Decoding PR in the News

People who are in the PR business generally watch and read and listen to media coverage differently from the way other people do it. We understand that when the news covers a story, that's exactly what they're doing most of the time, covering a story. So we look at a story the way it's presented in the news like it's a tarp that's draped over something, and then we try to deduce what is underneath that story. So you learn how to decipher, for example, slogans or statements by government officials or people in business to understand what they really mean. We sort of reverse engineer the way a story is presented or statements that politicians make by looking at what the desired effect is, what reaction they're trying to elicit, what message they're trying to convey.

And that sort of tells us what information they are spinning or interpreting or omitting. And we sort of perform like an x-ray of the story as it's presented in the media to see what the skeleton of information actually looks like. That's like the reverse process of what our job is. Our job is our client comes to us with a skeleton of information or a skeleton of what their objective is, and then we build on top of that skeleton a story, a narrative, an interpretation until finally the body or the form that we create maybe bears almost no resemblance to the original information that was given to us or doesn't reflect in any way their objective, but it achieves their objective. So take for instance the slogan Malaysian Malaysia.

The objective of this slogan is very, simple, but it's a very controversial objective and politically dangerous to address directly. And that objective is very simply to end these special accommodations or affirmative action for Malays. This slogan is absolutely a brilliant piece of gaslighting and manipulation. No one can just outright reject the concept of a Malaysian Malaysia because objecting to that concept would be oxymoronic to begin with. Malaysia can only be Malaysian.

It wouldn't make any sense for it to be anything else. But the point of getting you to accept this concept is to then massage you into accepting the details of what they mean by it, which again is to get you to accept the suspension of the special, support granted by the government to the Malays in their ancestral homeland even while other ethnicities in Malaysia enjoy higher household incomes than the Malays. It's a sort of covert persuasive technique whereby you can say, well, if you accept this in principle, then you have to accept that in practice. Now in this particular example, it's a bit conspicuous because the implication of the slogan is directed exclusively at malaise. In other words, it's implied that the malaise are the only obstacle stopping the creation of a truly Malaysian Malaysia.

In other words, because of their special entitlements. I mean, no one is saying we need to create a Malaysian Malaysia in terms of hiring practices so that a Malay wouldn't have to apply for 13 jobs before getting a callback while a Chinese Malaysian only has to apply for two. Now as I said, of course, the debate over Malay entitlements is an incredibly controversial topic. But if you wanna tackle it, you can't do it sneakily. This topic may be a minefield in Malaysia, but it's a minefield that you're not gonna be able to get to the other side of by trying to glide around the outside of it.

And that's exactly what the Malaysian Malaysia, slogan attempts to do. It's trying to reach a successful conclusion to the debate without having the debate. No matter how much you try to obscure your objective by talking about racism or divisiveness or exclusivity or inclusivity or special preferential treatment and so on and so on, at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to stop the entitlements for malaise by some sort of sleight of hand with nobody noticing. You're gonna have to deal with this topic directly at some point. So while, yes, indeed it may be a brilliant PR tactic, ultimately, it's not going to be able to achieve the intended objective.

Now another example of what I'm talking about would be when, German chancellor Scholz tells the German public on national television, we have to be ready to sacrifice our prosperity for democracy and our values. Of course, what he's actually saying is that the German people are about to face severe economic hardship whether they like it or not. But if they object, they are immoral traitors. It's a similarly manipulative piece of gaslighting. So again, I'm making this video to let you know that like a PR professional, you have to learn how to see through the layers of manipulation and rhetoric down to the bone of what's actually being said.

Because generally speaking, anything that is being given to you sugarcoated and in fancy packaging, it's something that you would not have accepted otherwise.