The Suit is Back! (Paul Graham article)

I often find Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, interesting to read. I just came across an older article of his on the breaking news that suits are back in corporate America, as reported in April 2005 in the New York Times. And as previously reported in February, March, June and September 2004 and September 2003 and February, April and November 2002. So who cares? Here at Taken For Ranted World Headquarters, our staff of one has shown up to work in a suit, let’s see, zero times in his life. He has shown up to work in a tee-shirt or bathrobe approximately… 2783 times. So who cares about suits? Well, PR firms for the garment industry, and that’s what Graham’s article is about. He runs down how it is that the PR firms drive mainstream media reporting and how that explains why there is so much inexplicable crap in most mainstream reporting, the New York Times included.
In particular, he raises an important point that I’m always trying to explain: bias in reporting is less about the the biases within the article, than in the bias that determines what gets covered in the first place. The piece of the puzzle that I didn’t understand so well is the dominant role that PR firms play in directing reporting. Of course you know that they are trying to get positive stories out there, but the extent to which they really make the news is astonishing and Graham has some great examples.

None of that likely comes as a surprise to anyone who is reading here. What’s fun about Graham’s article is that he gives some tips on how to use the internet to identify articles that have been fed to the media by PR firms and, perhaps more importantly, to guess at who the client is. As he says:

Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it’s straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more “experts” to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. [5] When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men’s Wearhouse.

Enough of my blabbering – go check out Graham’s far better article called The Submarine

Still here? While I’m giving out reading assignments, Phil Agre another guy that I find often worth reading. His Red Rock Eater News Service had the original (as far as I know) debunking of the “Al Gore claims to have invented the internet” crap, demonstrating that this whole thing was a right-wing smear campaign to discredti Gore, which it did, of course (as I write this, that article is offline with promises to get it running in August, but Seth Finkelstein has a page of links on the Al Gore thing that is more up to date)

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