Lately, I have been pondering an attention-grabbing news item category. It began, when few months ago almost each mainstream daily newspaper within the UK reported the sad demise of Jade Goody on the front page. While it actually may be a sad event, after I saw this news item grabbing a pair of of the high 5 browse news on BBC website 2 things clicked in my mind with regard to celebrity hype and therefore the PR strategies and marketing.
Firstly, in Liverpool I had a tutorial colleague who researches into the world of celebrities and their impact on masses. He additionally happened to be a fanatic soccer fan and I remembered him telling me that he had read umpteen number of celebrity biographies (including many footballers and entertainers) and had concluded that there was hardly anything inspiring in those memoirs (BTW, jade goody had one!). It absolutely was simply one talent that had place most of those folks in the mainstream media and once they're there we have a tendency to apprehend the human struggle to be there.
The second thought that arrived in my mind connected to the power of high tech public relations (PR). I might be utterly wrong but even the BBC obituary of Jade Goody notes "...she hit the headlines as a young woman with shockingly poor general data, who was usually the item of her fellow housemates' derision" (BBC, 2009). But, when you simply sort Jade Goody in Google it turns up with five,a hundred thirty,000 results. These include a Wikipedia which is several print pages long, official website, news (clearly in terms of celebrity gossip), a perfume web site and a FAN website (yes...)!
Considering this I ran another Google explore for Prof. Amartya Sen (yes, yes, the 1998 Nobel prize winner) and it returned with 659,000 entries. Pardon me Prof. Sen for even comparing.
However, this demonstrates the power of public relations and how PR corporations exploit it.
I'm amazed to work out that society as a full what do we have a tendency to very explore for and how our thoughts can be manipulated. Strikes a chord in my memory of Edward Bernays - the father of public relations and the nephew of Sigmund Freud - who believed in manipulating society and resultant public opinion. In one among his seminal works 'the propaganda' he argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary half of democracy. He successfully used it in 'breaking the taboo against girl smoking in public' and even helping United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) and therefore the U.S. government to facilitate the successful overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.
These days's high tech public relations corporations have honed their skills with such a finesse that a 'Miss Piggy' who reportedly thought a ferret was a bird, an abscess a inexperienced drink from France, that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, that there was a part of England known as East Angular which there was a language known as Portuganese (Jeffries, 2009) gets two out of five prime news items on BBC and gets coverage on all the globe media. I've got infrequently seen that being achieved...
Something has surely going wrong at the macro societal level or I suppose Bernays was thus right when he said "The general public has its own standards and demands and habits. You may modify them but you dare not run counter to them." This is often what we tend to demand as news today, do not we?
Author Resource:
Howard has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in PR, you can also check out his latest website about: