{"id":13354,"date":"2012-02-02T09:32:01","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T14:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13354"},"modified":"2012-02-02T09:32:47","modified_gmt":"2012-02-02T14:32:47","slug":"a-textbook-case-of-how-pr-should-not-be-conducted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/02\/a-textbook-case-of-how-pr-should-not-be-conducted\/","title":{"rendered":"A textbook case of how PR should not be conducted"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Smith<\/a> recounts the public relations moves the Obama White House used in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Jodi Kantor’s not-particularly damaging book The Obamas<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

One can argue that the once-dominant writing exercise known as the book — a collection of words roughly 4,000 tweets long — is increasingly difficult for the modern media to digest.<\/p>\n

But a skillful promotional campaign can help such a weighty work get traction even in today\u2019s blink-and-you-miss-it news cycle. The White House recently showed how it\u2019s done; the problem is, the Obama administration had hoped to bury this book, not praise it.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

But now that the dust has settled and the shooting war between Kantor and the White House has waned, it\u2019s clear that the decision to go to DEFCON 3 may well have been a tactical goof for the White House, which wound up largely validating — in caricature — the very themes of the book that it wanted to discredit: Michelle Obama\u2019s continuing adjustment to her role as first lady and the reactive and sometimes hair-trigger political operation around her.<\/p>\n

The White House air war also may have been good for sales: Kantor\u2019s title remains on the best seller lists. The book, which is deeply reported and nuanced, also has been well-reviewed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was so surreal was watching what looked like a classic political attack play out — except that some of it was directed at me,\u201d Kantor, a reporter for The New York Times<\/em>, said in an interview. \u201cI got a lot of support from other reporters who felt they had been attacked or treated harshly by this White House. It\u2019s not like this came out of nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ben Smith recounts the public relations moves the Obama White House used in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Jodi Kantor’s not-particularly damaging book The Obamas: One can argue that the once-dominant writing exercise known as the book — a collection of words roughly 4,000 tweets long — is increasingly difficult for the modern media to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53,13],"tags":[158,51],"class_list":["post-13354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-pr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3to","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13354"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13356,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13354\/revisions\/13356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}