I saw this one over the weekend and to be honest, I had to hold myself back from writing. I needed a bit of time to let myself lose a bit of the moral outrage.
Donald Rumsfeld is arguing that Al Qaeda is winning the PR war. No arguement from me on that.
This is what got me all pissy:
Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Pentagon chief said today’s weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.
Remember when I got all in a huff over WalMart attributing its problems to bad press and not to its shitty labor practices?
He lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of “Saddam Hussein’s mass graves.”
I’ll spare you all the political rant. Here instead is the PR rant…. Public relations is a tactic. It is not a substitute for reality. More APRs being airlifted into Baghdad is not the solution and won’t win hearts and minds.
If you or your clients aren’t paying attention to the underlying problem – be it widgets that won’t sell or images of tortured innocents in a prison formerly used by the dictator you threw out – PR isn’t going to solve the problem. It might paper over the problem for a bit (“Hey… look over there, not here”) but not forever.
/rant over
