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Comment by victor9000 | Hacker News Reader

Seems fair to identify this as PR folks doing PR. You do PR where you need it, and they need it.

If the police departments are actually fortuitously finding baby ducks, sure...that's smart PR. But if the entire event is staged, that's propaganda instead of PR.

If it's staged, then it would border into animal mistreatment since the ducklings would have been removed from their environment to be used as prop.

It's propaganda either way because it's funded by public money (PR is funded by private money).

Propaganda and PR are the same thing. The term "public relations" was invented in the wake of public sentiment turning negative regarding "propaganda" in the wake of the second world war. Prior to that PR was just called propaganda, and did not have a generally negative connotation.

If it's staged, it's the police lying about the work they're doing in the community, which is an ethical problem.

Doesn't even crack the top 10 of ethical problems resulting from the police.

Whether or not it's staged it's the creation of a PR person who's likely never even so much as been on the inside of a squad car, trying to spread an insipid, demonstrably false narrative about a bunch of wife-beating knuckleheads hiding in their SUV's between bouts of extreme violence.

There is another term for when the state does it — propaganda.

It's annoying that the word “propaganda” has ended up meaning “PR efforts I don't like”. There was once an era when propaganda was a normal word.

Okay, but this is propaganda in the original sense of the word.

AFAIK propaganda is used with a positive connotation as well. It's just debatable if you interpret a specific act of propaganda as positive or negative, depending on the objective of the message.

Despite this particular story which is probably a "matryoshka" of propaganda inside a propaganda inside... you are one step away from discovering the reason for the frequent appearance of Chekhov and Dostoevsky in HN :)

Please forgive my ignorance, but I don't understand (probably because of my lack of knowledge wrt Chekhov and Dostoevsky), yet I want to. At the risk of giving away the joke, could you explain your point to me?

When did propaganda not mean "PR efforts I don't like", especially government PR efforts?

Wikipedia says:

The term began taking a pejorative or negative connotation in the mid-19th century, when it was used in the political sphere

Do you long for the days of the 1850's?

I heard a great definition of propaganda recently.

It’s a British person having a good look.

I don't get it.

It sounds like "proper gander", where gander means "a look".

In case people are wondering, the analogy is to the appearance of a goose (the male goose is a gander) when it cranes its neck to look at something, and you can't use it in many places "look" fits, it's specifically an action so you can "take a gander" or "have a gander" but you don't just "gander" and the appearance of something is not its "gander".

(Ganda means to look)

> You do PR where you need it, and they need it.

But sometimes you need to step back and ask why you need that PR in the first place, and if perhaps there are better avenues to recover your standing rather than staging PR-worthy displays. At some point the PR becomes completely disingenuous and starts actively harming you.

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