“Today is Friendsday” announced Orange in their ad campaign last week. Having just finished the Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, a book that I refererred to earlier, this ad addresses me in a completely different way than before. Flat Earth News is the first book in a long time that opened up my eyes to looking at the world in a new way. I didn’t naively think before that whatever one reads in the newspaper is true, but I didn’t expect journalism to be in such a bad shape.

Well written, packed with examples and insights, the book is enjoyable reading. The best thing is that it seems to be objective, not selling the authors narrow point of view as the general truth as some other books tend to do. The writer has decades of experience in journalism, and has worked in a number of quality newspapers in UK and elsewhere. He knows the industry inside-out, and has access to some of the most amazing true stories.

The reason why Orange’s ad caught my eye, refers to one of the examples that Nick Davies highlights as PR agencies’ ways of injecting marketing and corporate promotions into journalism. Inventing a day dedicated to a cause allows the company to use the invented day in their ad campaign, newspapers writing about the day, and finally people buying the goods and services that the company offers. Davies lists, for example, that the first week of August 2007 had at least 48 different PR generated days attached to it in the US alone, including the National Watermelon Day, the National Choclate Chip Day, the National Fresh Breath Day and the National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. UK has also had a telecom related PR stunt before, when BT launched the “chatter day” already before mobile phones even existed.

My favorite topic, the environmetal discussion, is also covered. Like Bjorn Lomborg, Nick Davies also recognizes that both proponents and opponents use exaggeration when selling their side of the story. But unlike Lomborg, Davies also offers stories from both sides.

A hair-raising example of the oil companies’ lobby campaign was the way for them to fabricate consumer interest groups and scientific initiatives. While Greenpeace and Friends of Earth have been (rightly) accused of sexying up their press releases, ExxonMobil alone spent 15.8 milion dollars on 43 different fabricated interest groups, one of which is a list of 18,000 “scientists” who dispute the theory of global warming. Actually, most of these 18,000 individuals were not scientists (although some of theme were), but students, interns, and fake names like Perry Mason or someone from the Spice Girls. The first and biggest of ExxonMobile groups is the Global Climate Coalition who spent 13 million dollars on TV ads persuading the american people to oppose Kyoto conference. Others are “think tanks” like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, others fringe groups like the Congress of Racial Equality who staged a protest at the Exxon shareholder meeting opposing environmental protests.

Other oil companies like Shell and BP chose another route. Instead of trying to create pseudo-groups and pseudo-events, they opted a strategy of ‘camouflage’, greenwashing their brand and participating in the discussion with those worried about global warming. They both have resigned from the original Global Climate Coalition because the anti-environmental image was hurting them especially among women drivers. BP hired the PR manager from Friends of Earth, and worked together with Greenpeace to get endorsements from the environmental groups. BP promised to cut 10% of emissions from their own activities, but did not assign any campaigns to reduce emissions from the actual polluters, their customers. The Finnish Neste Oil is conducting a similar campaign currently with their “natural” palm oil based products.

A research published in 2007 by the Union of Concerned Scientists called this oil industry’s stunt as the ‘most sophisticated and succesful misinformation campaign since Big Tobacco misled the public’. Needless to say, Flat Earth News has its own section for how the press has helped turn cigarettes from a cancer generating addiction into a sign of freedom and independence, especially targetting women.

Other fascinating stories about how falshehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media include the (non-)story about Y2K, 9/11, Al-Qaeda, Iraq, UK politics, NATO, and many others.

The emergence of blogs like this, and other citzen journalism tools are feeding into this phenomenon, of course. The only thing I can do is to try to use intelligence when selecting which stories to promote here, not contribute to nonsenese, and try to bring something personal or a new angle into the recycled stories.