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As a result of such “programmatic” buying, advertisers often are in the dark about where their ads end up. Advertisers can opt out of certain sites, of course, but only if they affirmatively place them on a blacklist of sites. So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story. The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.” This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet....
The Campaign Legal Center is complaining in a letter to the White House that a top adviser to President Donald Trump may be illegally accepting outside professional services. Steve Bannon has worked with publicist Alexandra Preate since he was head of Breitbart News. Preate has continued to work with reporters on Bannon’s behalf even though she is not a government employee. A recent article by the Center for Public Integrity quotes an associate of Preate’s saying she doesn’t receive pay from Bannon. The Campaign Legal Center says that appears to be a violation of what’s called the Antideficiency Act. The law says government employees “may not accept voluntary services for (the) government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law.”...
The Russian attempt to influence the 2016 American presidential election, using what intelligence agencies call “active measures,” has dominated U.S. headlines.There is, however, a second front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of American citizens, and it’s received almost no attention in mainstream U.S. media outlets since the election. As someone who studies the growth of global public relations, I’ve researched the roles PR firms play in shaping public perceptions of international affairs. For years, Russia has been involved in public relations campaigns that have been developed and deployed by prominent, U.S.-based, global PR firms – campaigns intended to influence American public opinion and policy in ways that advance Russia’s strategic interests....
Political viewers of all stripes have been inundated with news about President Donald Trump, whose immigration policies and potential ties to Russia have sparked controversy while his tweets routinely set digital chatter ablaze. Socialbakers just wrapped up eight months of research, looking at Twitter consumption around Trump-related subjects in six countries and offering eye-opening insights into just how immersed consumers have become in all things Donald. "Audiences are tuning in more, but polarization means you’re seeing a lot of negative reactions to political statements,” noted Moses Velasco, chief product evangelist at the Prague, Czech Republic-based tech agency. Despite the raw, public discourse, media brands have undoubtedly benefitted: CNN, Fox News and MSNBC saw double-digit TV ratings gains in May, while subscriptions for The Washington Post and The New York Times have jumped considerably. Here, Socialbakers’ statistics spotlight the impact of Trump’s Twitter. (And if you keep scrolling past the infographic, you will see a video with SocialBakers founder Jan Rezab analyzing the data.)...
During my eight years in the Obama administration, there was an offhand comment uttered from time to time in the hallway after something went off the rails, "It's a communications problem." The reality is that is the case sometimes, but most of the time the problem is much larger. Some of the major fumbles of the first few weeks of the Trump administration have been due to the communications team: whether it was the sloppy rollout of the executive order on immigration or the series of television interviews with senior officials who were either unprepared, out of the loop or pompous enough to think they could wing it with a network anchor. But not all the problems are communications issues....
Several people have figured out that the best way to get a message to President Trump is to do so via a TV program he is likely to watch, but no one has gone to the lengths that John Oliver has to get a television-based message to the president.
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the first new episode since Trump’s inauguration, Oliver revealed that his show has arranged to run a Trump-targeted ad locally in the Washington D.C. market on all three cable news shows Monday morning, between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Oliver made the announcement during a segment on the show called “Trump vs. Truth,” about Trump’s reliance on information gleaned from dubious and often false outlets like Brietbart and Infowars, and his alarming tendency to lie about easily-debunked topics such as his inauguration crowd size, much as he did for a decade about the ratings for his NBC series, Celebrity Apprentice....
If you repeat a lie enough, it becomes the truth.”That quote has been attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. I say attributed because even though there are many reports of him saying it, there is no public record that he actually did. In other words, it could be a lie that has become the truth simply because it was repeated enough times....
All modern American presidents have seen their disapproval rating surpass the 50 percent mark at some stage after taking office. Some reached that milestone faster than others but generally, it took all of them hundreds of days to do so. George Bush senior lasted an impressive 1,336 days before he hit 50 percent disapproval in Gallup's polls while Bill Clinton lasted 573 days before reaching majority disapproval. As a result of the federal debt crisis, Barack Obama passed the 50 percent mark 936 days into his presidency.
