Food for Thought for PIOs 8-8-2023
PIOs—
Is the constant churn of media platforms a problem for communicators? Well, yes, but according to one maven it means opportunity for PR people to demonstrate their value to the organization. “PR people are the champions of managing relationships with multiple platforms, when you think of varying types of media outlets as ‘platforms.’ Executives and peers in other functions sure don’t want to learn how to use your tools, and they wouldn’t be as good at it if they did.”
What do you do if you’re the waste industry, collecting thousands of tons of mixed, contaminated, or multilayered plastics that—largely unknown to the general public—are impossible or unprofitable to recycle? You make it somebody else’s problem and export it.
Nostalgia is a longing for something that once existed, a person or place or experience that lives in our memory, but the Portuguese word saudade expresses a longing for something that never was, something not attainable. This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to somehow be different than they are, and for the universe not to be indifferent to our cares and concerns.
Just by changing their admissions policies, elite colleges could make the country’s leadership more socioeconomically diverse. Eliminating legacy admissions, getting rid of recruitment for “country club athletes,” and putting less emphasis on super-high non-academic activities would reduce affirmative action for the children of wealth.
There’s little empirical evidence that police dogs help solve crimes or catch criminals, but there’s plenty of evidence that dogs and their handlers cause severe, unnecessary, and biased injuries of ordinary people in vulnerable communities.
An interesting intersection of international scientific and sociological research and government regulation and public communication has helped to vastly reduce the presence of toxic lead in turmeric found in the Bangladesh food supply. Bangladesh’s success is noteworthy and unusual, whether in developed or developing countries. Somebody, please tell the libertarians.
We can’t afford to be climate doomers, says Rebecca Solnit. It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win. Maybe people assume you can’t be hopeful and heartbroken at the same time, and of course you can. In times when everything is fine, hope is unnecessary. But hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.
And as Wislawa Szymborska notes, there is hope “So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day.”
David
David Vossbrink, APR, Fellow PRSA
Communications Counsel
1. Why Twitter’s decline is great for PR people.
https://michaelsmartpr.com/why-twitters-decline-is-great-for-pr-people/
“So why am I bullish on a world where we don’t know who is gonna be on Threads and who will stay on Twitter and what a rehabilitated Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook might look like? Not to mention the chaos of a dominant TikTok that could realistically get kicked out of the U.S. over national security concerns? The answer:
“The more complex communication platforms become, the more reliant employers become on full-time experts to manage them.
“PR people are the champions of managing relationships with multiple platforms, when you think of varying types of media outlets as ‘platforms.’ We inherently know how to talk differently to a staffer at the Journal compared to one at The Verge.
“Yes, it’s a pain to have to learn another platform, whether that’s Threads or something else, when you may have felt fluent with Twitter. But that friction equals VALUE to your role at your company or agency. Executives and peers in other functions sure don’t wanna learn another platform, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be as good at it as you are.”
2. The world’s garbage can: On the human consequences of the mass export of waste.
https://lithub.com/the-worlds-garbage-can-on-the-human-consequences-of-mass-export-of-waste/
“What do you do if you’re the waste industry, collecting thousands of tons of mixed, contaminated, or multilayered plastics that—largely unknown to the general public—are impossible or unprofitable to recycle? You make it somebody else’s problem.
“Exporting waste is nothing new. Wastepaper, rags, and scrap metals have been traded for centuries. In Victorian London, for example, one ‘volcano-like’ dust heap that towered over King’s Cross in 1826 was shipped to Russia to be used in the rebuilding of Moscow after the devastating fire of 1812.
“Waste was and is material—like any commodity, it moves where the market is. But the global waste trade in its current form did not truly take off until the second half of the twentieth century, as consumers in the Global North began gorging on cheap goods made largely in Asia.
“The scale of Chinese recycling by the early 2000s is hard to even picture. In Wen’an, a formerly rural region south of Beijing, as many as 20,000 plastics processors—and an estimated 100,000 workers—set up shop in just a handful of villages, sorting, shredding, and melting plastic down to feed the country’s voracious manufacturing base.
“These recyclers lacked even basic safety equipment or environmental controls. Polluted wastewater filled the nearby streams, killing off the fish; the pollution was so severe that locals started to drink only bottled water.”
3. Solace and saudade. In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, perhaps we should cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-find-a-strange-solace-in-the-indifference-of-the-universe
“An elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a yearning that will never be fulfilled. It is a point never reached.
“This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to somehow be different than they are, and for the universe not to be indifferent to our cares and concerns.
“When combined with the longing for something absent, for something that simply can’t be, this is saudade, a Portuguese expression for a state akin to melancholic longing. A complex emotion where a melancholic grey seeps into the distant blue.
“Whereas nostalgia is a longing for something that once existed, a person or place or experience that lives in our memory, saudade encompasses a longing for something that never was, something not attainable.
“Rather than straining ourselves in a supreme effort to find answers, to achieve goals, to reach destinations, we should instead—and this is equally difficult—learn to wait. Waiting means making oneself receptive, and being ready to recognise a truth when it shows up.
“We must, in other words, stop searching for meaning or for the things that will satisfy our melancholic longings, and instead accept that all we can do is wait, with an open and ready heart, for such truths as there are to turn up.”
4. You have to care about Harvard. It creates the super-elite. The super-elite create America.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/raj-chetty-paper-harvard-ivy-league-elite/674803/
“New research confirms that these kids [at elite colleges] do indeed become elites. Compared with attending one of the best public colleges, attending an Ivy or another super-selective private school ‘amplifies the persistence of privilege across generations.’
“That means that just by changing their admissions policies, these colleges could make the country’s leadership more socioeconomically diverse.
