News photographers at the White House are steamed because the Obama administration is taking photos of events and serving the images to the news. Meanwhile, photojournalists are barred. Commentators are claiming that it is propaganda, but is it? It might be the wounded pride and exaggerated self-importance of the media. The potential for propaganda […]
Posted on November 28th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 184 Comments »
Say you are a gene-testing company and you get a public letter of warning from the Food and Drug Administration that states what you are offering is a form of consumer fraud. How do you recover your reputation after that? This is what has happened to 23 and Me, the best-known brand of genetic testing […]
Posted on November 27th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 168 Comments »
In the internet age, sites come and go and few remember them. Here is one. When it started, iVillage was touted as the premier site for women. Then it faded. Now it is gone and one is left wondering if a web site dedicated to women’s interests was a bad idea. From a traditional media […]
Posted on November 26th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 189 Comments »
At the heart of PR, diplomacy, business dealings and relationships is credibility, Do we trust another party? US and Western Europe are facing that question with the tentative Iranian deal to slow uranium enrichment. Can we really trust them? Israel does not, and President Obama has a major challenge in getting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu […]
Posted on November 25th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 176 Comments »
Companies are suing and fining customers for bad-mouthing them online. Threats are designed to muzzle them through intimidation. How dumb is that? All it does is tick off the unhappy person who will make an extra effort offline to give the company a bad name, and the more people who find out about such aggressive […]
Posted on November 22nd, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 429 Comments »
When is destroying something a good deed? When the object being destroyed is illegal and never should have been collected in the first place. That is the reason why the US Government crushed its stock pile of ivory recently as a symbolic protest against poaching and slaughter of elephants by criminal syndicates. While it is […]
Posted on November 21st, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 194 Comments »
When the Daily Show first aired, Jon Stewart was a comedian hosting a parody show on Comedy Central. Now he’s a satirist for a news show that just happens to run on Comedy Central. While Comedy Central’s Daily Show is as an example of niche cable brands expanding programming to attract a bigger audience, it’s […]
Posted on November 19th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 196 Comments »
Here is an example of a PR crisis in the making unless airlines work hard to prevent it. The idea that pilots never learn how to fly their highly automated planes makes sense. Most of us learn to trust the output of machinery without learning what is in it. Consider, for example, a car. How many have an […]
Posted on November 19th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 193 Comments »
The Pentagon can’t balance its books. That is an old story. It hasn’t been able to audit its leviathan accounting system for decades. No one seems to care. There is no move in Congress to force accountability. The White House is silent. Waste and fraud continue in the armed services, but their relations with the […]
Posted on November 18th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 51 Comments »
JPMorgan Chase & Co dipped its toe into social media and got burned. As this commentator says, the bank ought to have known better. What seemed like a good idea was tried when the bank is under attack from regulators and activists for its actions during the economic meltdown. The communications practitioners at the […]
Posted on November 15th, 2013 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 212 Comments »
