Recently, I’ve been considering a fascinating news item category. Everything began, when couple of several weeks ago nearly every mainstream daily newspaper within the United kingdom reported the sad demise of Jade Goody around the first page. While it definitely is an unfortunate event, after i saw what is the news item grabbing 2 of the top five read news on BBC website a couple of things clicked i believe regarding celebrity hype and also the PR strategies and marketing.
First of all, in Liverpool I’d an instructional friend who researches in to the section of celebrities as well as their effect on masses. Also, he been a fanatic football fan and that i appreciated him saying he had read many quantity of celebrity biographies (including many footballers and entertainers) coupled with figured that there is almost nothing inspiring in individuals memoirs (BTW, jade goody had one!). It had been only one skill which in fact had put many of these individuals the mainstream media and when they’re there we all know a persons find it difficult to exist.
The 2nd thought which showed up i believe associated with the strength of hi-tech pr (PR). I would be drastically wrong but the BBC obituary of Jade Goody notes “…she hit the headlines like a youthful lady with shockingly poor general understanding, who had been frequently the item of her fellow housemates’ derision” (BBC, 2009). However, whenever you just type Jade Goody in the search engines it appears with 5,130,000 results. Included in this are a Wikipedia that is several print pages lengthy, official website, news (clearly when it comes to celebrity gossip), a perfume website along with a FAN website (yes…)!
Considering i ran another Search for Prof. Amartya Sen (yes, yes, the 1998 Nobel prize champion) also it came back with 659,000 records. Pardon me Prof. Sen for evaluating.
However, this demonstrates the strength of pr and just how PR firms exploit it.
I’m amazed to determine that society in general exactly what do we actually search for and just how our ideas could be manipulated. Jogs my memory of Edward Bernays – the daddy of pr and also the nephew of Sigmund Freud – who supported manipulating society and resultant public opinion. In a single of his seminal works ‘the propaganda’ he contended the manipulation of public opinion was essential for democracy. He effectively tried on the extender in ‘breaking the taboo against lady smoking in public’ as well as helping U . s . Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita Brands Worldwide) and also the U.S. government to facilitate the effective overthrow from the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.
