Sporadic Public Relations

I rationalise my patronage of CNN. I tell myself that as someone in public relations, I have to be up-to-date on the trends in the mainstream media. But it’s lies, really.

I liken CNN to rubbernecking an accident on the highway: I shouldn’t look, but I…just…can’t…help…it.

So when CNN started selling T-shirts with headlines on them two months ago, I waited excitedly for the opportunity to purchase some horrible headline emblazoned on a shirt branded with CNN’s logo. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

CNN reserves its shirts for only the most quirky, offbeat headlines that find their way onto the site.

So while CNN’s headline shirts have been around for a while now (longer than I expected actually), it’s only recently that I found that they serve an important purpose. As CNN’s most outrageous and gimmicky headlines are the ones “shirt-worthy”, the number of shirts featured on the CNN home page is actually a pretty keen barometer of CNN’s credibility as a news source.

So without further ado I propose the CNN T-shirt Index, together we can document CNN’s precipitous slide toward tabloid journalism. Hold on to your Blitzers!

Current CNN T-shirt Index: 3

In my last post, The double-edged sword of Olympic sponsorship, I said this:

[Olympic sponsors] can take solace in the fact that although activists of all stripes will work to associate the Games with a variety of issues, it appears that they have, at least in the minds of the majority, not yet successfully done so.

It is arguable whether the statement was true at the time that I wrote it. It’s possible that given Spielberg’s resignation and the Uyghur “terrorist plots” among others, that some of China’s most sensitive issues have already been irreversibly tied to the Beijing Olympics. I also stated that the landscape could change; and change it did. A mere week later, we are standing on an entirely new precipice and I can say unequivocally: the statement is wrong.

In the foreign media coverage of the recent riots in Tibet, the subject of the Olympics and the effect of these events on the Games featured prominently in most stories. However, tying the riots to the Olympic Games was not only prevalent in foreign coverage but also in coverage by the Chinese media (a.k.a. the Chinese government). In fact, the Chinese government’s desire to link the events in Tibet to the Olympics has left me scratching my head.

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The high level of interest in the Olympic Games, as well as its unparalleled viewership makes the event extremely attractive to marketers. This is why official sponsors and clever guerilla marketers alike have used past Olympics as an opportunity to launch a marketing stunt that could win attention across the globe.

This time around, however, corporations would be wise to consider the possible downsides of being associated with the Olympics. While the event has been dubbed the “Green Olympics” by the Chinese government, activists have decided to go with another G-word: genocide. China’s support of the Sudanese government has dominated recent headlines but is just one of the many potential landmines sponsors could find themselves stepping on. Other issues range from the environment to Tibet to the country’s human rights record and beyond.

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This week’s “Reads for the weekend” is completely off-topic, but is on a subject that I find fascinating: evolution.

Many interpret evolution as the continual “improvement” of a species over time, but this is an over-simplification. Evolution makes no assumptions on what is “good” or what is an “improvement”. It does not favour the fastest or the strongest but rather whatever characteristics ensure survival and spur reproduction.

This week’s links show three observations that have clued us into how we humans play a role in the evolution of other species. Interestingly, the changes in these cases are not of the sort one might expect to be favoured by evolution; it is also certain, that if it were not for our influence, these species would evolve rather differently.

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