Donald Trump has reached majority disapproval in record time, just 8 days. When he entered office, an initial poll from Gallup showed that 45 percent of Americans approved of him, 45 disapproved and 10 percent were undecided. In his first week, he announced construction of the border wall, halted immigration from seven countries, gutted the Affordable Care Act and reversed U.S abortion policy, pushing his disapproval rating to 51 percent, according to a Gallup poll released on January 28....
A lot of former congressional staffers agree that the best way to make your voice heard is to call your representatives rather than emailing them. And a new website makes that easier than ever. 5 Calls streamlines the calling process to make it user friendly and convenient. Simply enter your zipcode at the top left and you’ll be given a personalized list of numbers to call about the most pressing issues of the day. Click through topics on the left hand column to access a brief overview of each issue, a script to use when placing the call, and an explanation of why you’re calling a particular office (i.e. it’s one of your Senators or the Army Corps of Engineers is conducting an environmental impact report on the Dakota Access Pipeline)....
What we’ve got here is [NOT] a failure to communicate” to slightly alter the famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke. That line best describes public response to the Trump inauguration, the massive DC and national Women’s March, and the public and social media response to the first six days of the new administration. The Trump campaign and transition teams, and the new White House advisors all pride themselves on their social media savvy. Led by the newly sworn-in POTUS and Twitter-in-Chief, social media is now alive with the sound of truth, lies, statistics and “alternate facts.” And the new administration is scrambling to respond....
You can count the Department of Agriculture as the latest federal agency under attack from Donald Trump who is now actively rebelling against him. After Trump punished the National Park Service for tweeting about his inauguration crowd size, and the Badlands was forced to delete its tweets about climate change, these agencies have begun sticking it to Trump by rolling out secondary non-government Twitter accounts that he can’t control. Lo and behold, the unofficial USDA Twitter account.
The @AltUSDA account on Twitter has been in existence for less than a day but already has tens of thousands of followers, and it’s been posting helpful tweets along the lines of “Read the USDA Climate Change Solutions page while you still can” along with a link to an article on the usda.gov website which, for the moment at least, is still visible. It’s expected that the Trump administration will forcibly remove such information in order to pretend that climate change isn’t real. But @AltUSDA is going further....
I revisit all this now, just six tumultuous days into the Trump presidency, because not since Nixon, perhaps, have White House aides found themselves so plainly caught between loyalty to a boss on one hand and personal integrity on the other. And the questions I have are the same ones they should be asking themselves.
Who here will refuse to keep saying things they know aren’t true? And will anyone tell the boss what he doesn’t want to know?
Let’s face it: Trump’s not someone who puts a ton of value on the truth. That’s always been his way, and it’s worked for him.
Much of the world was united yesterday in solidarity as Women’s Marches took place all over the globe. The protest signs – and there were so many – spoke volumes.
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Political tensions have reached a point where some brands are perceiving mainstream news outlets as too controversial, leading media buyers to pull ads from those sites. One campaign manager at a holding group media agency said a major automaker decided last month to stop serving ads in the news category in case the content didn’t align with the brand’s values. Then, after violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, the agency blocked keywords including “Nazis” and “Charlottesville” in programmatic campaigns for the brand. This exec, like the other three media agency executives interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity due to political sensitivities. The executive said the blocked news category contains hundreds of publishers, including foxnews.com, which also is the only mainstream news site that has been on the agency’s blacklist since March....
Behind the scenes, as law enforcement officials tried to stem protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, alumni from the George W. Bush White House were leading a crisis communications effort to discredit pipeline protesters. This revelation comes from documents obtained via an open records request from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Department in Wyoming. Emails show that the firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies, apparently on contract with the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA), worked in secret on talking points, media outreach, and communications training for law enforcement dealing with Dakota Access opponents mobilized at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. As previously reported by DeSmog Blog, the GOP-connected firm DCI Group led the forward-facing public relations efforts for Dakota Access via a front group called Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN). Today MAIN has morphed into a national effort known as Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN). Delve is an opposition research firm run by Jeff Berkowitz, former Republican National Committee research director and official in the George W. Bush White House. His company led research efforts on behalf of the sheriffs’ association. Off the Record Strategies, meanwhile, guided the sheriffs’ behind-the-scenes communications strategy. Mark Pfeifle runs the secretive firm, and also served as communications advisor in the Bush administration, leading PR efforts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....
