Thanks to a reader for this tip:
“The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a new identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation.” The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and has lost ground to enemies’ competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you….”
More here at MSNBC.
Our favorite yuppie framing genius, Matt Nisbet, takes terrific aim at his cognitive linguistic brain and shoots himself big time with this glaring fascist post. http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science/2007/07/propaganda_20_analysis_of_iraq.php
Does this mean that the framing scam has played out, and we are back to plain old murder. No, wait a minute – homicide? Cleansing?
Create your own reality as in the blockbuster new age film, “What the Bleep do we know.”
The two articles above are as illustrative of the age of rhetoric, marketing, and linguistic determinism as I have ever found. The culture of lawyer word games and doubletalking in full view.
Applied to global heating, it is terminal.
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We are all being shaped by all shapes of shaping geniuses, but when some religious “frame” is invoked, then all goes religious? As I peck, law professor Dershowitz is invoking the sanctity of the law. Stephen Speilberg is agonizing over Darfur and his agonies are getting mucho press.
True. But that does not mean they will be successful. A lot of PR went into the Iraq war. Somehow, the truth came out.
Have you seen Adam Curtis’s four part British tv film about modern peeyar, THE CENTURY OF THE SELF. It is available on line.
I have heard about it a lot.
When someone drops by and contributes, I appreciate the input. But you realize, I don’t know where you are coming from, nor do I have the time to research everyone who comments here – so let me say I like to keep it all as impersonal as possible.
The help is offset by the disservice it does to the tone of this blog.