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June 27, 2005
Of thee I sing???
One day last week, the front page of the local paper featured:
* Coverage of the constitutional amendment banning flag-burning.
* A story about how the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution to monitor the influence of homosexual activitsts and their allies in the schools.
* A piece about the Pentagon's effort to create a datatbase of American 16-18-year-olds for "recruitment" purposes.
* A story about a local sheriff who created a county-wide map showing where convicted sex offenders live.
All on the front page. How depressing.
With the war in Iraq, Medicaid costs exploding, trade deficits, U.S. budget deficits -- dozens of other pressing issues -- the U.S. House of Representatives is wasting time on the flag amendment. We're told that there were maybe a dozen cases of flag desecration in the country last year. In a year when there was plenty to protest.
The Southern Baptists. Oh, yes. The church of my childhood. There is plenty of sin to go around. No doubt about it. But to single out homosexual sin is puzzling. Do you suppose there is more homosexuality or marital infidelity in the Southern Baptist Church? Hmmm.
The Pentagon has an interesting dilemma. It is no doubt hitting the wall on recruits. Fewer young people will want to enlist. The Army is missing its recruitment goals nearly every month. As the economy improves, recruitment will become more challenging. But a database is scary. A database of youth in the hands of the Pentagon is doubly scare to me.
And the sex offender map. This is a new twist on an old problem. Studies show that sex offenders tend to be difficult to rehabilitate. Therapy seems to be ineffective. So that's why in almost any community, you can go on line and view a list of sex offeners. Johnston County is taking that one more step by mapping out sex offenders on the county map.
All of these points just nibble away at our liberty. The liberty to burn our flag in protest. I would never do it, but I'm not sure we should have a constitutional amendment against it. And all the others just seem to be so much sound and fury.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 07:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 22, 2005
PR: finally at the strategy table
I've been in the public relations business more or less for 18 years. At dinner last night with a friend who runs an advertising agency, we reflected on the changes in our businesses.
For me, as a public relations practitioner, there have been two large changes. First, business decisions get made faster than they did in the late 1980s. When I left the world of political campaigns to get into the PR business, executives were amazed at how fast I could make recommendations, especially when it came to spending lots of their money. But in campaigns, the only finite resource is time. If you can't make a decision quickly, the clock will run out. You will not preval.
The second change I've noticed over the years is that business executives no longer look at the public relations function as tacitical. When I first got into the PR business, I often would get a call that started something like this: "We've made a decision and we need to get out a press release..."
These days, companies are much more cognizant of their reputations in the marketplace of consumers, investors, regulators and employees. There is much more to public relations than issuing a press release. That's a positive development for the PR business. But outside PR counsel and the leaders of corporate communications departments have to be smart and diligent stewards of the client's reputation in order to retain that place at the strategy table. It's taken too long for us to get there to let that status slip away. More on that later.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 20, 2005
Give junior the benefit of the doubt
Last week, Walter Jones Jr., the Republican congressman from North Carolina's 3rd District, broke with the Bush Administration and called for debates on an exit strategy in Iraq. This from the publicity hound who introduced a bill to change the menu listing in the House cafeteria from French Fries to Freedom Fries when the French opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Jones, whose district includes Camp Lejeune, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, says that the deaths of young servicemen with families has weighed on his conscience.
This is a guy I knew as a North Carolina legislator when I was a reporter. He promoted campaign finance reform, but took PAC money from special interests wanting to impress Jones' father, the long-time congressman Walter Jones Sr. I always thought Jones Jr. touted campaign finance reform because he believed reporters favored it, and he wanted to curry favor with them. There were other inconsistencies I noticed between the public and private Junior.
When his father retired in 1992, Jones ran for his father's seat as a Democrat. He lost the primary, switched to the Republican Party, then ran again in 1994 in a district he didn't even live in. In that campaign, he ran a TV ad with a photo of his opponent, the Democratic incumbent congressman, jogging with President Clinton. That was the primary evidence that Jones should be elected. In the Republican tidal wave of 1994, a monkey could have been elected if he had an "R" behind his name. Jones was.
So here we are 11 years later and Walter Jones Jr. is making a very public break with his president. He represents a significant number of military families in his district. How will they feel about Jones' call for an exit timeline?
I do not know if Jones is just a little ahead of everybody in his understanding of public opinion and the war.
But maybe, just maybe, he's following his conscience. Knowing him as I have for 25 years, it's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. But in this case, Walter Jones Jr., is entitled to it.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 10, 2005
Cracking heads again in China
The government of China announced this week that bloggers in that country will now be required to register with the government or be shut down.
According to a statement released by the Chinese information ministry, "the Internet has profited many people, but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence, feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people's spirits."
Hmmm. Feudal superstitions.
I'm no expert on China, but this not-so-subtle intimidation will not work. China is burgeoning as a world economic power. The U.S. military-industrial complex seems to be scared to death of China's potential.
The Chinese people, mostly young people, made a fledgling and ultimately vain move toward freedom with uprisings in 1989. They were brutally repressed by the government.
China has about 87 million Internet users and about 770,000 blogs.
With increasing economic success, and with a taste of the freedom of expression that is a big feature of the blog world, it's hard to envision the Chinese people accepting the government's blog intimidation.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 08, 2005
The return of hubris?
