While we have seen how threatening disinformation can be to democracies and elections — cue the 2016 U.S. election — little attention has been paid to preventing and combatting it in the public relations industry. Disinformation (I prefer this term over fake news) is defined as deliberately misleading or biased information. This is different from misinformation, which is erroneous information...
Never before have we seen corporate public relations embracing racial justice with both arms. A once-touchy subject reserved for annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day ads and ethnic media, racial justice and anti-racist messages now flood the airwaves and social media. Journalists have a lot to do with the astounding flip.
Twitter this year gave its employees Juneteenth as a company...
It’s not a coincidence that Gen Z, those born after 1996, is leading the fight for social change. They are the most diverse generation — nearly half (48 percent) are racial or ethnic minorities, compared with 39 percent of Millennials and more than double the percentage of early Baby Boomers, according to Pew Research. They will surpass the Millennials as the most populous generation on the...
George Santayana, a philosopher and essayist of Spanish-American heritage, once observed that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As we review U.S. history over the past several decades, Asian Americans have been marginalized repeatedly since the first Asians arrived on our shores.
Chinese and Japanese laborers arrived in the late 19th century, seeking jobs...
Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair. Sigmund Freud made this statement over a century ago however his words remain relevant today.
I recently spent 20 minutes in a faculty meeting explaining to a well-intentioned white colleague why he couldn’t say the n-word in class, even if he is quoting someone else. I told him the more...
The stories began flooding in during the month of June. Stories of Black students at USC feeling invisible, threatened and scared on the very campus they call home.
These stories were no longer contained within the walls of a classroom, dorm room or the campus grounds. They were no longer whispers in the halls or forgotten complaints tucked away in file cabinets of administrators. They...
The Hollywood Commission for Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality was founded in 2017 by Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and talent attorney Nina Shaw and is Chaired by Anita Hill. In 2019, it conducted the first large-scale survey of the entertainment industry to understand the experience of working in Hollywood and identify gaps that increase exposure to harassment and...
Black people are tired, and yes, angry. Waiting so long, for so many decades and generations, for the communications industry to begin, in earnest, to take down the Wall of institutionalized racism, brick-by-brick. It has not. Some companies have hired a few Black employees to handle diversity and inclusion projects. Others made Juneteenth an annual holiday once they recently learned the day...