Is the "Handover of Power" Just Spin?
Juan Cole, a professor of MiddleEast history at the University of Michigan, thinks the press is being hoodwinked on the idea of a transfer of power, which he sess as a public relations move more than a substantive one: He writes
"Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had
talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when
something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill
Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to
that effect.) Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush
show. That's what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations
and manipulation of journalists. Let's see if they fall for it."
I'm not convinced that the handover is as manufactured as Cole claims, but I think the point bears watching in terms of how quickly the Bush administration tries to distance itself from certain activities and what journalists let them get away with.
BTW: I came across Cole's link in a weekly newsletter I get from PRwatch.org, a website that is dedicated to uncovering "spin" promoted by public relations pros and related media manipulators. There are forums and other interesting tidbits at the site. I knew PR's tentacles had stretched way too far in the late 1980s when I was working for a publication focused on the "business of law" and began dealing with the new public relations people several law firms were hiring at the time. The experience led me to do a few articles about the public relations industry. While I was used to dealing with PR people back in my days as a daily newspaper reporter, I never appreciated the extensive role PR people have in massaging much news of the way until I ventured into the bowels of the field and watched a few practitioners "place" stories in prominent newspapers. You can do a little study of this yourself simply by tracking press releases of various corporate announcements across the Internet. A few of my students have enjoyed this exercise. Unfortunately, the exercise made one of them decide to go into PR rather than journalism. She figured it didn't make a big difference. Sigh.;-)
2:09:48 PM 
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