Sunday, February 8, 2009
Toxic Sludge
I don't know about all of you...but Toxic Sludge was a bore compared to UnSpun. While the chapter made some really interesting points and comments, I found the read to be very dry and hard to get through. Some of the history behind propaganda and PR firms was pretty cool to learn, because I never really considered how far back this type of scam can date. The idea that "damage control" was used during the PA Railroad era was very interesting to me because I love learning about PA history and I am a little bit of a celebrity buff. Knowing that celebrities and publicists have adopted a technique used decades ago is kind of cool. It basically shows that history repeats itself and scam isn't something known strictly to the 21st century. The part that talked about vegetarians and book banning was also informative and relateable to me because, being a vegetarian, I have done quite a bit of research on the meat packing industry. It amazing to see the amount of PR and money spent on Anti-vegetarian campaigns and pro-"big beef." Cattle farmers and meat packers seem to stop at nothing to promote business, which isn't a huge shock in our society. Freedom of speech is an idea that our country was founded upon, so allowing this industry to speak its beliefs should be tolerated, however, when their ideas can possibly interfere with the safety of the public, I think the government needs to step in. There were some rather boring sections of this reading, but overall, I felt as if there were some very effective questioning methods and ideas.
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I definitely agree with the differences in the books, unspun is the kind of rare textbook which i will read without having an assignment from it. as with all "controversy" books toxic sludge definitely does a good job of raising questions that would ordinarily not come up, but I feel that upsun does a much more thorough (and interesting) job of it.
ReplyDeleteYeeeeah, for a book with such a cartoony, action-packed title and cover, the inner guts of Toxic Sludge were definitely not the razor-sharp upbeat revelations I was expecting. Still, some parts of it so far have been pretty interesting, especially the sections in which they tell you the lengths of which PR firms have gone from keeping infomration from leaking to the public that their clients don't want exposed. The part about Ketchum's destruction and sabotage of the Poisoned Planet book was downright tragic. Again, it makes me question how any of this is legal.
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