From: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 11:23:04 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: The FV Problem = A Press Problem
Message-ID: <ad341eb60302100439eb@[132.162.233.188]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 9:28 PM 01/30/96, Timothy C. May wrote:
>At 6:42 PM 1/30/96, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
[...]
>>that allowed Bernays to do his thing.  Bernays developed expertise in
>>"engineering of consent" turned the news into a commercialized and
>
>Interesting term, similar to Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" (which
>obviously must've come later...).

Chomsky generally takes those terms like that from the (often truly scary)
writings of others. "Manufacturing Consent", "Deterring Democracy," etc.  I
bet Bernays said 'manufacturing consent' at some point too, and this is
where Chomsky got it.

> [...]
>Maybe I've from the old school, the school that says one should be more
>modest, objective, and circumspect. Then, if it's really news, and not just
>a PR scam, the journalists will come.

One _should_ be, but the question is whether that's the way the media
actually works.   Now, clearly, with thousands of journalists all doing
their own thing, no one model of the media is going to be all encompassing.
Journalists all believe they are looking for real news, of course--but when
it's so much (much, much) easier (and, equally importantly, less
time-consuming) to get leads from press releases then from investigation...
the key, of course, is for the press releases to convince the journalist
that what they're talking about _is_ real news, and not just hype.

I'm sure Garfinkel thinks that the FV story is "real news", and is grateful
for the "alert" alerting him to it.  Although,  Borenstein says that the
Garfinkel article came first in this case--but he probably just means
before the FV 'alert', not before FV 'demonstrated' the issue with a
program of their own, which was probably Garfinkel's lead.

>I think that the view that "all news is hype" is overly harsh. In fact,
>corrective forces tend to slow this headlong rush into P.R. For example,
>the reaction here to the Nathaniel Borenstein/First Virtual hyperbole, and
>the fatuous, credulous article by Simson Garfinkel (sorry, Simson, but I
>call 'em as I see 'em), will undermine their credibility for a long time.
>Crying wolf, and all that.

It will undermine their credibility among cypherpunks for a long time,
certainly.  Maybe even among the net--but among the vast majority of the
public?  It's possible that as "among the net" grows to include
increasingly more of the 'the public',  things will change.  But at
present, I don't think things will have changed yet.  The FV propaganda
will probably net good results for FV,  although not among cypherpunks.

>The FV "discovery" that insecure machines can cause all sorts of problems
>rated at most a brief paragraph in the papers, not the full-page treatment
>Garfinkel and his editors gave it in the "San Jose Mercury News" (and maybe
>other papers that picked it up, or will in the next few weeks).
>
>Newspapers and magazines that run "fluff" pieces, taken almost directly
>from press releases, lose credibility.
>[...]

Most people aren't equipped with the knowledge to tell that this was a
'fluff' piece, not meriting a full page story.  In fact,  most people rely
on newspapers themselves to make these sorts of determinations for
them--what topics are seriously important and newsworthy, and what topics
aren't.  Which is why companies can be so succesful when they can use press
releases to influences what shows up in the news.   Generally, press
releases aren't seen by the majority of the public, so they don't realize
that a story is taken directly from a press release.  Most papers use
press releases to write stories--maybe not the NYT, but most local papers.
And most people either don't realize it, or don't care.

>>If you want to effect what's in the media, maybe you should learn how to
>>issue press releases.
>
>Nope. I think it a very poor model for getting information out. With all
>due respect to Sameer, who has done many fine things, I gag every time I
>see a press release from Community Connection in which Sameer interviews
>himself.
>

It's a poor model in the sense that it makes us cringe with their tackiness
and phoniness, you're right.  But the question is whether it _works_, and I
suggest it does.  The tacky and phony press releases get just enough
editing from journalists to appear to be 'real' articles (although if one
practices... I think I can spot the articles in the paper written more or
less directly from P.R. with reasonable accuracy. )  The fact that there
are lots of people payed a lot to do "public relations" is evidence of
this,  I think,  as this is pretty much what 'public relations' is.

As tacky and phony as press releases are, I'm glad Sameer writes them,
because it's the way to get your issues (and often opinions) covered by the
press.  It's the way you play the system, unless the system changes.  Maybe
the system will change because of the Net--I hope so.  But, as the net
becomes huger and huger, most people will still have to pay others to
filter out the good information for them (only the truly diehard can still
read most usenet groups--or cypherpunks for that matter.)  And odds are,
it's newspaper-like organizations we'll be paying (many current newspapers
are revisioning themselves in just such a role).  And, as you identified in
your first post, it's in the interests of both newspapers and commercial
interests to continue the P.R. relationship.   Whether it's in the
intersets of the consuming public (or more importantly, I think, the
polity--Bernays wasn't talking about what you buy at the supermarket when
he discussed the engineering of consent) is more debatable.