danny2747

I have seen very little coverage of the Chrysler recall or the GM recall. Lots of coverage on Toyota and BP. When I travel overseas, or to Canada, I sense a lot of animosity towards Americans (US ones). Does anyone else feel the same? Does it matter? Does the Media always have to bash the Japanese, the British, the Europeans, the Arabs? Is this tactic really helping in positioning the US in its quest for world leadership? Is it working?
Do we always have to polarize?
I feel pretty shitty about the whole thing.
Anyone else feels like I do?

revlimiter

iTrader: (1)

US Americans?

Sparetire

Ratings. Here in the US they will blast a foreign owned company if the public sentiment is leaning that way. It gets ratings. This now occurs faster than ever. Do a fun little experiment. On whatever news site, just click on some headlines that you would normally not give a crap about for a few days, every morning or evening. See what the composition of the headlines at the top of the page is by the end of a week in compairison to what it was when you started. Thats not an accident. Its good marketing.

It's also a small scale version of what happens nationally and internationally. News is a product and its shaped to fit your desires for better or worse. The alternative is government run media.

Right now IMHO Americans are more or less convinced that their automakers are making huge strides financially, and that the vehicles are pretty darn good. Which I happen to agree with...sorta. I think the vehicles are just fine, not so sure about the finance. Anyway, public sentiment is more or less neutral-positive there. Now a big story about some horrible flaw that kills someone in an interesting fashion can change that over night. But a recall on say a half-million vehicles for a small electrical switch or something wont. It gets burried on page 8.

But off-shore oil? Energy debate? People in the Katrina zone suffering? A chance to either lampoon Obama or claim that he is so much better than Bush in handling this compared to Katrina or just a general chance to hate on the gov? Its fresh meat. Who is not interested? Who doesnt have an opinion? What public figure wont kick a foreign energy company right in the nuts publicly while taking their campaign contributions?

Its Page 1 for a looong time. Toyota showed BP exactly what to do too. Back pedal. Rope-a-dope. Fast. Talk a lot of about 'fixing it' and doing right by people. Regardless of the fact that a lot of people are fools. BP is not doing nearly as good a job as Toyo did though. Within a couple months, Toyo could start very reservedly showing that a lot of the BS was just that: BS. BP, partially because of the on-going SNAFU and partially through less skill and less positive market image to start with, is not going to turn it around nearly so fast.

What really makes me laugh about the whole hate on BP thing is logic. BP is responsible to clean it up, no debate there. But they have what, hundreds or thousands of rigs around the world? And only the one in the gulf burned and sank (in pretty calm weather)? You know what that says to me? Operator error. Nobody even knows why this ******* happened and BP is Satans brother-in-law image-wise. The crew is up for cannonization on the other hand. That's maybe a bit pre-mature. Quite honestly, looking at it pretty neutrally, BP goes in to make some major cash. They employ a lot of locals in pretty high paying, skilled jobs in the process. Something happens, and its a effing nightmare scenario. Now they pay more locals to clean up the mess, which may well have been caused by someone acting outside company policy/******* up in the first place. I'm not going to applaud BP here, but thats not exactly Darth Vader level evil.

Then theres the gov angle. IS Obama handling this well? WTF? Is my Senator handling the repair of the blown main downtown well? Theres about 10 layers of authority between the pres and this. LOL at people who form opinions of presidents this way. Bush got uber-screwed there. Dont know how it will affect Obama. Quite honestly my guess is that his press staff quietly said thank god when this went down. Less coverage of finance. Less on healthcare. Less on Iran. Less on War. I dont watch much in the way of news right now, cheifly because its a repeat. But I bet they do a update at least twice a day on one level or another regarding the gulf. I bet they have a sizeable dedicated staff pitching sotries at the journalists 24/7. I would.

danny2747

I like this analysis.
Cool!