Public Education: Baby Steps Versus Playing the "Long Game"

Several years ago I was volunteering for a Green Party election campaign and I got "schooled" by a "hip youngster" with a degree in marketing about why it is important to not be what I'd call "punk and plain" about environmental issues during an election campaign. (I have a tendency to go on about unlimited economic growth being the ideology of cancer, among other things.) She told me that she had been taught that the key to effective advertising is to change people's behaviour and that that comes from appealing to them "where they are" instead of "where you'd like them to be".

She used the example of a fairly famous advert from my childhood, one that she said studies had shown did absolutely nothing to actually change people's behaviour. Here it is (ah, the wonders of YouTube!):

(Before we get too far, let me first admit that this video is somewhat racist. It plays to the "magic Indian" trope. This says that the First Nations peoples have some sort of inherent, genetic propensity to being environmentally groovy. While I think a case can be made that at least some of the tribal cultures are more "in tune" with nature, I don't want to give credit to the idea that this is something inherent in their genetic make up---which is clearly as racist as saying that all Chinese Canadians are good at math, and, all Black Canadians "have rhythm". Moreover, there is the whole point that the actor playing the role was actually an Italian-American who had adopted the persona and name of "Iron Eyes Cody". Having said that, I don't think that this invalidates anything I'm going to write after this disclaimer.)

Here's the other advert that her professor compared it to, one that actually is supposed to have made a real difference in how people act.

At the time I hadn't heard about this second ad, I was old, she was young, and I didn't want to get into an argument with someone who had studied marketing. But something about what she had said just didn't "sit right" with me. That was over 10 years ago, but I think I've finally figured out what I didn't like about what she said.

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Every time an organization creates and promotes a message it is going to have to decide whether it wants to "play the long game" or "seek out the low-hanging fruit". I would argue that our discussion wasn't about whether or not we were going to change people's behaviour, but actually about whether we were playing the long game or seeking after low-hanging fruit. Moreover, I'd suggest that just chasing low-hanging fruit is ultimately self-defeating in politics.

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On one level, this involves the message you are projecting to the audience. In the case of the "don't mess with Texas" ad, it is simply that you should put the trash in the can, period. The "crying Indian" ad is much more ambitious. It's trying to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with modern industrial society. That's why we have shots of him paddling through harbours with cranes, factories, oil refineries etc in the background. It's also why we have a zero-in on the huge traffic-filled highways before we see a bag of fast-food dumped at his feet. In short, the "crying Indian" ad was a critique of modern, capitalist, industrial society whereas the "don't mess with Texas" one was simply focused on litter.

Also, think about the people who were chosen in each different ad to represent the public viewpoint. In "Don't Mess with Texas", the heroes were two extremely well-paid NFL players. In "the Crying Indian" it was (I've already offered my disclaimers above) a First Nations member---certainly not a person of privilege. So it is a case of putting in the viewpoint of people who have the system working for them, and another who has probably seen nothing but exploitation from it.

The point I'd like readers to meditate upon is that it is always easier to do well in the short term if you have no problem with ignoring the long haul. For example, a government can almost always gin up the economy for a few years with tax cuts---if you don't care about the size of the deficit or the resulting wealth stratification in society. Executives can always increase the dividends they pay stock holders for a few years if they cut their research and development departments, and, avoid investing in new machinery---at the price of having the competition "eat their lunch" ten years down the road. Similarly, a political party can always do better in the short run by pandering to voter's pre-conceived notions than in trying to educate them about important issues---if they don't care about the long-term consequences for society.

And what exactly has been the trajectory of Texas since the "don't mess with Texas" ad first aired? Well, a quick Google search resulted in the following statistic:  Texas is 48th worst out of 50 states in terms of health risks from pollution.  (US News and World Report) (Obviously someone is messing with Texas after all---.)

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I suspect that at least some of my readers keep meaning to subscribe but never quite get around to doing so. It's not that hard. If you have a credit card (and I know that almost all of you do), all you have to do is sign up on Patreon or PayPal. But here's something new---why not have your community group buy a subscription? Unions, service clubs, charitable institutions---you all benefit from having local news. Why not subscribe? Or even buy an advertisement, for that matter. All sorts of groups used to buy ads in the old paper newspapers---what's stopping you from doing the same thing in the Back-Grounder? 

Drop me an email at thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com if you want to find out more. 

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Both of these advertisements have become "icons" in the American psyche, so it might be useful to see how they have exerted their influence since they were first created.

Here's a clip from The Simpsons that plays on the "crying Indian" ad: 

And here's another advert from Texas that is an out-growth of the original "Don't Mess with Texas" ad: 

I've cherry picked somewhat, but I do think that there is some sort of rough generalization that can be discerned here. But the point I want to make is that almost all pieces of messaging can be divided into two different messages: the foreground and the background.

