Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
In public relations, our job was to make the company look good, to cast the company in a good light.
When I worked for “house organs” — or employee publications — I learned they gave the company complete control over what messages were sent and the context in which they were stated.
I started thinking of such publications as “management’s makeup mirror.”
A makeup mirror allows its users to control not only their reflection but the light in which they view themselves.
Employee publications allow managers to perpetuate the fantasy they are universally loved and look great.
President Donald Trump is aghast that the media in the U.S. refuse to act as his house organ. He seems to think that should be their purpose.
It goes along with his theory that the job of the U.S. population and world leaders is to like him.
If they show they like him, he might even let them get away with murder.
Like his good buddies, the rulers of Saudi Arabia.
Trump says he trusts the Saudis to investigate fully the murder of Jamal Kasshogi, a Saudi journalist who lived in Virginia and regularly criticized the oppressive Saudi regime.
On Oct. 2, Kasshogi entered his own country’s embassy in Turkey to get papers for his coming wedding and never came out.
More than two weeks later, the Saudis released a ludicrous statement that said Kasshogi died in a “fist-fight” inside the embassy. This was after statements from Turkish officials and photo evidence point to high-level official Saudi involvement with Kasshogi’s death.
Well, bin Salman likes Trump, so our president, while condemning Kasshogi’s murder, now says he will rely on the secretive Saudi regime’s investigation.
If Trump didn’t hold an office that once unofficially included the title, “leader of the free world,” that would funny.
But nobody’s laughing.
Nobody laughed either, when he “joked” (his press secretary said he was joking) last week about the “body-slamming” ability of another good buddy, U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte.
The Montana congressman won his current term in 2017 shortly after he responded to a reporter’s question about health care by grabbing the reporter by the neck in both of his hands and throwing him to the floor.
“Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type,” the president “joked” to a cheering crowd last week. The crowd, like Gianforte, like Trump, seems to think that if you win, the First Amendment no longer applies.
To be fair, Gianforte was prosecuted for the assault and issued a full, sincere apology.
Trump, however, still thinks he should be able to punish news media for not liking him, and the penalty can be as brutal as a body slam.
For not liking his friends, we see, it can be murder with impunity.
As a journalist, I advise my colleagues not to panic, but be ready for the fight of our lives.
Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at: