To do one’s job properly, I have for years told my earnest journalism and public relations students, anyone who works with words and images must cultivate a “professionally dirty mind.”
This does not mean, I tell them in the confident tones of those who are used to being listened to, that they should use bad language, or while away the hours in the office telling offensive jokes or searching out smut on their employer’s Internet account.
No, the professionally dirty mind means something quite different from an unwholesome appreciation of dirt.
The point is that folks who work with language and images need to be constantly aware that words, phrases and unexpectedly juxtaposed images can have alternative meanings, some of them pretty unfortunate. Ergo, we should be alert to those possible unintended interpretations — if only to keep, if you’ll pardon the expression, our proverbial butts covered.
That is how we avoid the infamous fate of my dear friend and former headline-writing colleague who composed — with reference to an intoxicated fellow who broke a window, stole a musical instrument and then faced harsh justice for his crime — a headline that read, “Drunk Gets 9 Months in Violin Case.” (“I should have known,” my friend recounted bitterly. “People who normally disparaged my work were encouraging me that night.”)
If only the communications brain trust of the Wildrose Party — which hitherto has looked pretty good — had taken my class and paid attention!
Tout le monde political Alberta saw the same jaw-dropping thing at the same moment yesterday, at the instant Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith climbed aboard her new campaign bus to announce the party now had a full slate of 87 candidates. Instead of listening to the Wildrose leader, the reporters and photographers who had gathered for the news stared aghast and agog at Smith’s unfortunately placed image on the side of the bus.
Apparently neither neo-Con campaign supremo Tom Flanagan nor his many minions — focused as they presumably were on scaring the bejeepers out of us about same-sex marriages, cattle mutilations, black helicopters hovering over our power lines and Premier Alison Redford personally kicking down our doors to conscript us to fight pandemics or forest fires — saw the obvious when they perused and approved the design for the bus.
As for those cynical but naïve Albertans who are suggesting in the Twitterspace that this was done intentionally to drum up free publicity — and, Lord knows, it’s generated enough since the image went viral yesterday morning — not a chance. Consider the humourless social conservatives who are the party’s mainstay!
No, the Wildrose goal yesterday was to use the bus as a prop and the 87 candidates as evidence that as an election campaign is about to begin they’re serious and credible enough to form a government. No amount of free publicity can make up for the corrosive effect of the general hilarity that ensued.
What’s more, in addition to the instant damage to the party’s credibility, the Wildrose Party or one of its many generous donors is going to have to fork over another $24,000 or so to re-do the entire bus.
The Wildrosers, of course, are not the only Alberta conservative party to perpetrate a spectacular boo-boo of this nature by not paying enough attention to what they were printing. Who can forget the PCs’ disastrous 2009 attempt to re-brand Alberta?
Not only can no one remember the official provincial slogan, but there was the embarrassment of the branding campaign’s use of an image of happy ruddy-faced English children running down an English seashore in the north of England in order to plug the undeniable charms of landlocked Alberta.
In that case, as alert readers will recall, the communications braniacs employed by then-premier Ed Stelmach tried to brazen it out and pretend the forgotten clip-art was all part of their plan, an effort that prompted guffaws even in normally sympathetic circles.
Which brings us back to yesterday’s post on this blog, in which we discussed to 2008 Harris Decima poll that discovered Canadians in Vancouver and Toronto find Albertans to be smug, condescending, self-interested and increasingly annoying.
When the story appeared on the Toronto Star’s website, an online commentator lamented the divisive tendencies of such surveys and asked why any government would use tax dollars to pay for such an unhelpful conclusion, no matter how sound the research on which it was based.
Well, as a matter of fact, I know the answer to that one: They did it to justify the re-branding effort that gave us “Freedom to Create” … and, uh, I forget the rest.
Really!
To their credit, unlike their PC rivals on the right, at least Smith and the Wildrosers had the courage to admit that their moving billboard had turned out to be a big green bust…
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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