In the case of the clip from the Simpsons, the foreground message is clearly that there is something profoundly wrong with American society---hence the giant, rat-infested garbage dump. The background message is that native Americans have some deeper appreciation and respect for nature than the average citizen. In the case of the official Texas advert, the foreground message is "don't litter", but the background one is "have respect for the military" and even "we honour our Confederate traditions". (I suspect this last bit is unconscious and came about simply because an existing institution---the Texas Confederate Airforce---helped with the ad. Indeed, the organization realized this fact and in 2002 changed it's name to the "Commemorative Air Force".)

The original advert inspired a whole line of official ads aimed at the "don't mess with Texas" trope. Here is one that is more than a bit "loopy":

Here's one that is a bit more indicative of most of them:

And another official ad that plays on the usual tropes:

The real message of the "don't mess with Texas" ads is that "life is good, happy motoring is good, things are just fine in Texas---just don't toss your trash out the window of your car as you roar down the road on your way to destroying the planet!"

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In the recent election there were a lot of times that I thought the politicians were obviously pandering to public opinion polls without even attempting to make any sense. Two examples that immediately come to mind were the idiotic policies that the Conservatives and Liberals came up with to make housing more affordable. Scheer announced that he'd loosen the requirements that would allow more people to get a mortgage, and, he'd allow it to be paid off in a maximum 30 years instead of the current 25. Trudeau's offer was to expand the "First-Time Home Buyer Incentive".

Both of these suggestions are flat-out idiotic and would be immediately obvious as such to anyone who hadn't flunked first year economics. That's because they don't actually increase the number of houses being built, just make it easier for everyone to borrow money in order to buy one. If they were implemented, they'd just increase the cost of housing, and channel more money out of home-owner's pockets and into the banks.

Both the Conservatives and Liberals had to have known this fact. But the leaders looked at the polling numbers and decided that they had to say something that sounded like they were concerned about housing affordability. As such, both Scheer and Trudeau were deciding to "make baby steps" and "pander to people's preconceived notions" rather than try to educate voters about the real reasons why housing is so damned expensive. They were following the "don't mess with Texas" route instead of the "crying Indian" one.

They thought that they had to do this to win the election. But the problem is that by pandering to the ignorance of voters, they were making it that much harder to get them to accept a more reasonable policy later on down the road. If you keep telling people "there's no reason to make hard choices---it's all just peachy the way it is", it may be surprising, but it's true none-the-less, that a lot of them will actually believe it. And if you turn around and tell them something different at a later date---like "if you want affordable housing you are simply going to have to accept living in small homes in higher density neighbourhoods"---they are not going to be happy to hear it. In effect, every time parties do the "easy thing" and suggest that all people need to do is "make baby steps", they are dramatically limiting their ability to tell voters the hard truth at some time in the future.

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This problem has been identified a long time ago. Henry David Thoreau once opined

"There are a thousand people hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root."

Henry was no fool, he knew what was important.
Henry David Thoreau, Public Domain image by Geo. F. Parlow.
Public Domain Image c/o the Wiki Commons.

And that's the ultimate problem with taking "baby steps" in our messaging about important public policy issues: they only strike at the branch of problems while leaving their roots still strong and vigorous.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Does News Need to be Topical?

I've built the brand of the Guelph-Back-Grounder around the idea that it is never meant to be "topical". By this I mean that I am specifically trying to not respond to the "news of the day". This is heresy to reporters, who's job it is to go out and get the story before the other guy. But I'm not that sort of beast, instead I'm a long form journalist. The difference boils down to the relative importance of getting the news out on time, versus making sure that the story is complete.

Both types of news gathering are important and ideally they help one another. Long form journalists rely upon reporters to dig up facts and publish them quickly so the former can then use this information to point them in the direction of other sources. And reporters (at least sometimes) should be reading long form journalism so they can understand the bigger picture when they are trying to understand the individual facts they are collecting.

One of the important differences between the two is the fact that reporting tends to have an extremely short shelf-life. This shouldn't be because the "facts" keep changing (although this sometimes happens because editors feel that they have to publish things before being able to do adequate research), but just because time marches on and what is news today is forgotten tomorrow. In fact, this was such a truism of newspaper reporting that I've had more than one friend "in the biz" tell me that no matter how good a story was she'd written, it all boiled down to not being much more than liner for a birdcage. An ancient television show even build its opening theme around this trope.

This isn't entirely true, as I have learned while grinding through spools of microfilm of old copies of various newspapers. Those articles (at least the ones that have survived the vagaries of time) are important windows into the historical issues that have long been forgotten. But in one point my reporter friends were right. They aren't easily accessible to the general public.

Long form journalism in the modern age is different. It costs very little to keep old articles on-line. And search engines make it easy to retrieve stories on any given subject. This means that anyone who writes in-depth stories about subjects that are of continuing interest can hope that people will continue to read a good article long, long past it has been published. (And long past the point where newsprint has been recycled and the most a glossy magazine can hope for is a twilight existence in a doctor's waiting room.)

