Is diplomacy a kind of public relations? If you read John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's new book, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, that's what you'd conclude. Jeffrey St. Clair, one of the editors over at CounterPunch wrote a review of the new book called: "War Pimps." Here's a taste:
To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spin meisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was either shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers who Powell tapped as Undersecretary of State in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was the grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses Ogilvey and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
Stauber and Rampton run a website called PR Watch. Reading the review, I ran across an interesting word: claque. A claque is a group of people hired to clap at a show. Well, the ancient Romans hired professional mourners to wail at their funerary rites.
Posted by jim at August 16, 2003 02:12 PM | TrackBack