Author: Buck Banks

Can’t See the Forest for the Spin

Buck Banks

Apparently, the Bush Admin didn’t learn its lesson about the imprudence of using outside public relations firms to spin its education message and is now trying to replace U.S. Forest Service information officers with PR consultants. (Disclosure: I am a PR consultant in the leisure travel industry.) According to the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the move to outsource spokesperson duties is the first step in Bush’s renewed effort to further gut the Forest Service and erode forest protections.

The U.S. Forest Service announced that it is weighing replacement of 100 of its public information staff with private public relations firms, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The move is motivated by pressure from the Bush White House to put more federal jobs out to bid by private contractors in order to “increase the cost-effectiveness of Forest Service work.”

According to agency memos, 100 of the agency’s 700 public affairs officers, public affairs specialists, writers, editors, graphic artists, illustrators and audio visual specialists will be reviewed by June 30 to determine whether the positions would be subject to bid by private firms. The agency plans to make decisions this fall and contractors could be in place by January.

Hundreds of other positions throughout the agency may be subject to similar bidding in 2006. In 2004, citing cost overruns and potential side effects, Congress severely restricted the Bush Administration efforts to outsource Forest Service and National Park Service jobs. Those restrictions, however, lapsed this past October and now the Bush Administration is again pushing its “Competitive Sourcing” initiative.

“Wag the Dog is coming to a national forest near you,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, referring to the movie about government use of PR firms to manipulate public perception of events. “Civil servants are under a legal obligation to tell the public the truth while PR firms specialize in shading it. Outsourcing the public information function risks putting a premium on spin at the expense of candor.”

President Bush promised to limit reliance on PR firms after recent controversy over federal agency payments to commentators for promoting Bush Administration programs. Through this “Competitive Sourcing” mechanism, these same firms can have a long-term role in shaping agency communication practices.

In 2004, the Forest Service spent $113,000 for a public relations firm to design a campaign to gain public acceptance of the agency plan to increase logging in California’s Sierra Nevadas. The campaign, titled “Forests With a Future,” sparked criticism but the Government Accountability Office ultimately ruled that the contract did not violate prohibitions on using taxpayer dollars to pay for “publicity or propaganda.”

Ironically, the Forest Service needs to retain contractors in order to prepare private sector competitions. Previous Bush competitive sourcing plans at the Forest Service involved possible contracting for law enforcement, biologist and sylviculturalist positions. The agency spent an estimated $100 million before Congress stepped in and put the effort on hold.

Find out more at http://www.peer.org/

EPIC: In the Year 2014

Buck Banks

It’s 2014. “The New York Times” has gone off-line and is now a print-only newsletter for the elite and elderly, and EPIC is how you get everything, customized based on your consumption habits. Hey, it could happen, right? “EPIC” is an online film created by two fellows at the Poynter Institute, a well-respected journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla. It tells the story of what has happened and what could (might? will??) happen to how we get our media and products in the near (immediate???) future. Besides being interesting intellectually, it also represents a cogent analysis of what has happened to the way news is disseminated over just the past six years. See the film here: Epic.

Gays face same enemy as Jews in ’30s: hatred

Buck Banks

In today’s Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts Jr. examines the au courant tendency to label the crisi dujour as whatever’s “Holocaust.” In this case, it’s a gay holocaust. While drawing the distinction between capital H and little H holocausts, Pitts notes that the tendency of conservatives to want to limit freedoms, especially those of gays and lesbians, does harken back to the neo-fascist days of the late ’30s, early ’40s.

Gay Holocaust?

That was the subject line of an e-mail I received last week from ”Chris,” a lawyer in a red state. He wanted to know if anybody else sees a similarity between the beginning of the Holocaust — the nibbling away of rights and personhood that ultimately led to the attempted extermination of a people — and what is happening to gay people in American right now.

He knows it’s far-fetched. ”But,” he says, speaking of the conservative element that is pushing hardest against gay rights, “we are not dealing with normal people here.”

Chris concedes that there are differences between the plights of Jews and gays. “But they also have this in common — at one time in history, that time being the present for gays, they were the object of official government-sponsored hatred couched in the name of religion or morals.”

Here’s what I think:

The Holocaust is an atrocity unique in history, and I’m wary of appending modifiers: the ”this” holocaust or the ”that” holocaust. There’s a reason the word takes a capital h.

Which is not to say the lawyer is off base. I’ve long felt the current spate of laws — you can’t do this because you’re gay, can’t have that because you’re lesbian — bears a discomfitting resemblance to Germany in the 1930s.

Both spring from a mind-set that says a given people is so loathsome, so offensive to our sensibilities, that we are obliged to place them outside the circle of normal human compassion. We don’t have to hear their cries, don’t have to respect their humanity, don’t have to revere their tears, because they are less than we — and at the same time, are responsible for everything that scares or threatens us.

Whatever it is, it’s all their fault. Blame them, whoever ”them” may be.

WE’RE ALL HUMAN

My problem is that I see human dignity as all of a piece. I don’t know how to want it for me and mine but not for them and theirs. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, we are caught in a network of mutuality. As Dick Cheney put it, freedom means freedom for everybody. As Cain put it, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

I always considered that the signature lesson of the Holocaust; always felt that in the largest sense, it was not about Jews and Aryans, but about humanity and inhumanity. The Holocaust was, after all, only hatred carried to its logical extreme, the predictable outcome of an environment where we countenance taking rights from ”them,” heaping scorn on ”them,” making scapegoats of “them.”

And who can deny that this describes the plight of gay Americans in 2005? Or that demagogic lawmakers are using this environment to further their own ambitions?

There used to be an expression in Southern politics. The candidate who lost because he had been found insufficiently draconian on racial issues was said to have been ”out-niggered.” These days, the worry seems to be that one might be ”out-homoed.” Consider, for instance, a law under consideration in Alabama to ban books with gay characters from public school libraries.

Books. With gay characters.

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION

It prompted a group of gay Alabamans to rise before a legislative committee and ask a pregnant question.

Why do you hate us?

And it strikes me that the same thing could have been asked by an Armenian in 1915, by a Bosnian Muslim in 1992, by a Rwandan in 1994 and, yes, by a Jew, in 1936.

We just don’t learn.

Ours is a stable and prosperous democracy, so no, I don’t predict train cars full of gays rolling toward death factories.

Still, the mind-set of aggrieved righteousness that allowed those trains to roll is not dissimilar from that which would ban gay people from public school libraries.

Maybe your instinct is to find the comparison unthinkable. Nobody is interning gays, nobody mass-murdering them.

You’re right. But ask yourself: How many would if they could?