I keep track of the hits on this blog and I can see that people are actually using the Guelph-Back-Grounder as an information source. That is to say, my readership is growing at a significant curve and a lot of that increase is driven by people reading past articles. This is exactly what I set out to do. I want to be something of a "news encyclopedia" for the community. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to be as focused on local stories as I'd originally hoped. That's because I need to get something out every week in order to build a loyal readership---and it's far too much effort to research a "deep dig" article every week. (Or at least far too much effort for an old man who, while retired, still has all the aches and pains associated with a life of hard physical labour.) I have been heartened by quite a few readers who have said that they like these editorials just as much as the other stories, though.

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I got started on this subject because I originally was interested in writing some comments about the Jeffrey Epstein case. But once I sat in front of the computer, I realized that I was about to break the rule I set down when I started the blog. Then I thought about the Lavalin issue and the ethics watchdog report that recently came out. I could write a story because I've been researching Parliamentary reform and there is an aspect of that that has direct bearing on the expulsion of Jody Wilson-Raybould from the Liberal caucus. But I decided that would be wasting a future deep dig on what I suspect will turn out to be a minor story.

But it did get me thinking about the tyranny of topicality and how it can damage the way people learn about the world around them. It's often said that "the average person has the attention span of a gnat". I don't agree. First, it simply is a fact that there is a market for long form journalism, or else it simply wouldn't be "a thing". Some journalists have developed extremely successful "franchises" based on long form journalism. The best example is VOX Media.

For those of you who haven't heard of this institution, VOX is something of a "media empire" that is based on getting into the "nitty gritty" of stories instead of just the latest headlines. It has a website with lots of stories like The day Philadelphia bombed its own people, Fracking may be doing more climate damage than we thought, and, The algorithms that detect hate speech online are biased against black people. It also has a series of very popular podcasts such as The Ezra Klein Show and The Weeds which are specifically meant to deal with complex issues in depth over a fairly long period of time (both shows routinely extend over an hour in length). There is also a YouTube channel, (here's an example of one of their shorter videos---I think that they are better than amusing cat videos.)

Netflix created a partnership with VOX to produce a series of documentaries on a variety of subjects, which is titled Explained. (I highly recommend the episode titled Weed, which explains in great detail many of the issues raised by cannabis legalization.) 

Secondly, if you look at people's behaviour you can tell that if someone is really interested in a subject, lots of people can be very focused towards it. To cite one example, I remember hearing Ralph Nader once opine that if the average sports enthusiast invested a fraction of the attention towards politics that they do to following their favourite team, there would be a revolution in American society. Even if someone can't recite baseball statistics back to the 19th century, there is generally something that he can and will focus on. We live in a world of shade-tree mechanics, master gardeners, quilters, home brewers, model train builders, and so on. All of these pursuits seem horribly tedious to anyone who hasn't "caught the bug"---yet we all know someone who devotes enormous amounts of their spare time to them. It's obvious to me that these folks have more than "the attention span of a gnat". If they don't want to pay much attention to the news, it's because it doesn't interest them---not that they are genetically incapable of focusing on it.

Some of these folks probably don't care about the news and there's nothing anyone can do to get them excited. But I suspect that at least a percentage of them just don't like the trivial way the mainstream media follows stories. It becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when an editor constantly tells his reporters to "dumb down" the news. Eventually people who would be interested in something else get bored and look elsewhere. Many of the folks who do stick just expect that the vast majority of what they are watching is nonsense that they should only take with a grain of salt, so they only engage with it in a half-hearted way. That leaves the fraction of people who truly are incapable of "paying attention" as being the only folks who get listened to when it's time to design the latest main-stream media model. I suspect that this is at least part of why we've seen such a decline in real investigative news in favour of blowhards yelling at each other and quick "he-said, she-said" stories totally devoid of any context. (Of course the general decline in revenue for news is another part of this, but again, lack of loyalty to real news on the part of management is probably also another cause of declining support for news organizations.) 

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This whole editorial is something of an explanation of why I think this blog is important, so I'm not going to insert the standard blue-type plea for subscriptions. (But if you do want to subscribe through Patreon or PayPal feel free.) But I will leave you with this last idea. VOX has succeeded because it specifically deals with issues of interest to a huge market---the USA and the greater international audience. Insofar as a news site focuses on local stories (like my deep digs) I am not going to get readers outside of Guelph. That means that I am trying to dance with cement blocks tied to my feet, which suggests that the "smart money" is against what I'm trying to do here. So any support that "proves the business model" right now is going to pay big dividends down the road for creating a vibrant local news ecosystem. If you want to read news about where you live, the motto isn't "build it and they will come", but rather "support it and it will survive".

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!