Dry Vodka Martini
- 1 shot, journalism
- 1 dash, persuasion,
- 1 ice filled shaker
- stir in shaker, pour, then enjoy!
Salty Big Apples
Mayor Bloomberg and NYC health officials in his administration are leading a charge for a voluntary restriction on salt usage in city restaurants. The NYT takes a multiple source effect approach here, offering the expert insights of several experts while the WSJ offers one man’s opinion. I find the NYT nutrition experts, Walter Willett and Michael Jacobson interesting from a persuasion angle. Willett is a Harvard public health professor and Jacobson runs the Center for Science in the Public Interest (guess their positions?). Both, however, use the same persuasion ploy of Global Warming activists: “Consensus” science declares Salt Bad. Do your own Medline search to learn that advocates, oops, scientists like Willett and Jacobson have a definition of scientific consensus that is closer to “Me and the other Smart Guys at the Cool Table” than to “general agreement or concord; harmony” or “An opinion or position reached by a group as a whole.” When your work becomes a part of your self concept and self esteem it is difficult to separate fact from personality.
Making More with More
I watched the famed 1958 NFL Championship game as a little kid. Back then, football broadcasts lasted about 2 hours and were a rocking good time. If you’re under 30 you don’t believe me because nowadays NFL games are 3 hours long and riddled with ads and silly technology. How could you broadcast a football game in just two hours?
A piece searing of investigative journalism at the WSJ proves it. They clocked last weekend’s playoff games and found that the football action (from the snap of the ball to the whistle blowing it down) averaged 11 minutes. Eleven minutes. That’s 10 + 1 minutes of actual contact. And that’s no misprint. An NFL game is 60 minutes and that 60 minutes boils down to 11 minutes of play with the remaining 49 minutes devoted to everything else but playing. Now, you can understand how it is possible (and exciting) to make an NFL broadcast run 2 hours. But not nearly as profitable. It’s a great persuasion trick.
Stymied Genius – The Icon of Marketing

Another WSJ article outlines the marketing success various media players are making with Nikola Tesla. Tesla’s story has been fashioned, worked, molded, squeezed, stretched, and fabricated into movies, computer games, and electric cars. He is used often as the abused and misunderstood genius against the foil of that famous old fuddy-duddy Thomas Alva Edison who invented those dustbin of history devices like the phonograph, the movie camera, and incandescent light bulbs, AND the electric power grid that drives most of the world today with its Earth raping coal mines and Atmosphere strangling emissions.
Tesla failed to achieve much market or intellectual success back in the day, but if you are weird enough, ambiguous enough and wait long enough, some badly educated, but highly ambitious marketer will repair your image and give you the fictional success you never achieved in nonfiction. For a flaming takedown of similar intellectuals whose lives betrayed their reputations, read Paul Johnson’s aggressive book, “The Intellectuals.” He pummels the intellectual behind the icon from Rousseau to Marx to Hemingway, Sartre, and Lillian Hellman. (I’d give Sartre a pass if only for his line: “Hell is other people” or “L’enfer, c’est les autres” for us haughty, effete types who took high school French. Mr. Johnson is less forgiving.) Hey, if you are badly educated, but ambitious, you might want to read the book to find your next icon! I’d think that Rousseau would be a great empty vessel for filling with your inspiration.
Less Is More and the Say-Do Gap

Karl Rove continues his series on killing Democrats with Truth, Perspective, and Facts at the WSJ. Mr. Rove’s primary persuasion tactic seems to be the Say-Do Gap. He frequently focuses simply on what Democrats (and sometimes Republicans) Say, but don’t Do, then pounds politely on the Gap. Look this guy made George W. Bush into the political success he is – ignore Rove (or Bush) at your peril. I don’t have to take anyone’s side on this. He knows what he doing, so listen up.
My surprise is just how simple and direct Rove’s focus is. He doesn’t typically clown around with complex arguments, PowerPoint slides, and colorful charts. What did you say? What did you do? That’s it. And, Rove doesn’t have to exaggerate, invent, squeeze, stretch (how did I put it with the Tesla thing?), you know, make it up too much. Consider just this one example from Rove about Mr. Obama:
During his campaign, Mr. Obama pledged that any negotiations on health-care legislation would be broadcast on C-SPAN, “so the American people can see what the choices are,” and not conducted behind closed doors. “Such public negotiations,” he said, were “the antidote” to “overcoming the special interests and the lobbyists who . . . will resist anything that we try to do.”
Rove then follows the What Did You Say? with several observations about What Did You Do? that show the Gap. A skeptic or an opponent can find a million ways to jail house lawyer this, but with any uncertain or uncommitted voter, the Say-Do Gap here is obvious. Rove has always struck me as a persuader who follows the Rule: Less Is More. Stated another way, Keep It Simple, Stupid.
And again to those of you rolling your eyes over Rove, remember, All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.
Persuasion with Numbers

The great line is “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” but the research tends to indicate that stories beat numbers by a mile in the overwhelming majority of persuasion cases. Yet, many persuaders insist on finding numbers for their Arguments. Like Nicholas Kristof today on international aid to Haiti. He uses numbers (money) to make the case and chooses this way to make the US look like pikers compared to everyone else.
The United States contributed $2.32 per American to Haiti over the last three years for which we have data (about 80 cents a year). That’s much less than other countries do, even though Haiti is in our hemisphere and has historic close ties to the U.S. For example, Canada contributed $12.13 per person to Haiti over three years, and Norway sent $8.44. Other countries that contribute more, per capita, to Haiti than the U.S. are Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Spain and Belgium.
So Kristof uses per capita numbers to make Canada look 6 times more helpful and Norway 4 times more helpful than the US. Of course, the money hits Haiti as a total amount and when you look at the totals the US, of course, looks a bit better, as Kristof, oddly enough, notes.
True, there are more Americans, so collectively our aid amounts to more than one-quarter of the pot in Haiti, but that’s only because we’re such a big country. Given the per capita sums, we have no right to be bragging about our generosity in Haiti.
Why is “per capita” the persuasion standard Kristof wants to use? Why is that more compelling than the total? Why even get into a numbers-based Argument here? The disaster in Haiti is overwhelmed with stories, horrible stories, powerful stories, compelling stories. And Kristof tries to generate more contributions with numbers Arguments? And bad numbers Arguments at that. You persuade like this when no one is thinking critically, either you or your receivers.
And, of course, you fail. But, you feel good doing it and in so doing you violate the Billy Crystal/Fernando Lamas Persuasion Principle: It is better to look good than to feel good!
Where’s the Beef?

In 1984 Walter Mondale destroyed Gary Hart during the Democrat primary race with the mocking line from a popular Wendy’s commercial: Where’s the beef?
Today the NYT perilously channels Gary Hart with a feature on how to have a burger without the beef and without irony.
And why is so much content at the NYT seemingly presented as somebody else’s blog? Is no one except Maureen Dowd on the payroll? Does anyone actually have a desk in the building? It’s like the New York Times is only a symbol, a brand, and no longer an institution, a building, a place for speaking Truth to Power.
I’m A Journalist with People Magazine

In the classic movie, “The Big Chill,” Jeff Goldblum played a sweet, ambitious, but clueless buddy who always introduced himself as a “journalist with People magazine” with a serious and deadly demeanor. Today it seems that people who write about sports think and act the same way.
The Shutdown Corner at Yahoo spreads the word about a piece of searing investigative journalism on the case of NFL wideout Marvin Harrison. You might recall that Harrison was involved in a case where a man was shot to death on the streets of Philadelphia. Harrison was not charged with any crime and has since retired from the NFL.
The piece of searing investigative journalism comes from that searing investigative team at . . . and no, I’m not kidding . . . at GQ Magazine. That’s right. The next Mike Wallace writes for GQ and he’s got the real deal on Mr. Harrison, at least according to the Yahoo who writes at Shutdown Corner. If you read the Searing Investigative Report without your critical facilities engaged, it looks bad for Mr. Harrison. But, if you go High WATT about what you read, you realize that it has more in common with Oliver Stone’s overwrought screenplay, “JFK,” than Mr. Wallace’s worst piece of searing investigative journalism.
The GQ article is essentially an extremely well written case of what if this is true and that is true and if Mickey put the gun under the cushion then Red couldn’t have driven the getaway car, but the Blonde never lies, does she? It is a constructed fantasy that would border on libel if it was not so clearly untrue.
Outro
Perhaps it’s time for another Martini. Dry. Stirred.