Principled Profit

It’s about time! The House voted against war funding (because the Republicans, for their own reasons, sat out the vote)–and the Senate voted to block more media consolidation.

Now, we’ve got to put enough pressure that these very positive actions are mirrored in the respective other chambers.

My question: what happens if the Senate votes to continue funding the war while the House aintains its opposition? What happens in conference committee?

Watch out for these snakes! Some people have no ethics at all.

I got an email this morning that purported to be from the IRS. The subject was “2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. [Scanned]”

And it started like this:

Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as
part of The White House program to jumpstart the economy.

Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the
2008 Economic Stimulus Refund.

The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by
direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

Please follow the link…

And ended with *a numeric URL*!

I don’t bother to report most phishing scams–I get a dozen or so every day) but this one, I forwarded to the IRS. Unfortunatley, it bounced.

Fascinating and far-ranging interview with European philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Democracy Now this morning.

He covered war, energy, US presidential politics, and much more. But the statement that really got to me was:

A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do it, and the whole field changes: it’s possible.

He went on to cite President Nixon’s opening US relations with Maoist China, and postulated that if Obama becomes president, he will seize a similar window with Cuba.

But this concept has reach far beyond international relations. In sports, the 4-minute mile was an unassailable barrier for decades; once Roger Bannister broke it, many people followed quickly. In science, it was unthinkable in 1955 that a human being would walk on the moon before 1970. In energy and the environment, the work of Amory Lovins and others show new ways of reinventing society as a more earth-friendly place (see my article here). And in business ethics, I like to hope that my Business Ethics Pledge campaign will make a similar difference in the consciousness that ethical business is actually more profitable.

By some weird coincidence, both Seth Godin and David Garfinkel (names well known to any student of modern marketing) went after the media for distorting the news to artificially create drama this week.

Godin, posting today, looked at CNN’s report on yesterday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries, and found the headline and focus only told one part of the story. While accurate on its face, the headline, “Clinton ‘full speed ahead’ After Indian Nail-biter”, was misleading.

A more appropriate but less dramatic rendition of the results, he says, would have conveyed a very different story.

The page would have been more accurate if it had said things like, “Obama gains more than 200,000 votes over Clinton” or “Obama campaign further extends delegate lead, picking up 12 more delegates” or even “Obama pummels Clinton in the bigger state.”

That’s not dramatic, though, and as William Randolph Hearst taught us a long time ago, the goal is to sell newspapers, not to report the news.

A day earlier, Garfinkel attacked the San Francisco Chronicle for similar manipulation on a totally different topic: “Is Any Web site Safe? No Way to be Sure.”

First, Garfinkel points out that the paper is using a technique for which journalists often diss marketers:

The headline is bad enough — but we all know that fear sells, and it certainly sells newspapers. (Don’t think I’m going to take it lightly though the next time I see or hear a journalist taking a swipe at an ad because it preys on people’s fears.)

And then he points out the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) implications of a headline that could be read several different ways.

This intersection of the journalist mind and the marketer mind is a stream where I swim regularly, and I think both of these guys are right. What do you think?

More on the scandal I wrote about Sunday regarding the Pentagon’s shills infiltrating the media in the run-up to the Iraq war.

This from Jim Lehrer’s Online News Report. Lehrer’s guest was John Stauber, founder/executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and author of Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq and other books:

What happened here was a psy-ops campaign, an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit 75, at least 75 former military officers, as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors, and insert them, beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates.

And that’s the words that are actually used, “message multipliers” for the secretary of defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the essence of this that what they did was — what the Pentagon did was illegal?

JOHN STAUBER: Yes, what they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we’ve had various laws on the books in our country going back to the 1920s. It is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way.

In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. And what we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program, but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war.

Two related stories that I found in the Romensko news-about-newspapers newsletter. First, on Journalism.org, that the WSJ is shifting a lot of its front page coverage away from finance and toward politics and international news. and second, one columnist on the Recovering Journalist blog speculates, very cogently, that Rupert Murdoch is attempting to essentially surround the New York Times with its properties, fighting from below with the New York Post, from above with the Wall Street Journal, and laterally with a possible purchase and relaunch of a metro NYC edition) of Newsday.

As a former New Yorker his growing media empire makes me nervous. I remember when the New York Post was a very decent newspaper, before he got his tabloid-sensationalist fingers into it. Of course, he doesn’t always kill a paper’s journalistic integrity; the London times still seems to be doing ok, and Murdoch has owned it since 1981. But I surely would not want to see him owning both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times–America’s only two national papers other than the USA Today.

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reveals that the Pentagon has gone far beyond paying Armstrong Williams. A whole gaggle of retired military