The Good, The Bad, The Spin

I’ll be tweeting live tomorrow from the Tahoe backcountry on a media relations excursion (cell phone coverage depending, of course). A local TV news crew is doing a Lake Tahoe backcountry feature on horseback.

I’ll be tagging along and documenting it as we head from Spooner Lake to the grand vistas of the Sierras, which overlook both Lake Tahoe and the Reno/Carson areas.

Pics will be posted on the DCNR Flickr page hopefully by the end of the day. Please visit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevadadcnr/

Are you on Twitter? If not, you should be. Follow me here: www.twitter.com/nvbob.

The Public Relations Society of American threw down a challenge yesterday to both presidential candidates. In a statement,

PRSA Chair & CEO Jeffrey Julin, on behalf of the PRSA Board of Directors, asks the campaigns to sign a formal pledge obligating them to abide by the PRSA Code of Ethics in all communications, stating that:

“The use of innuendo, incomplete information, surrogate messaging and character attacks, whether in political discourse or other forms of commercial free speech, raises serious concerns for our organization and its 32,000 members, each of whom signs a pledge to the PRSA Code of Ethics. In fact, ethical practice is the most important obligation of PRSA membership, and we maintain that our obligations extend not only to those we represent, but also to the publics they serve. We view the code as a model for other professions, organizations and professionals, including political campaigns.”

PRSA has yet to receive signed pledge forms back from the campaigns, but is responding to media interview requests as we continue to speak out publicly and vigorously on the issue.

It won’t happen, but PRSA does with this public statement more to advocate for the public relations profession than anything else recently. Well done.

It’s intriguing that at election time our thinking tends to get sloppy. Not that the season is uncharacteristic of any other time of the year.

No. As a species, we are characterized by behaviors presented from well-documented illusory thoughts about our surroundings and each other. Election time just amplifies this phenomenon in an extremely in-your-face way. Despite the fact that the vast majority of people in the U.S. don’t vote, the coverage and level of discussion would have one believe politics is a worthwhile investment of our time and energy.

Yet the lack of interest suggests quite the opposite, that in fact political issues have a far lesser impact, real or imagined, on the average person to the point that the incentive to be informed of “the issues” (apparently there are some issues worthy of being THE issues) simply isn’t there. And if civic responsibility, such as fulfilling our rights our ancestors fought for, were enough, then surely voter turnout would reflect this as a widely accepted level of importance.

It doesn’t. (more…)