Tuesday, February 4th - Ethical Questions about Issue Management

The most interesting idea from the readings was the concept of front groups (Palenchar & Fitzpatrick, 2009). I was unfamiliar with this idea previously; it is like fake news except as an entity. Fake news is often recognized for pushing some agenda to media consumers through sensationalized content. On the other hand, front groups have a much more professional appearance and reasonable logics, which is why they seem so real and often are effective at masking their true agenda.

I did some research on long-established front groups and came across one called The Center for Consumer Freedom. From surveying their website, I can see that this organization is managing the issue of consumers being exposed to more local and healthy food options. There are categories such as "junk science" and "animal rights extremism" that viewers can read more about. On their About Us page, there is a list of frequently asked questions, one being "Who funds you? How about some full disclosure." It was intriguing to me the way they phrased and answered this question, because they state that some restaurants and food companies fund them, and yet they don't name any specific names. This reminded me of the Bowen reading from this week, as The Center for Consumer Freedom was being "transparent", but not really honest. There seemed to be a lot of red flags throughout this website, and I hope that other people can identify the sketchiness of this website as well and discover the fact that CCF is using unethical public relations techniques.
Palenchar, M. J., & Fitzpatrick, K. R. (2009). Ethical and Rhetorical Perspectives on the Use of Public Relations Front Groups. Rhetorical and critical approaches to public relations II, 272.

 About Us. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.consumerfreedom.com/about

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday, April 28th - Internal Issue Mgmt

For our final week of readings, I chose to examine the study by Ewing et al. (2019) regarding internal communication and employee engagement. I found it to be fascinating since I have limited experience studying communication between members of the same organization; most studies I read are focused on how an organization communicates to outside publics. However, the important concept I took away from this article is that employee engagement is a desired state of organizations for their employees, and it can be increased by utilizing social media platforms for the purpose of facilitating internal communication. The study defines employee engagement as "employees who are connected to the values and mission of the company, feel empowered, bring energy, passion, and discretionary effort to their jobs, and serve as advocates." (p. 113). It makes sense that an employee who is not engaged would feel and possess less of these positive characteristics, and that is why it is crucial fo...
Read more

Tuesday, February 11th - Values Advocacy

This week's focus was on the concept of values advocacy: when an organization strategically emphasizes certain shared cultural values in order to persuade publics to align with them and support their organization. Support can be exercised whether that is through purchasing their product/service or supporting their policy influences. The first reading by Botsdorff & Vibbert (1994) helped me to understand the full scope of this concept and the three reasons that organizations employ it, namely enhancing their image, dodging criticism, and establishing a foundation of value premises that in the future can be used to benefit themselves or their policies. Values advocacy is important to recognize out in "the real world" in order to identify which of these three functions an organization is using. One example I thought of from the past week was from the Oscars, when Korean director Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite won 4 Oscars. The victory came to my attention through soc...
Read more