Month: August 2016

One thing communicators should never be is smug — convinced they and their clients are safe.  There is no protection from events imagined and not yet thought of.  This was brought home to me on Friday when I received a call informing me that my oldest brother had been in a bicycle accident and is on life support.  He had pedaled thousands of miles without incident, but suddenly he plowed into the back of a truck.  There is no way of knowing why such a thing could happen.  It did.  Now his wife and daughter must prepare to live without him and those of us who depended on his leadership will have to make our own ways.  It is no use complaining about the unfairness of it all.  Life is not a matter of even-handed justice.  The good and bad both leave this earth and the only thing left of them are memories of what they did.  Recollections of my brother will be fond and vigorous for he was that kind of person.

The science news is discovery of a planet 4.25 light years away.  Little is known about it other than it is in the “goldilocks” zone suitable for life.  The media went crazy with this news but it shouldn’t have.  It is clear the planet is so far away, any probe traveling less than the speed of light would take tens of thousands of years to get there.  Further, there is no way to tell yet whether the planet has water or oxygen suitable for life as we know it.  All we know is that it rotates a red dwarf star every 11 days and the only reason it is potentially habitable is that its sun is cooler than ours.  It may take years if not decades of astronomical work to flesh out the details of the planet and some might remain hidden given its distance from earth.  Why did the media play up the story?  The scientists did and the media obliged.  Secondly, the media probably didn’t understand how far away the planet is, how many trillion miles go into a light year.  Third, how would we communicate to a satellite at such vast distances? Each message would need to travel for 4.25 years to reach the instrument and another 4.25 years for a response.  This is science hype at its worst.

There is little doubt pharmaceutical companies are sparking self-induced crises in their drug pricing policies.  The latest uproar is over the EpiPen used by people with peanut and other severe allergies.  The ingredients in the pen cost $10 but Mylan is selling the pens in packs of two for $600.  The company has tried to justify its huge pricing differential but no one is listening.  It has brought this PR disaster on itself, and it will be pilloried until it lowers its price.  Mylan is not alone, however.  New drugs coming on the market are costing $100,000 or more, and there is no way for consumers to pay for them without health insurance. Health insurers in turn are fighting back but to no avail.  There are no generic drugs for some of these medicines at the current time. Pharmaceutical companies are getting a bad name because of this aggressive pricing — and they deserve it.

The Nigerian government is claiming it has killed the terrorist leader of Boko Haram.  The problem is that it has made that pronouncement several times before and each time Abubakar Shekau has reappeared in good health.  To say the Nigerian government has no credibility in the issue is an understatement.  In order for it to be believed, it needs to produce a body and other evidence that the bandit has indeed been slain this time.  It doesn’t look like it can given the nature of the attack — an air strike in the jungle where the terrorists can easily disappear.  Why does the government risk becoming a laughingstock with its multiple communications that it has killed the leader?  It might be a twisted sense of PR — providing hope to families whose lives have been destroyed by the group and whose girls have been kidnapped.  A false sense of security, however, doesn’t help anyone and none can be blamed for being cynical about Nigeria’s leaders.

In a usual election year, this kind of negative PR would be enough to sink a candidate.  Not this year.  Hillary Clinton should thank the Republican party for putting up a candidate with more negatives than she has.  Although it is early, it is looking now like Clinton will sweep most of the states in her march to the White House.  Trump, although getting better, is so far behind that it would take a herculean effort to turn around his slide.  Add to that, his lack of organization.  Hillary has a campaign machine working behind her constantly.  Trump has a skeleton staff and he has barely advertised his candidacy.  Even though a judge has ordered the release of 18,000 new Clinton e-mails before the election, it doesn’t look like this would hurt her much.  The Republican Party’s collapse this election year is a case study of bad PR.  One can only hope that the party can revitalize itself before future elections.

