Human Rights Organisations are PR Agencies

This is gonna be interesting again from a PR perspective. This is an article published by a human rights organization here in Malaysia, and they were responding to a statement by a government official talking about not insulting Islam. They were saying, yes, we agree that, Islam shouldn't be insulted. However, corruption by Muslims in the government is a greater insult to Islam than anything that anyone could say against Islam. Okay.

See, that's a nice little PR twist to use. But then here's the interesting thing. They go on to talk about, for example, other countries that are prosecuting people for, corruption and saying that other non Muslim countries are making progress against corruption. And they use the example of China, which actually executes people who are, charged with corruption. Now I'm not sure if a human rights organization wants to take the position of advocating summary executions of people who've been charged with the corruption.

And then they go on to say, look at the docket in court and see all of the people who are being charged with and prosecuted for corruption or who have been convicted of corruption in Malaysia, and most of them are Muslim, Malay, either politicians or civil servants. This is PR. You have to understand that because that's one way of presenting that information. The other way of presenting that information is if you're gonna say that a lot of people are getting, prosecuted in court, well, who are they getting prosecuted by? You're saying that most of the civil servants and politicians and judges and courts that most of those are Malay Muslims.

Well, those are also the ones who are prosecuting them. Those are the ones who are investigating. Those are the ones who are arresting. Those are the ones who are punishing. So it just depends on what you wanna emphasize.

These cases represent Malaysia fighting corruption. The fact that these cases exist, the fact that these people are being prosecuted is also a positive sign that Malaysia is taking corruption seriously. The job of a human rights organization first of all, a human rights organization is basically a PR organization. That's what they do. They put out press releases.

They put out media statements. They don't do much else. And their job as a PR agency is to be perpetually dissatisfied. Because as a human rights organization, the only way that they can continue to exist and can can continue to get funding is by continuously emphasizing how bad things are. They have to focus on what they see as, human rights violations or human rights abuses.

Whether they are or not, it's another matter. So a human rights organization is a PR organization whose job is to always talk about how bad things are. That's what their function is. That's how they get funding. But whenever they put out statements, you have to look at the information that's in there and realize that they're spinning it.

They're spinning the information, presenting the information in such a way as to justify their existence as an organization. In other words, always to make things look bad. Just understand when you read something to try to look at it critically and know that a a very large percentage of what appears in the newspaper, what appears in the press is straight PR. It's just public relations marketing. It's they're getting it even sometimes directly from people like me who write the stories, who write the narratives, then submit it to the press, to reporters, to columnists, to whoever, to print it in their name to control the narratives.

That's what the media does now. And those narratives are largely being provided to the media by PR agencies, PR professionals.