For those of you with an interest in documentaries / investigative journalism movies, Inside Job is worth the watch.
It's much in the vein of The Corporation, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Fog of War. Fog of War is my favorite movie that looks at the folly that can unfold from the powers that be making decisions based on certain pre-conceived notions of risk and reward.
Personally I think all of the above movies should be mandatory viewing for students studying public relations, because they are all what I might call post-PR reviews of certain events (the PR that's left over when no one is actively generating any more PR related to the event in question).
Which brings up an interesting question that I think is rarely talked about but is so essential to PR, which is, do you base your PR strategies around immediate returns, short-term returns or long-term returns? Or is even that a false choice, can you perhaps have all three?
The reality is that PR generally operates based on immediate returns. What all these movies show you is the long-term, post-PR results. What's left after everything has shaken out and people look back on the PR at the time and assess what it really meant.
Inside Job, while not as entertaining as The Corporation or Capitalism: A Love Story, does a very good job at simply presenting the facts around the stock market crash of 2008 and everything that ensued as a result.
To be honest, the movie could easily be called The Ugly Side of PR. It does a good job of showing how many people voiced grave concerns over deregulation, predatory lending and out of control bonus structures (the IMF pointed out in 2005 I believe how this could set up a catastrophic economic crisis), and yet, that's not what the public heard. The dire concerns people had were kept mostly behind closed doors.
This movie will shake the public's confidence in the governing bodies that manage the machine called society (if there's any confidence really left at this point) and in my opinion goes to show the terrible costs associated with misleading the public.
Personally I think all of the above movies should be mandatory viewing for students studying public relations, because they are all what I might call post-PR reviews of certain events (the PR that's left over when no one is actively generating any more PR related to the event in question).
Which brings up an interesting question that I think is rarely talked about but is so essential to PR, which is, do you base your PR strategies around immediate returns, short-term returns or long-term returns? Or is even that a false choice, can you perhaps have all three?
The reality is that PR generally operates based on immediate returns. What all these movies show you is the long-term, post-PR results. What's left after everything has shaken out and people look back on the PR at the time and assess what it really meant.
Inside Job, while not as entertaining as The Corporation or Capitalism: A Love Story, does a very good job at simply presenting the facts around the stock market crash of 2008 and everything that ensued as a result.
To be honest, the movie could easily be called The Ugly Side of PR. It does a good job of showing how many people voiced grave concerns over deregulation, predatory lending and out of control bonus structures (the IMF pointed out in 2005 I believe how this could set up a catastrophic economic crisis), and yet, that's not what the public heard. The dire concerns people had were kept mostly behind closed doors.
This movie will shake the public's confidence in the governing bodies that manage the machine called society (if there's any confidence really left at this point) and in my opinion goes to show the terrible costs associated with misleading the public.
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