks to Canadian, American and British media, communications and politics veterans about the influence of spinners, spinmasters, spin specialists, the spiiinnn maaaann.
I still can’t shake the feeling, though, that Basen will be standing beside St. Peter when it comes to my turn, flipping through a giant book of perceived misdeeds in an attempt to condemn me to purgatory.
Nevertheless, the CBC has made available mp3 files of the previous episodes, as well as transcripts of his interviews. Here are two excerpts that paint a portrait of the environment in Ottawa today:
Scott Reid, on the shift in relationship and operating styles between media covering national issues and the federal government:
“… in the past decade there’s been a pretty substantial cultural shift in the town in terms of how media and government inter-relate. I think basically there is or there ought to be a culture of “nothing is off the record now”. I think that stories get told when they’re not fully formed in terms of the conduct of your job from where I sat, it meant you had to very much plan from a perspective that – you had to assume that the median in terms of gallery behaviour was going to be pretty punishing, pretty insurgent, and you had to factor that in.
There is no culture of being able to work on a story for a period of time and say, “well, hang on. You actually don’t have all the facts straight. Why don’t we – you should really get briefed up and we’ll take a few days…” None of that. Speed became the imperative. Speed became the only imperative and that changed the way that other journalists and other news organizations worked and that changed the way the people who answered the phone and dealt with journalists, worked as well.”
Elly Alboim, on the increasing level of disengagement citizens feel towards government and public policy issues:
” … Well, you know, look, it’s not the second coming of the apocalypse, you know I – what is the effect? We ‘re going to know in 20 years. We don’t know today. But there are signposts, you know.
The signposts are: we have the highest level of alienation from government and authority that we’ve probably had in our lifetimes or probably stretching beyond, and it’s not just a Canadian phenomenon, it’s western; the lack of deference to authority is astonishing worldwide; the cacophony associated with fundamental decision-making is loud; and voting turnout is dropping except for the last election which had a slight twist-up but most important, the disengagement of most people from issues involving governance, politics, labour, finance is astonishingly high.
They profess no interest in it, their literacy on fundamental issues has been dropping, and the shared sense of institutions, country, has become subject to all these centrifugal forces – you know, go to British Columbia and read their daily menu of information and compare it to the one in Atlantic Canada and try to understand where the common threads are. What does all this mean? I don’t know what it means.”
h/t to Ian for reminding me.
[tags] Scott Reid, PR in Canada, spin [/tags]
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2 Responses for "I tell ya, we government communicators got it tough. How tough? …"
Judy McAlpine from the CBC assured me that the entire series was also being repurposed into podcasts. They are currently in production, editing out the copyrighted music and other proprietary material that it is necessary for a public broadcaster to respect. She told me the target to have the podcasts online was late February and was delighted to hear that there would be a large audience or PR practitioners clamouring for the series to appear in this format.
I asked Judy why the series hadn’t been produced as podcasts at the front end. (This was during the networking session, which followed her presentation at AIMS Canada on “Should Your Business be Podcasting?”) An area she discussed during her presentation (which she and two of her podcasting producer staff also detailed to me at greater length) is the fact that most of the CBC Radio shows that are made available as podcasts are first edited down and “best of” versions, for just those reasons. (Plus to make the shows shorter.)
I’ve found the Ira Basen series excellent to date. My initial positive impressions of his thesis and him were confirmed at the January 31st CPRS Toronto “Spin Doctor” session where he was a panellist. (He “stole the show,” for the most part.)
Likely the concluding segment of the “Spin Doctors” series will be particularly interesting:
Program Six: A New Century of Spin
There is growing evidence that the current spin cycle may have reached its saturation point. Citizens, journalists, even some spinners themselves, are expressing increasing levels of unease about the extent to which “spin” has infused our politics and culture. “Spin” will never disappear, but it may not always look like it does now. This program will hear from people who are thinking about how public relations and journalism need to change in order to serve their audiences better, and improve the troubled relationship that has existed for so long between practitioners in both fields.
That’s great to hear – there’s no way I can justify spending that much time in my car listening to the broadcasts!
As for the devil that is PR, I’m ambivalent (or maybe confused) about “the level of unease.”
For a certain generation – or everyone over the age of 23 – it’s certainly true that the growing influence of PR and marketing has proven disquieting.(Especially if we implicitly compare our current situation to some idyllic past without brand and key messaging. I think Charles Dickens described that kind of commercial environment quite well)
For MY kids, however, I’ve just seen them tune out corporate messaging, or dismiss it altogether. They’ve grown up in such a “message-rich” environment that they’ve developed the ability to filter their own media.
Sure, it means my kids may be more sarcastic and wiser than I was at their age – but I’ve also seen them make better decisions as consumers and citizens.
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