‘Golden Voice’ Tale Is Golden Corporate PR

[BridgeTheGap]

It’s heartwarming to see an unemployed, panhandling man plucked off a streetcorner and given a job due to his singular talent—that’s why the post-holiday human-interest story about “golden voiced” YouTube sensation Ted Williams spread far and wide last week. But David Sirota at Open Left has dug deeper into the narrative behind Williams’ unlikely rise and found the story of his re-employment to be a silky-smooth public relations maneuver by Quicken Loans and “a microcosm of a media that has become far more a manufacturer of false, establishment-serving storylines than a documenter of genuine everyday reality.”

Sirota explains:

What’s so galling about this particular instance of American Dream triumphalism is the most famous player now involved: the Cleveland Cavaliers. As Cleveland’s ABC affiliate reports, the NBA team owned by Quicken Loans’ CEO has now “offered Williams full-time voiceover work” and “offered to pay a mortgage on a home” for him. The ABC affiliate—like the rest of the media—hasn’t bothered to point out what The Nation magazine’s Dave Zirin has previously noted: namely, that Quicken Loans has been one of the major banks throwing people out of their homes during the foreclosure crisis. Yes, that’s right: The same company that is bragging about offering a single homeless man a job is the same predatory subprime firm that is making many people homeless—and none of the media covering the story have mentioned that. All we get are stories about how wonderful and generous the Cavs and Quicken Loans are for making their offer to Williams. …

Instead of using Williams’ story to highlight the thousands of other rank-and-file Ted Williamses who didn’t get lucky enough to become an Internet sensation, we are effectively led to believe that Ted Williams is a classic American story emblematic of what supposedly happens all the time in our allegedly well-functioning economy (i.e. “proof that life in this country can change overnight”). Likewise, instead of highlighting the hypocrisy of a company that has caused so much homelessness now using a homeless man to whitewash its corporate record, we get hagiography making that company out to be a benevolent savior.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Media/Golden-Voice-Tale-Is-Golden-Corporate-PR.aspx#ixzz1BgTl6rGf

[Ian David]

1. Pardoning The Turkey. n/t

[phantom power]

2. Conservatives play this bullshit game all the time.

They pick on these one-in-a-million cases where some poor person wins the lottery-combination of exceptional talent and exceptional luck to make it big, and then they use these stories to justify their crappy social-darwinist policies, as if it's reasonable to expect this to work for everybody, and it proves everybody else is just lazy.

x(

[BridgeTheGap]

3. It's also ironic that many c.e.o. s attribute their success to "luck!" n/t