This is a crucial component of corporate PR. I don't know if you have heard of a guy named Peter Sandman and the model's used to manage outrage. I'll provide a few links here. The essence though is not to alter policy or admit ot injustice but to control how people think about the situation. This is used to destroy and marginalize enviro,s, political protesters and otherwise social justice activists.
Essentially this is just an extension of propaganda techniques to assassinate the left. People who defend this sort of thing do the bidding of those who work to keep the people in servitude.
John Stauber does an excellent job of de-constructing this propaganda technique.
Dr. Peter M. Sandman
Outrage Management
(Low Hazard, High Outrage)
http://www.psandman.com/index-OM.htmHere's an old article on what we are discussing here:
WAR ON TRUTH
The Secret Battle for the American Mind
An Interview with John Stauber
Published in "The Sun"
March 1999
Australian academic Alex Carey once wrote that "the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
In societies like ours, corporate propaganda is delivered through advertising and public relations. Most people recognize that advertising is propaganda. We understand that whoever paid for and designed an ad wants us to think or feel a certain way, vote for a certain candidate, or purchase a certain product. Public relations, on the other hand, is much more insidious. Because it's disguised as information, we often don't realize we are being influenced by public relations. But this multi-billion-dollar transnational industry's propaganda campaigns affect our private and public lives every day. PR firms that most people have never heard of - such as Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, and Ketchum - are working on behalf of myriad powerful interests, from dictatorships to the cosmetic industry, manipulating public opinion, policy making, and the flow of information.
As editor of the quarterly investigative journal PR Watch, John Stauber exposes how public relations works and helps people to understand it. He hasn't always been a watchdog journalist, though. He worked for more than twenty years as an activist and organizer for various causes: the environment, peace, social justice, neighborhood concerns. Eventually, it dawned on him that public opinion on every issue he cared about was being managed by influential, politically connected PR operatives with nearly limitless budgets. "Public relations is a perversion of the democratic process," he says. "I knew I had to fight it."
In addition to starting PR Watch, Stauber founded the Center for Media and Democracy, the first and only organization dedicated to monitoring and exposing PR propaganda. In 1995, Common Courage Press published a book by Stauber and his colleague Sheldon Rampton titled Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry. Their second book, Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, came out in 1997 and examined the public-relations coverup of the risk of mad-cow disease in the U.S.
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http://www.derrickjensen.org/stauber.html