the rise of PR

I was pretty surprised to read that in addition to being involved in a shooting war, Russia and Georgia are also involved in a PR war—at the same time:

Armed not just with guns but public relations agencies, Russia and Georgia are fighting a propaganda war to shape public opinion at home and abroad with a constant stream of disputed facts about their conflict. …

Both sides are employing Brussels-based public relations specialists who arranged a succession of conference calls for the international media in recent days, with senior government figures striving to put their side of the story across first.

Russia wants to convince the world of its role as an honest broker, reluctantly intervening against an out-of-control Georgian president whose forces have carried out ethnic cleansing against the Ossetian people.

Georgia in turn portrays itself as a plucky little country fighting off the resurgent Russian bear and suffering unfair Kremlin punishment on account of its drive to become a Western democracy and NATO ally. …

But the spin hasn’t helped clarify the many disputed facts.

You don’t say! But war isn’t about facts! It’s all about spin.

Stanley Bing was writing about business war in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy:  But what he says is still to the point:

Let’s take a minute about your PR effort.

Jesus himself had the four apostles, plus, at a later date, Mel Gibson. Samuel Johnson, a fat, witty guy who illuminated the 18th century, had a talented scribe named Boswell, who followed him around and captured his every fatuity. Trump has himself. Every war master controls the story while the whole thing is going on. You always know that a side has lost a war when they lose control of the press.

The thing you need to know about the press, if you have any dealings with the nice, smart people who do that grubby job, is that the thing they want most is a story. If there is no story, still they want a story. Stories they like:

fiduciariy irresponsibility

sex stuff

cultural dissonance

celebrity gossip/factoids

The most important thing for them, without fail, is the need to feed the beast every day. Think about it.They have a hundred pages of content to frame around their advertising each time they show up at work. Imagine that. It’s tough. So if you give them a story, no matter how gooshy, fractile, or brain damaged, they will listen. This is terrific for you in your war, because if you are [as] aggressive in this sphere as you are on the battlefield, you will define the way the war is perceived, and that, my friends is the whole deal.

(pp. 166-67)