Let's begin by synchronizing our watches. We are in the Eastern time zone.
The legislative session is over, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is about to give his wrap-up press conference. The reporters trudge into the gallery, grumbling, as reporters like to do, about traffic and editors. Someone gives the "10 seconds" signal, and Trudeau strides to the podium. He gives a nod and starts ticking off his accomplishments. The first is self-praise for cutting taxes on the middle class and raising them on the one percent. "We've given nine out of 10 families more money each month to help with the costs of raising their kids," Trudeau says.
Justin Trudeau introduced a bill that would make marijuana legal – but what will that look like, and what will it mean for the U.S.?
It's strange to witness: He speaks in a modulated, indoor voice. His dark hair is a color found in nature. At home, there is a glamorous wife and three photogenic children, still not old enough to warm his seat at next week's G-20 summit or be involved in an espionage scandal. When Trudeau moves on to his feminist bona fides (women and minorities make up more than half of his Cabinet), he pauses for a moment, but does not lose his train of thought. His words are coherent and will not need to be run through Google Translate when he is done (except if you want to translate his French into English)....
“Many of our global clients have already requested that we block this site on our activity.”
An employee for the agency described it to BuzzFeed News as a “preventative measure”, as online advertising is assigned to websites algorithmically.
Omnicom handpicks the sites their clients’ ads run on, which is known as a whitelist, whereas ad exchanges or networks such as Google’s typically work on a blacklist where brands specify which sites not to run on.
The email from management added: “If you are running activity through ad networks such as MediaIQ/Regital, Quantcast & RocketFuel it is worth reaching out to your rep and making sure Breitbart is blacklisted and request a URL level site report over the past 30 days which all should be able to provide.”...
Let’s dive into one of the more recent mentions. In our first graph, Nordstrom sees the highest engagement spike for their February mention by Trump. So how is the current controversy playing out for the brand on social media? Over 3.45 Million Engagements From February 6th to 13th, 2017, Nordstrom has driven over 3.45 million engagements across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest on English language content. Compare this with a weekly average of 31,000 engagements in January 2017. This most recent week is over a 11,000 percent increase to that average. Let’s look at some of the top stories and how they performed. Analyzing top stories platform-by-platform can yield different results, especially concerning stories about companies. Those on Facebook tend to be more emotive, while LinkedIn’s top stories tend to focus on the implications for the brand’s business....
As the press secretary for a president who's obsessed with how things play on cable TV, Sean Spicer’s real audience during his daily televised press briefings has always been an audience of one.
And the devastating “Saturday Night Live” caricature of Spicer that aired over the weekend — in which a belligerent Spicer was spoofed by a gum-chomping, super soaker-wielding Melissa McCarthy in drag — did not go over well internally at a White House in which looks matter.
More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him. And the unflattering send-up by a female comedian was not considered helpful for Spicer’s longevity in the grueling, high-profile job in which he has struggled to strike the right balance between representing an administration that considers the media the "opposition party," and developing a functional relationship with the press....
Under more ordinary circumstances, the cover of the issue for February 13 and 20, 2017—our Anniversary Issue, marking ninety-two years—would feature some version of Rea Irvin’s classic image of the monocled dandy Eustace Tilley. This year, as a response to the opening weeks of the Trump Administration, particularly the executive order on immigration, we feature John W. Tomac’s dark, unwelcoming image, “Liberty’s Flameout.” “It used to be that the Statue of Liberty, and her shining torch, was the vision that welcomed new immigrants. And, at the same time, it was the symbol of American values,” Tomac says. “Now it seems that we are turning off the light.” Here is a slide show of past Anniversary Issue covers....