I got a funny sense of deja vu Monday when an news alert came across my laptop: the Scripps media company had paid $585 million in cash for Shopzilla, an online shopping service with a funky name.
No one, not even the most arrogant of the venture capitalists, believes we will return to late 1990s days of the dot.com balloon. But are we beginning to talk ourselves back into a giddy optimism about the future of technology and the Internet? I took a pledge of resistance a long time ago and hereby renew my vow not to participate in a renewal.
As a leader of a public relations firm, that time was unprecedented: new companies would throw unbelievable amounts of money our way, demanding that we get them in the Wall Street Journal. Never mind that their products were not much beyond proof-of-concept. Didn't have a revenue stream. They just thought the publicity would result in a life-changing event, i.e., some big company would acquire them and make them zillionaires.
Most of those companies long ago collapsed under the weight of their own hubris. But money and hope can have a way of changing things.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 03, 2005
Thank God for the Methodists!
I am not a theologian. But I was wondering, how do leaders in the U.S. Catholic Church square their unswerving opposition to abortion and euthenasia with their tolerance for the death penalty and war?
If one is for life, any kind of life (like Terry Schiavo's), then how can one tolerate the death penalty or the war in Iraq? And how comfortable can the increasingly warm embrace between Catholics and the far right wing in America be?
During last year's presidential campaign, many U.S. bishops said they would deny communion to the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, who supported abortion rights.
But they expressed no reluctance to serve communion to politicians who supported execution by lethal injection on Death Row or killing with cluster bombs in Iraq.
As it turns out, they can make up theology. Before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's job was enforcer of church doctrine. He had been asked the very question that I posed above.
In a letter to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, head of the U.S. Bishop's Conference,during last year's presidential campaign, Ratzinger wrote, "Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthenasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.... There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death pentalty but not, however, with respect to abortion and euthenasia."
I thought that according to Christian theology that all sins were the same in God's eyes, that all had sinned and come short of the glory of God, and that if a person transgresses even one part of the law, he or she had transgressed the entire law.
So I was surprised to read about Cardinal Ratzinger's new theological discovery. Wow! I wonder where lying about weapons of mass destruction falls on the hierarchy of sin?
It's a good thing that George W. Bush is a Methodist.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 06:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005
Three cheers for Woodward and Bernstein
It's interesting to observe the discussion about the revelation that the FBI's No. 2 guy, Mark Felt, was Deep Throat, whose tips helped the Washington Post tell the story of Watergate.
Nixon loyalists like Pat Buchanan and dirty-trickster-turned-Christian Charles Colson have thrashed Felt for disloyalty to Nixon, as if the FBI should have been loayal to a crooked president.
My own wonderment is that Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein kept the secret of Deep Throat's identity for 33 years.
Do you realize how hard it is to keep a secret in Washington for 33 minutes? Even the publisher of Woodward and Bernstein's newspaper, Katherine Graham, went to her grave without knowing.
At a time when the credibility of journalism is at an all-time low and still falling, the lesson of maintaining the confidentiality of sources is heartening.
Woodward and Bernstein's careful and selective use of confidential sources spawned a generation of journalists who bastardized the method.
Reporters often allow unnamed sources to carry out vendettas anonymously. Many times, reporters are too lazy to keep searching for sources who'll give them the same information on the record.
Woodward and Bernstein did it right: they used confidential sources mostly to confirm what they had learned elsewhere, not to be the primary source of a news story. And the result was the unraveling of the most corrupt presidency in America's history.
As anniversaries of Nixon's resigntion rolled around -- the 10th anniversay, the 15th, then at Nixon's death in 1994, just before the 20th anniversary, the reporters were asked and cajoled into revealing their source. They never did. Good for them.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 01, 2005
Time for an exit strategy in Iraq
Yesterday I was listening to the Don Imus radio show and was struck by a conversation Imus was having with an NBC News reporter in Iraq, Jim Maceda.
Maceda is a veteran correspondent whose latest tour covering the war began three months ago. He said flat out that security was deteriorating in Iraq, that it's more dangerous than it's ever been, that suicide bombings are on the increase, and that more Iraqis have been killed in May, since the Iraqui government was formed, than in April.
Contrast that with what Vice President Cheney said Monday on the Larry King broadcast -- the violence is winding down, the worst was over.
From where I sit in the comfort of my library, I can't possibly have all the information that Meceda and Cheney have. But if I assume that some of the news reports are correct, then the vice president is, charitably, blowing smoke. Some might say, smoking crack.
Even Democrats who have questioned the Bush Amdinistration's honesty and competence in invading Iraq persist in saying that the United States must stay and finish the job in Iraq. But what does that mean?
American lives lost now stand at more than 1,650. It seems like yesterday we were observing the 1,000th death just before Bush's reelection last year. We are becoming numb to the news reports of two Americans killed yesterday, three Americans today.
It's now time for Democratic leaders to stake out a bold position for exiting Iraq. Our commitment cannot be open-ended. We cannot stay until the last insurgent is subdued.
The price we pay in the currency of young American lives is simply not worth it.
Posted by Ken Eudy at 05:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack