AN OPEN LETTER TO MICROSOFT’S PR PEOPLE

rrt@wagged.com [Short for MS’s PR firm, Waggoner Edstrom]

Dear rrt,

I am wondering if you are aware of the dangers posed to Microsoft’s reputation by MSNBC’s decision to give air time to one of America’s most xenophobic, hateful, race-baiting and foul-mouthed liars.

I refer, as you proabably know, to MSNBC’s recent announcement that Michael Savage will have his own TV show on Saturday afternoons.

As a PR practitioner myself, I am prepared for the usual canned response: MSNBC is a separate entity under separate management and the views of its hosts in no way reflect our own and blah blah blah blah. The bottom line remains that this is Microsoft-NBC that is perpetrating this misdeed, and to believe there will be no fallout up there in Redmond is to swim in a sea of delusion.

Can Microsoft truly be at ease knowing that it, directly or indirectly, is hiring a man who says of immigrants, “You open the door to them and the next thing you know, they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control”? Do you really want this type of slanderer receiving a paycheck that has the Microsoft name on it?

Savage has made it quite clear what he thinks of “the degenerates on the left who want to sell Americans on the idea that homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, even sex with animals is normal.” I can’t believe that Microsoft, a company with many gay employees, could want to be associated with this insanity. Do you see something good about this, something positive? Am I missing something — is there a way this kind of publicity might be of some benefit?

Never one to keep his prejudices and loathings to himself, Savage’s litany of crimes is long and detailed. And now he’ll be spouting his poison with the MSNBC logo over his head. That’s half Microsoft, half NBC.

Please take a moment to think about it. Microsoft has had its ups and its down when it comes to PR. Does it really need this rotting albatross tied around its neck?

Warmest regards,

Richard (aka, The Peking Duck)

[quotes courtesy of Eschaton]

I read with a true sense of wonder Orcinus’ enlightening and alarming post on the use of xenophobic “transmitters” to destabilize the Clinton presidency. He captures so beautifully that which is repellent over on the far right; their ability to control the flow of their poison so that it seeps into the mainstream is nothing less than terrifying. Orcinus is a must-read, and all I can say is Thank you. (Edited at 4:37 p.m. CST)

One China, One Party

The 16th Party Congress of China’s Communist Party has begun, and the airwaves are jammed with coverage of the ritual. The newspapers and other media have assigned the bulk of their staffs to cover this annual circus. I watch bemused as hundreds of reporters sit there listening studiously, taking notes and asking questions, as though the whole thing meant something.

This is one of the great “bizarreries” of life here in China. Everyone hates their government. Everyone. They laugh at it, curse it, sigh about it and work fiendishly to get around it. It is simply a necessary evil. (This is not to say that they hate their country. They do not. The Chinese are fervently patriotic and love their country.)

Because The Government is monolithic, the corruption is everywhere. Anytime something needs to be done that involves a government agency, “special fees” need to be handed over. It is just a fact of life. There is no one to complain to. And this is exactly why the Congress is little more than farce: For all the talk of the Party following “the will of the people” (an oft-repeated phrase) there is no real or meaningful representation.

To give the current leaders credit, there are signs that it is loosening the reigns, and allowing a slight modicum of criticism to be heard in the media — very slight. It is also slowly changing its educational system, moving away from learning by rote to the more inquisitive, problem-solving method employed in the West. But this is a matter of necessity, not Liberalism — if China is going to compete on a global scale, it requires an army of employees who can think for themselves and manage and create, and not simply do as they are told. (At the moment, nearly every enterprise hires foreigners and Hong Kong Chinese for mid- and upper-management positions, and if that’s ever going to change the Mainlanders simply must learn to approach problems and challenges in a new way, instead of simply asking the person above to decide for them. This is not to imply they aren’t smart — they may well be the smartest people on the planet.) The government is well aware of the inherent dangers of encouraging people to think, and it will be interesting to see how far this actually goes.

Have to keep it short, but I’ll try to give periodic updates on the glorious Party Congress.

Eschaton today lashes out at MSNBC’s misguided and abhorrent decision to boost ratings by hiring talk radio Nazi Michael Savage for his own Saturday afternoon show. The term Nazi is thrown around way too frivolously and frequently, but in this case it is actually legitimate. Eschaton ends the piece with a suggestion to email MSNBC (nightly@nbc.com ) with your thoughts. In the Comments to this post, one reader suggests, “Let’s not forget the ‘MS” in MSNBC. Maybe a few emails to Bill Gates and MS’s PR might get them thinking.” I like that idea. I believe his email is bgates@microsoft.com.
UPDATE: You can also email Mister Softee’s PR people at rrt@wagged.com

I was really moved when I received an email today from someone who read my post on the death of Roy Kessler. He too was one of Roy’s best friends, and I remember Roy telling me about him. Memories. Scattered pictures….

Super-bloggers periodically announce how many page views their sites have garnered, proof-positive of their ever-swelling flocks. Today I have to do the opposite: traffic here has decreased steadily since a week ago, when my blogging screeched to a near-stop, my work consuming all my free time including evenings and weekends. This should go on until March 15. I’ll squeeze in a post or two when the boss isn’t looking, but they’ll be few, far-between and slender.

Out to Lunch

I have been working on a huge project for one of China’s rickety state-owned-enterprises (how can they afford to spend so much $$$ on marketing?) and have been forced to blog lightly lately, and probably won’t get back into it full-time until the second half of March.

Interesting and unusual article in today’s WSJ by Dan Rather on his recent face-to-face encounter with Saddam. Interesting because Western reporters rarely get so close to the Butcher of Baghdad. Unusual because its theme is Saddam’s focus on one thing alone, his survival. No, that’s not unusual. But the fact that Rather doesn’t bring up this obvious question is: If Saddam is so hellbent on his own survival, why is he dragging himself and his country into a situation that literally guarantees his downfall? It does not compute.

My life in Beijing is improving with the weather. And to my utter dismay, after seven treatments at the local hospital my arm actually seems to be recovering after four months of misery. There are some people I miss so badly I can cry, but I at least feel that I can make it through the next six months alive. There were moments when I truly wondered.

Michael Kinsley has a way of getting to the heart of the matter that I truly envy, of taking an impossibly complex subject and translating it into bite-sized pieces that even the feebleminded like me can readily grasp:

Like generals, anti-war protesters are always fighting the last war. Or in this case, depending on how you count, the war-before-last. The methods, the style, the arguments, the very language of objecting to war are still stuck in Vietnam. That’s why the protests of the past couple of weeks have seemed so lame and retro. The Vietnam debate was primarily a moral one. Although the cost of victory became an important factor as the years went on, it was not the main factor turning people against that war. Americans ultimately decided it was a victory we shouldn’t even want. In the case of Iraq, by contrast, few people think the goal of overturning Saddam Hussein is immoral. If we knew for sure it would be as easy and cheap as the administration hopes, few folks would object.

Ouch.

This type of highly ironic “fooled-you” article seems to be much in vogue at the moment. The formula is simple: quote a famous politician saying absolutely shocking things about a hot topic (like Iraq), tell how horrified and indignant his political arch-enemy is at what he’s saying, then hammer the reader with the truth — that the shocking things were actually said by the arch-enemy in regard to a similar topic in the past. In this case, it makes Tom DeLay look like a total fool and a hypocrite (not that that’s so hard to do).

Is this a legitimate form of journalism? It works, but if you don’t read down to the end of the article you could end up with a serious misimpression….