" America Experiencing a PR Revolution that Promotes Outraged Denial Over Fact-Based Persuasion"

Features » October 5, 2009
Mad Men 2.0
America is experiencing a PR revolution that promotes outraged denial over fact-based persuasion.
By David Sirota

Don Draper to Don Rumsfeld

In the last decade, America has witnessed the evolution of the head-pounding hard sell and brain-massaging soft pitch into what can be called “outraged denial.” Its key component is replacing spin—the artful highlighting of partial truths—with a total rejection of all facts.

This PR device is based on the theory that in a post-Watergate, post-Monicagate world, the public will view spinned parsings as admissions of guilt, yet accept enraged refutations as ineluctably true. Through decades of commercials, congressional testimony and political punditry, we’ve been taught to believe that institutions and individuals may evade and prevaricate, but they will never defend or promote themselves with brazen, up-is-down fabrications because they know such lies can be easily exposed.

Of course, this expectation of minimal honesty is precisely why we’re moving from the Don Draper zeitgeist to the Don Rumsfeld paradigm—that is, from finesse to outraged denial.

When a company’s safety standards or earnings reports are criticized, the corporate parent today inevitably denies all charges with gusto, knowing we have trouble believing an angry denial isn’t at least somewhat true. When a political figure is asked about sex with an intern or prior knowledge of a terrorist threat, he doesn’t acknowledge any of the verifiable facts—he angrily rejects the entire line of questioning as irresponsible conspiracy theory, knowing that we don’t want to believe he could lie so brazenly.

Certainly, the Internet explosion and the proliferation of news outlets have made uncovering untruths easy. In theory, this should deter institutions and individuals from employing outraged denial. Yet the opposite is true.

Thanks to so many news sources fragmenting the audience, almost no single source is powerful enough to enforce empirical truths against outraged denial. Indeed, for every objective blog that fact-checks a congressperson’s statements, three partisan blogs defend that lawmakers’ fibs. For every reporter who uncovers discrepancies between a CEO’s public speech and his company’s SEC filings, five PR firms exist to “prove” no discrepancies exist.

Thus we find ourselves in a perverse situation: As information becomes easier to obtain and cynicism rises, outraged denial by the 21st-century Mad Men becomes more pervasive.

Today, Tea Party protestors vehemently deny that patients will be given a choice of insurance provider under universal healthcare proposals that statutorily preserve said choice; Washington Republicans deny that the wealthy pay lower effective tax rates than middle-income earners—even as IRS data proves just that; Democrats deny that a filibuster-proof majority in Congress means they have any power to pass legislation; and the banking industry denies any relationship between billions in taxpayer bailouts and billions in lavish executive bonuses.

Deception has always been part of public life. And today’s dishonesty might be tolerable if the press charged with policing the truth was not part of the problem.

As PBS’s Bill Moyers has documented, the early 2000s saw the national press corps aid and abet the Bush administration’s worst outraged denials after 9/11. When antiwar activists said the government was lying about Iraq intelligence, the White House’s indignant denials were amplified by nearly every corporate media outlet. When legal scholars insisted the president was violating the constitution with torture memos and warrantless wiretapping orders, again, the press corps largely echoed official brush-offs.

READ THE WHOLE THING AT:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/4912/mad_men_2.0

(returning Austin's personal property after reanimating him)

Quartermaster Clerk: One Swedish-made penis enlarger.
Austin Powers: (to Vanessa) That's not mine.
Quartermaster Clerk: One credit card receipt for Swedish-made penis enlarger signed by Austin Powers.
Austin Powers: I'm telling ya baby, that's not mine.
Quartermaster Clerk: One warranty card for Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, filled out by Austin Powers.
Austin Powers: I don't even know what this is! This sort of thing ain't my bag, baby.
Quartermaster Clerk: One book, "Swedish-made Penis Enlargers And Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby", by Austin Powers.

:spray:

Funny stuff.

tribe have taken over.

Just as any animal can become most dangerous when it's wounded; so is the case with the traditional, one way, top down, corporate media. The truth had been hidden or obfuscated by the corporate media long before the Internet came along, but without the near instantaneous, unfiltered, coordinated, public challenges to their reporting or coverage empowered by the Internet, there was no desperation in resorting to angry, blatant bald faced lies on the corporate media's part as spinning was sufficient to cover their collective asses.

No doubt, the corporate centric media's owners took secret pride in the irony of having their organizations labeled as "the liberal media" by a corporate supremacist Republican Party because it created a mythic psychological box for the American People to live in allowing a good cop, bad cop scenario to rule "We the People."

As the Internet has grown in power and influence allowing the people to truly exercise their First Amendment Rights like never before and the curtain has been increasingly drawn back exposing the corporate media's butt nakedness; anger and embarrassment is to be expected as a natural reaction.

Thanks for the thread, KoKo.