Mandates Considered

Consider this exchange, in the Marketing Department of any company large enough to have one:

“How’s that market survey coming on the new and improved Widget?”, asks Sue, Director of Marketing.

“Well, the responses are all in and have been tallied. Of the respondents who participated, 51.4% of them responded favorably”, responds Bill, Marketing Manager for Widgets.

“Great!”, Sue explodes, “A clear mandate for the product!”

Sound reasonable? Of course not. At 51.4%, no marketing person or department in their right mind would even consider attempting to bring such a product to market. And no one would claim a clear mandate.

However, this president does claim a mandate based on the November election. Of those who voted in the 2004 presidential election, 51.4% voted for George Bush. Based on that percentage, he continues to claim a “mandate” for his administration’s policies from the first term, and that those policies should be continued and expanded in the second term.

Now, consider this alternative exchange at the same firm:

“How’s that market survey coming on the new and improved Widget?”, asks Sue, Director of Marketing.

“Well, the responses are all in and have been tallied. Of the respondents who participated, 51.4% of them responded favorably”, responds Bill, Marketing Manager for Widgets.

“That’s all?”, Sue replies incredulously. “But this is all we have. We have no other products in the pipeline. Without this, we have nothing to be recognized for; nothing to be remembered for.”

“We have what we have, and there are at least some people who like it. The other thing we have is the ability to blanket the market with our message. Who knows, if we say it enough times, maybe people will begin to believe that we are the best option out there for Widgets and they will say to themselves, ’We have to buy that‘,” Bill offers up.

“I like the way you think. That just might work..........”

Sound far-fetched? Sound ludicrous? It’s not. It’s the modus operandi for this administration. They trot out as many people from as many different departments that might have an opinion and they all say the same thing in an effort to get people to believe whatever the issue of the moment is - the War on Terror, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Axis of Evil, the Imminent Demise of Social Security.

Why do we buy into this? Because that’s all we’re fed by our mainstream media outlets. Investigative reporting of the type that exposed Watergate simply doesn’t exist in this country any more. As Bob Schieffer wrote in his memoir "This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV" , once the mainstream media shifted its collective thinking about news gathering and reporting as a fundamental need and a cost of doing business, to just another part of the network that must be self-sustaining and generate revenues to at least break even, true investigative news reporting disappeared.

So now we get the news bites, the sound bits, the extreme stories that the news organizations see as being probably to bring in viewers and prop up the ratings. In a sports bar I was in recently in California, the hard news of the afternoon was the high-speed chase being played out on the LA freeway system. People in the bar sat and watched the TVs - ALL of which had been switched over to the chase - for over two hours, commenting on and rooting for or against the runaway driver in their own ways.

How much money was spent on fuel for the helicopters covering the action? What other news stories could have been under investigation using that money? We’ll never know, because the networks knew they could sell advertising time at a premium, because people all over the area were like those people in that bar - sitting and watching the action.

So how do we change the situation? How do we, as a society, demand better? For starters, let’s stop being a nation of rubber-neckers, looking for the next bloody auto accident to gawk at. Demand better from wherever it is you get your news. Below are some ideas:

• Turn Fox News off - turn BBC News on; or try the English language version of Al Jazeera on-line news - www.english.aljazeera.net. (On second thought, just turn Fox off altogether).
  
  
• Put down the Star - pick up a copy of the Financial Times or the English language version of Le Monde and see how the rest of the world views itself and we Americans.
  
  
• Change the channel from “Everybody Loves Raymond” to “C-Span” in order to see how the Congress really operates. I‘ll admit, it can be dead boring at times. At others, it’s actually quite enlightening.
  
  
• Better yet, turn off the TV and read a book. Not Tom Clancy or a bodice-ripper; try a historical account of the Vietnam war, a book about religious intolerance, or a textbook on marketing in order to better understand how those messages you see all around you every day are designed and used to influence your opinion.
  
  
• Instead of going to www.whitehouse.com, try www.whitehouse.gov, or the web site for either major political party (or any of the smaller “fringe” parties). See what they have to say. Read their platforms; try to understand their positions.
  
  

Bottom line - become better informed. Don’t believe everything you see on TV or in print. Take in as many different points of view as you can, and decide for yourself. Don’t become anyone’s shill - speak your mind about your opinions, carefully considered and arrived at by you and you alone.