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Monday, April 26, 2004
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POSTDATED COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
April 26, 2004 Dear Corporate Executive/ Interest Group Representative/ Professor: Well, the cat's out of the bag. William M. Adler's article in the April 16 edition of The Austin Chronicle details the way in which American public relations firms often write op/ed pieces reflecting our clients' points of view on issues, and then ask prominent professors to "sign" the pieces as if they'd written them. This is done in order to lend the pieces an aura of respectability, dispassionate thought, and personal commitment. Until now, only a few insiders knew that some of the most heartfelt pleas for nuclear sanity, prescription drug reform, and firearms rights penned by concerned academics in our major newspapers were in fact written by lobbyists for corporations. Now that you know it too, Postdated Communications Inc. - a Washington DC public relations firm employing hundreds of highly literate Ph.D.'s - would like to offer you a new and exciting opportunity. What's new about our approach? Well, historically, PR firms have pitched the advantages of using living authorities. But keep in mind that the reputations of still-living and even recently-deceased academics are notoriously fickle. What if your interest group had placed in the New York Times a "Paul DeMan"- authored piece on immigration policy, in which he expressed gratitude to the U.S. for admitting a warrior against fascism into our country? Today you'd be a laughingstock. If you want your op/ed ghostwriter professor to have unimpeachable PR (industry shorthand for Probity Rep), he or she has to - our studies show - have been both dead and uninterruptedly revered for at least two decades. What PCI does, then, is postdate "discovered" correspondence, essays, marginalia, journals, you name it, from irreproachably esteemed intellectuals and professors, all in the service of our clients' issues. Let us give you a couple of examples of the sort of thing we do. You are the AAUP or another educational group fighting a pitched battle over the issue of tenure. More and more American universities are reviewing, criticizing, reforming, and even attempting to abolish tenure, after all. What if your side suddenly discovered a letter from Lionel Trilling or Richard Ellmann or another icon of moral scrupulosity saying something like "The world's going to hell in a handbasket. I can imagine a time when even tenure will be under siege. The thought absolutely chills me. Without tenure there'd have been no Joyce biography/Sincerity and Authenticity, and I'd no doubt have slit my wrists." Or let us say you are a group of trustees and alumni who wish to expand your university's sports program rather than its library - even though your sports program is an international embarrassment and your students dolts. You announce that the twentieth century's greatest man of letters, George Orwell, never noted for his interest in physical fitness, in fact confided urgently to a friend, in a letter late in life, that "As I write, highly civilized human beings are working underhandedly, trying to kill college athletics. The older I get, the more I realize that the simple virtues of comradeship, friendly competition, and realistic goal-setting are embodied nowhere more compellingly than in university sports. I wouldn't want to live in the - if you will - Orwellian world in which funds would be diverted for any reason away from them." We hope you begin to see the advantages of Postdated's posthumous approach to publicizing your issues. Our literary advisors invite your further inquiries. All the best, The Postdated Communications Inc. Team |