To err is human, to lobby is divine
I was one of the few extra thousand who bought the Independent today for a
The story, as they go, isn’t as “sexy” as Fox and Werrity, Giggs and his brother’s wife or even Brooks and Coulson. But it is compelling nonetheless.
If you want to lobby the UK government and make bad news disappear, Bell Pottinger can make that happen. Yes it could cost millions, but it’s worth it to cover up a few thousand human rights violations.
The corruption, the immoral attitude and the devious manipulation of the Internet are like a Robert Ludlum plot. It’s just somewhat lacking in a protagonist, fallen hero or sexual exploitation scandal to really seize the day.
A paragraph on the front page caught my attention;
“the company could manipulate Google results to “drown” out negative coverage”
And we all thought it was the Labour administration that coined “a good day to bury bad news”. It turns out (to those ignorant of such processes like me) that you can pay people to change your history on the Internet-rather like Newspeak.
There is an issue that bothers me. There is too much then escapes the public’s attention according to the targeted reporting (oddly a bit like Teresa Mays “targeted border control checks”, where she gone, anyway?).
Now it seems information, as many small activist groups keen to show, is infinitely manipulatable.
With that in mind, considering the reporting on this particular lobbying issue. Aside column, barely 4 paragraphs on page 8 of the Evening Standard. It no longer even features on the BBC News site at 9pm. Headlines on the BBC news site featured a bomb in Afghanistan for most of the day. Sadly, this is not usually mainstream news. However, on a day when the government wants lobbying story to quietly disappear (after all it’s only published in the Independent), a war that we’re currently pulling our troops out of is rarely more important.
Perhaps they were using Bell Pottinger’s newly launched
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