But there is a third kind of humor that could ultimately do the most to deflate Trump. Last weekend, in an attempt to explain the new Administration’s insistence on lying about the size of the crowds at Trump’s Inauguration, Kellyanne Conway went on “Meet the Press” to explain that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had been offering “alternative facts.” Trump’s team knows the political power of a concise, catchy, and easily repeated phrase—and they must recognize, in “alternative facts,” a potential crack in the veneer of Trumpism. The phrase is not simply plainly ridiculous, it’s pathetically so. It’s the kind of thing that an aspiring strongman like Trump himself would never say—he just blusters, pretending, or maybe even believing, that the things he says are the real facts, the only facts. Instead, it’s what the semi-reasonable people who work for him have to come up with in order to serve two masters—Trump on the one hand and reality on the other. “He believes what he believes,” Spicer later said about his boss.
It's been an interesting day. The 45th President of the United States of America took office just two hours ago, and he is clearly unlike any other President that has gone before him. So just for fun, I thought I might feed his inauguration speech into Watson in real-time, in order to see what the smartest computer in the world had to say about it. Would he notice any anomalies, or insights that the professional political commentators might have missed? Might we some people respect Trump a little more if they looked at his speech more analytically than emotionally? Have a look for yourself at all the data below and make up your own mind. The conclusion I drew was not at all what I expected...
Via massimo facchinetti
Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.
Seizing on Trump's favorite mode of discourse, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts - borrowing names and logos of their agencies - to protest restrictions they view as censorship and provide unfettered platforms for information the new administration has curtailed.... Employees at the EPA and the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Health and Human Services have since confirmed seeing notices from the new administration either instructing them to remove web pages or limit how they communicate to the public, including through social media.... Within hours, unofficial "resistance" or "rogue" Twitter accounts began sprouting up, emblazoned with the government logos of the agencies where they worked, the list growing to at least 14 such sites by Wednesday afternoon....
This drives journalists nuts. They feel a duty to rebut lies, and in the age of “John Oliver Destroys Something” headlines, there’s an appetite among liberal viewers for plucky correspondents eviscerating right-wing ideologues on-air. We’ve now seen one host after another—Todd, Cuomo, Anderson Cooper—lose his cool or waste a long interview trying to make Conway acknowledge elementary facts.
Of course, presidential flacks have always tried to stretch or shade the truth during on-air interviews. In his first briefings as press secretary to President George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer juggled contrary rationales for tax cuts, that the government could afford them or that a weak economy needed them, using whichever argument seemed to fit the evidence presented. In his first briefings as press secretary to President Obama,
Robert Gibbs used the term “financial stability package” to mask the stench of corporate bailouts. Reporters understood that no matter what they asked, Fleischer would defend tax cuts and Gibbs would defend bailouts. But the president’s spokesman would generally try to reconcile the president’s agenda with the facts. And if he couldn’t, he would at least clarify the agenda. Conway brings none of that. She alters unwelcome questions, disregards the facts presented to her, and clarifies nothing. In part, that’s because Trump has no organized agenda. All he has is ego. So that’s what she fights for. She’s not there to persuade a skittish Republican senator to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She’s there to defend and avenge one man’s wounded pride....
Today the New York Times rolled out the big guns in the battle for truth. There, in Jim Rutenberg’s latest Mediator column, were two digits the likes of which I have never seen in the Grey Lady. Footnotes, people. Honest-to-God footnotes. The footnotes were there to annotate a story about the Trump administration’s disregard for the truth: ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality. By necessity, that story referenced two of the administration’s newly minuted “alternative facts”, a.k.a. lies. The first of these was the claim by Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, that more people had used DC’s Metro system the morning of Trump’s inauguration than had used it the morning of Obama’s 2013 inauguration. The second was the President’s accusation that tensions between Trump and the intelligence community were caused by the meddling media....
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Sleeping Giants is anonymous, but its approach to killing Breitbart’s advertising has been effective.