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Boosterism beyond critique

The irony about that headline is that athletic boosters, who actively grease the wheels if not the palms, are the most willing and ready to weigh-in and express disapproval if not remedies. Cue the irony and the facts we hate.

One thing – and reader, there are many – that you pick up from working at the interface between PR and journalism is how aware you become of the vulnerabilities of the former and constraints of the latter, the need to go right up to the line between without misleading or insulting anyone. Especially yourself. Everyone who has done this work understands it well, but can misunderstand the notion of ‘protecting the institution,’ where we internalize and suppress certain things about what we know, perhaps under the illusion of self-preservation even at the expense of the broader endeavor.* We don’t want to think this is how these things happen or how they work – a little too much agency perhaps, but we watch them unfold nonetheless.

So the image up top. Occasionally we need to detain the messenger for questioning. The boosterism of local newspapers, heightened into absurdity by conglomeration and then into farce in the role as any state’s singular media outlet, provides a hothouse for particular dragons. To maintain a hands-off approach clear of financial conflict but convenient about loyalties begs questions out into the exoplanetary realm. What are the incentives to comfort or afflict? The information plot as essentially promotional fails on its own terms. Gather at the Derrida but what tensions remain in that line, or are they bled away into headlines about headlines? Who’s headlines were these, anyway? And then the egregious mention of ‘notoriety’ as though the product of some unknown force. They’re doing us a favor by being so clumsy about it.

There’s a lot to remember, granted. But let’s do better. The extent to which the word sequence ‘data center’ is simply deployed as a political, economic, and environmental gravity unto itself would be an excellent place to start.

* one gets moved up into crisis communications and comes to understand the same problem in a different way.

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How Slow Can You Go?

This Wall Street Journal article uses an example I’ve brought up before to say that guilt is the route to greener behavior. No, it isn’t.

Washington, D.C., imposed a five-cent tax on every disposable bag, paper or plastic, handed out at any retail outlet in the city that sells food, candy or liquor, effective Jan 1. But more important than the extra cost was something more subtle: No one got bags automatically anymore. Instead, shoppers had to ask for them—right in front of their fellow customers.

The result? Retail outlets that typically use 68 million disposable bags per quarter handed out 11 million bags in the first quarter of this year and fewer than 13 million bags in the second quarter, according to the district’s Office of Tax and Revenue. That may help explain why volunteers for the city’s annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup day in mid-April pulled 66% fewer plastic bags from the Anacostia River than they did last year.

District Councilman Tommy Wells doesn’t believe it is the nominal cost that’s keeping shoppers from using bags, but rather the expectation—made clear in a very public way in every transaction—that they could make do without. “It’s more important,” he concludes, “to get in their heads than in their pocketbooks.”

This is a decent example that draws the wrong conclusions. Yes, there are measurable returns from using pricing to effect behavior – and we definitely should use them. But the green aspect of this is about as lame as you can possibly expect. Using guilt isn’t the best way to get anyone to do anything and so should be given no quarter here. Peer pressure is perhaps a different story. But invoking guilt makes this just another marketing campaign destined to lose steam after a while – or worse, avail people of a work around. Because we will find ways to feel good about who we are and what we do, even if denial is one of them. And this is a far more powerful force than any guilt that can be summoned to make you use less, walk more, take a train, turn someone instead of something on at night.

Here is our greatest possibility. We’re interested in sexy and are powerless before it. So when slow is sexy (deja, already!), and the two get connect (Hook up!*) in people’s minds, we’ve got a renewable hold on being green. We just don’t yet think about it that way.

But, take your time, fer chrissakes. With everything.

* Good grief – the  bus and billboard campaigns literally write themselves – a young man, a nipple: “Turn it off – and Turn her On!”