It is a strange marketing and PR choice to ignore one’s best customers, yet Volkswagen is doing it in the diesel engine scandal that has overtaken the company.  The conglomerate has spent billions settling claims for cheating on its smaller motors, but it has yet to take any action on its larger power plants that went into its Porsche and Audi brands.  Porsche owners, particularly, are in a dudgeon over the lack of action on their high-priced vehicles, which are now devalued well below their selling points.  Why has Volkswagen not addressed the problem?  Probably because handling the fallout of cheating on its smaller engines is taking the company’s entire time.  However, ignoring one’s best customers is never a good idea, especially if one wants to enhance the luxury brands.  Volkswagen doesn’t have much time left to rectify the situation.  Lawsuits are pending and the corporation is not in a good position to defend against them.

This video opinion piece explains why American train travel is so bad.  Amtrak is caught in a bind not of its own making.  Were it free to operate, it might cut back on money-losing long haul routes and concentrate on three-hour trips between major cities.  This means it would be primarily an East Coast service since there are few cities outside the East Coast that are interstate, close enough to serve and with sufficient passenger traffic.  One can think of Chicago-Milwaukee, Chicago-St.Louis or Los Angeles-San Diego but the question remains whether there are enough business commuters between those cities.  The challenge for Amtrak lies in Congress.  Whenever Amtrak tries to remove a route, a Senator or Congressman will protest and force Amtrak to keep it alive.  Amtrak doesn’t have the lobbying power it needs to circumvent Congress, and it might never have.  Hence, it is like the US Postal service — another money losing entity.  It knows what it should do but it can’t get there.  It is a major public relations challenge and one that Amtrak will be struggling with for years to come.

It seems this political season fact checkers have come to the fore and everyone is busy looking into the details of what candidates say.  This is good but for one point.  Who will check the fact checkers to make sure they are doing their jobs correctly?  It is easy for a fact checker to slip opinion into data being vetted, even if the checker is rigorous about the work.  Facts are slippery.  One person’s body of facts are another’s set of lies.  One has to abstract himself from the noise and judge as objectively as possible what the truth of the matter is. There are obvious errors such as claiming President Obama was the founder of ISIS.  There are subtle mistakes such as forecasting what the GDP might be under one’s fiscal plan.  It is with these latter kinds of errors that a fact checker can go wrong.  Fact checking on the whole is good.  The media should be doing much more of it but with caution.

There has been a rise in pick-it-yourself farms and these have given a false perception of what it is to work in agriculture.  Real farm work can be brutal and exhausting.  There is no easy way to pick strawberries, for example, other than backbending labor that makes standing up agonizing.  The pick-it-yourself farms minimize the work and maximize the experience with a false sense of PR.  This is an issue close to me.  As a teenager, I worked on farms as a summer job.  There was no romance to it.  It was hot, dirty and painful.  I wouldn’t have done it had there been other jobs available.  There weren’t.  We forget that migrants do most of the manual labor on farms, and they too find the labor onerous, but they have little choice.  I was going back to school in the fall.  The migrant would push on to another field and then another and another.  They were and are trapped in a cycle of oppression that only unionization can alleviate.  That is why I have long had a warm feeling for the United Farm Workers union.  Before the UFW and its efforts to dramatize the plight of the migrant, there was no help for the field laborer.  Most Americans still think their food comes shrink wrapped or in plastic boxes, and they never think of how it got there.

Why is it that politicians and business people forget the basics of the electronic world? By basics, I mean never writing anything in an e-mail or text message that you would not want to see in headlines.  Here is another case of “Duh.”  A governor’s aide writes to another person that e-mails would show the governor “flat out lied” about his involvement in a scandal.  Apparently she never expected her message to be found in discovery, but it was and she put her boss in a bad light as the case goes to court.  But then again, maybe she did want her message to surface.  She might have given up on her boss and wanted to sink him and his reputation for bullying the media.  It is hard to say what her motivation was but the result is the same.  I hammer the point with my business school students.  Always check your email and text messages for how they are going to play in public.  Change them if necessary and never write in anger.  The basics.  Maybe the aide will remember the next time, if there is one.