“The first step is to eliminate legacy admissions, as Wesleyan did last month. This alumni preference acts as affirmative action for wealthy white kids.
“Second is getting rid of recruitment policies for athletes. Participating in a sport—including a niche, moneyed sport such as fencing or sailing—gives kids an admissions boost equivalent to earning an additional 200 points on the SAT, one study found.
“Third is putting less emphasis on super-high ‘non-academic’ ratings. ‘These admissions preferences tilt strongly in favor of the rich,’ the study noted.
“In addition, the economists find, schools could bolster their admissions preferences for low- and middle-income kids with excellent test scores. Such a policy would have an equally large impact on admissions and would improve the student body’s outcomes in the long term.”
• Study of elite college admissions data suggests being very rich is its own qualification.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html
5. Police say dogs help solve crimes. Little evidence supports that.
https://undark.org/2023/07/24/police-say-dogs-help-solve-crimes-little-evidence-supports-that/
“On Aug. 12, 2020, the mayor [of Salt Lake City] announced the city would suspend the use of [police] dogs to ‘engage with suspects,’ effective immediately.
“Salt Lake City’s abrupt decision did something else: It provided a natural experiment to test three hypotheses: whether police K9s protect officers, increase suspect injuries, or increase suspect resistance during felony arrests. The resulting data ultimately raise broader questions about longstanding police practices.
“…no published real-world data appears to substantiate that dogs actually make officers safer. And to critics, policing people with dogs not only lacks empirical and experimental validation more broadly, but also causes injuries that are sometimes so severe they require specialized trauma care not available in the emergency room.
“In a forthcoming law review, Wasilczuk argues that the criminal legal system systematically minimizes dog bites as a form of violence, and police often downplay or diminish the severity of injuries. Dogs are unpredictable, cannot be controlled with the precision of a baton or a Taser, and inflict life-threatening injuries.
“‘If you’re going to use such—what I think of as—a dehumanizing mechanism of force that creates very serious injuries, I want to see a justification for what that actually is achieving,’ Wasilczuk said.”
• Police dog bites Black man.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/police-dog-bites-black-man
“In 2011, the Chicago Tribune analyzed three years’ worth of data related to police dogs working in suburban Chicago. The analysis revealed how easy it is for certain cultural stereotypes—in this case, of drug-dealing Hispanics—to travel straight down the leash.
“When dogs alerted their handlers to the presence of drugs during traffic stops, the officers found drugs forty-four per cent of the time overall. In cases involving Latino drivers, that number fell to twenty-seven per cent. In other words, the dogs were erroneously implicating people of Hispanic descent far more frequently than other people.
“When this disparity was made public, the question naturally arose of whether handlers’ unconscious cues might be the cause? Paul Waggoner, a scientist at Auburn University's Canine Detection Research Institute, who was interviewed by the Tribune, provided the answer. A ‘big, resounding yes,’ he said.”
6. The vice of spice: confronting lead-tainted turmeric. Traders in Bangladesh used lead chromate to enhance the spice’s appearance. Then scientists and policymakers stepped in.
https://undark.org/2023/07/19/the-vice-of-spice-confronting-lead-tainted-turmeric/
“…an international group of researchers, including a research scientist at Stanford University worked together with Bangladesh’s Food Safety Authority to protect the country’s food supply from further lead exposure.
“The impacts of this intervention were significant, and summarized in a study published recently in the science journal Environmental Research. When researchers sampled and tested turmeric across the country before and after the intervention, the level of adulteration in this one study dropped from 47 percent to 0 percent.
“Fighting food fraud isn’t easy, and experts have a range of ideas on how to do it. Some approaches rely heavily on scientific testing while others work through undercover investigations. Regardless of the method, rooting out food fraud requires constant surveillance across long and complex supply chains.
“In this sense, Bangladesh’s success is noteworthy, said Roberts, who was not involved in the project to eliminate lead chromate from turmeric. ‘It’s unusual that this kind of campaign takes place, whether in developed or developing countries,’ he said, and there are lessons from this case study that could be applied to other commodities.
“The use of peuri [lead chromate] in turmeric is just one of many examples of food fraud. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, food fraud affects at least 1 percent of the global food industry and costs as much as $40 billion a year.”
7. We can’t afford to be climate doomers—Rebecca Solnit.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers
“It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win. Warnings are a valuable thing, given with the sense that there’s something we can do to prevent the anticipated outcome; prophesies assume the future is settled and there’s nothing we can do. But the defeatists often describe a present they assert are locking in the worst outcomes.
“The people putting out defeatist frameworks have more impact than outright deniers, not least because deniers are rightwingers and the right is already committed to climate inaction.
“Doomers discourage people who otherwise might act, so they’re working toward the worst outcomes they claim to dread. You would expect them to be quietly unmotivated, but a lot of them seem to have an evangelical passion for recruiting others to their views.
“Many things that were once true—that we didn’t have adequate solutions, that the general public wasn’t aware or engaged—no longer are. Outdated information is misinformation, and the climate situation has changed a lot in recent years.
“The physical condition of the planet—as this summer’s unprecedented extreme heat and flooding and Canada’s and Greece’s colossal fires demonstrate—has continued to get worse; the solutions have continued to get better; the public is far more engaged; the climate movement has grown, though of course it needs to grow far more; and there have been some significant victories as well as the incremental change of a shifting energy landscape.
“I wonder sometimes if it’s because people assume you can’t be hopeful and heartbroken at the same time, and of course you can. In times when everything is fine hope is unnecessary. Hope is not happiness or confidence or inner peace; it’s a commitment to search for possibilities.”
8. Vermeer, by Wisława Szymborska.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/11/vermeer/
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
Johannes Vermeer, CC BY-SA 4.0