The clue is in the name Public Relations. If "massaging" the truth to make it appear better than it is, and changing focus from the real problematic things to positive things isn't the job I don't know what is.
You can call it hyperbole and good marketing, but then it also goes to the extent of PR after oil spills, tailings damns wiping out villages and poisoning or risking the health of your own workforce, like for example Dupont and C8.
It's hard not to be cynical about PR because you cannot do it effectively without creating / propagating a distorted view of the truth.
But then again, the reason it still essentially needs to exist is because there is no universal truth, no universal sense of good or bad. So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes.
Anyway in spite of my ranting and bias, really I'd conclude it's a necessary evil, and the majority of the industry is innocuous and just trying to showcase the work and values of their clients...
Also newspaper editors are a huge part to blame, when these days loads of press releases make it to print almost unedited (and as has happened to myself and others I know, the bits they changed were even more wrong - including in national level newspaper)... Fact checking claims and sources is so lacking, especially in fast modern news cycle.
> But then again, the reason it still essentially needs to exist is because there is no universal truth, no universal sense of good or bad.
That may be true to some extent if you really push the philosophy angle, but I'd say real world is much simpler than that. There's stuff that happened, and there are consequences - just because the consequences may not be fully computable in the amount of time and effort anyone is willing to expend on it, doesn't mean truth suddenly becomes fuzzy. The territory is sharp, it's just the map that's uncertain. But for that, the proper words are "I'm not sure", not "I have my truth, you have yours".
> So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes.
And because of what I wrote above, I despise both. Yes, I understand the practical necessity - one side lies because the other side lies too, both stuck in a feedback loop. But I'd still say both are behaving unethically. Two wrongs don't make a right.
I subscribe to the viewpoint I've best seen phrased in an old blog post[0]: "promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires".
> I'd say real world is much simpler than that. There's stuff that happened, and there are consequences - just because the consequences may not be fully computable in the amount of time and effort anyone is willing to expend on it, doesn't mean truth suddenly becomes fuzzy. The territory is sharp, it's just the map that's uncertain.
Oh but it definitely DOES mean that truth becomes fuzzy. There is NO territory we can meaningfully talk about outside our subjective maps. Likewise, there is no such thing as "absolute truth" - and I do mean this on a very practical, day-to-day level, not in an abstract philosophical way.
The sooner we accept and embrace this, the sooner we can move away from "I'm right and you're wrong" to "let's make progress on what actually matters to the parties involved".
One challenge with this is that people do not seem to respond to nuance and potential indications so much as definite conclusions pointing toward specific actions.
I wonder if part of the problem is people do not have time or cultural persuasion to enjoy philosophical consideration of matters as they do tawdry headlines.
> the proper words are "I'm not sure", not "I have my truth, you have yours".
In this I agree. Looking back on it now, if I some other school had already put in any sort of turbine, I would have looked for another headline.
At the time, our group wasn't aware of this other school's efforts. It felt like we were all over cleantech in New England, so the dispute was a genuine surprise.
I pay close attention to the misuse of facts or lack of context around facts now. I try to look for the truth even if it isn't the way I might want it to be.
When I find out the truth is counter to the editor's headline on news, I get upset enough to try and pinpoint where the spin is coming from.
Or, as it is called in English: "lying by omission". Indeed such an idiom does not exist in Dutch. Which raises interesting questions that take us into Sapir-Whorf territory..
