Public Relations Battle Research Articles

Hydraulic Fracturing Conference Offers New Insights

Conference review The SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference and Exhibition took place 24–26 January in The Woodlands, Texas. The event included more than 50 technical paper presentations, as well as 90 exhibitors, discussing and showcasing new hydraulic fracturing technologies, various applications, and learnings from fracture-stimulated wells. Below are some of the highlights from the conference. Initial Impressions of Wells May Be Misleading Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor The mostly widely reported production data proved to be a bad indicator of future output. A study presented at the conference considered whether the widely reported 30-day production total is a good way to evaluate a well compared with less frequently offered longer-term numbers. “Production at 30 days tends to be an unreliable estimate,” said Edward Ifejika, a field operations engineer for Total who did the research while he was a student at Texas A&M University (SPE 184817). The number after 90 days offers a much better estimate of future gas production and the improvement from there is limited. Getting a Better Look at Propped Fractures Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor Carbo Ceramics is getting a clearer look at where the proppant goes. The ceramic proppant maker showed much-improved images at this year’s conference (SPE 184880) compared with the ones shown last year, as well as a new set of images showing three stages of a Marcellus gas well. The presentation at the start of the conference’s technical sessions drew a large crowd. The method discussed uses metallically coated ceramic proppant that is activated by an electric current run through the reservoir. The new method promises a deep look that is not available using alternatives such as radioactive markers, which are visible only within a couple feet of the wellbore. Think-Tank Founder Touts Benefits of Fossil Fuels Trent Jacobs, JPT Digital Editor Higher life expectancy, plentiful food, and soaring gross domestic product are among the benefits that much of the world’s population has enjoyed since widespread use of fossil fuels began more than a century ago. They are also the central pillars to Alex Epstein’s the-sis of why fossil fuel production, and the engineering involved, equates to a moral obligation. Epstein, founder of the for-profit think tank Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, was the featured speaker of this year’s conference. Addressing several hundred industry professionals, Epstein used the rise of the North American shale sector to highlight how, despite making possible the many advantages of living in the modern age, the wider oil and gas industry is losing the public relations battle. Institute Seeks To Boost Knowledge in Permian Basin Trent Jacobs, JPT Digital Editor For all of the upstream activity going on in the Permian Basin of Texas, it can be difficult to assess which horizontal well strategies are working best and why. The primary reason is operators in Texas are not required to share as much detailed drilling and completion information as they are in other major oil-producing states such as North Dakota, home to one of the shale sector’s most revered public databases. But with the recent formation of the Texas Oil and Gas Institute (TOGI), it is expected that the Permian will soon become a much more well understood shale play. TOGI was established in 2015 by the regents of the University of Texas (UT) system, which manages oil and gas mineral rights across 2 million acres of land in west Texas. Saudis Find Proppant Source in Their Own Back Yards Stephen Rassenfoss, JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor When hydraulic fracturing arrived in Saudi Arabia, there was something lacking. While the reserves of tight gas are bountiful and sand covers the desert, Saudi Aramco has had to import ceramic proppant to hold open the fractures created. Sand dunes in its deserts provide a seemingly endless supply of sand, but when the national oil company studied those grains of sand, it found that they were “nice and round but not very strong,” said Kirk Bartko, a senior petroleum engineering consultant for Saudi Aramco, during a presentation at the conference (SPE 184823). It was a second-grade proppant, which was not quite up to the demand of wells typically 10,000 ft deep where proppant faces closure pressures of about 11,000 psi. The likely result would be sand grains crushed into fine particles likely to block the flow of gas.

How Qatar is Its Own Worst Enemy

Qatar is proving to be its own worst enemy in achieving its soft power goals by embedding itself in the international community as a good citizen despite having put crucial blocks in place. Its failure to convincingly follow through on promises to reform its controversial migrant labour system could lead to world soccer body FIFA depriving it of the right to host the 2022 World Cup. Meanwhile, Qatar has been unable to convince even its allies that it is serious about its pledges to stop a flow of funds to jihadist organizations. Among Qatari nationals whom the US Treasury has categorized as specially designated terrorist is a historian religion and former head of the Qatar Football Association (QFA), who was awarded for his contribution to Qatari sports. Those allegations have allowed Qatar's detractors to further question the Gulf state's suitability as a World Cup host.Qatar's problems are compounded by its lack of a robust communications strategy that would enable it to respond to legitimate criticism and counter attacks by its detractors, some of whom have invested significant amounts in causing Qatar significant reputational damage and diplomatic and political capital. That lack dates back to Qatar's initial response to massive criticism and attacks almost immediately after it was awarded the World Cup in late 2010. Qatari officials argued at the time that they could not win the public relations battle and therefore would wait until the storm blew over (Multiple interviews with Qatari officials in the period from 2011 to 2014). They rejected the notion that failure to engage amounted to surrender of the battlefield, losing an opportunity to conquer the moral high ground, and allowing a wound to fester (Multiple interviews by the author with Qatari officials between 2011 and 2014).The problem was the storm did not subside. It got worse with Qatar currently battling public relations battles on numerous fronts: persistent challenges to the integrity of its World Cup bid; accusations of enforcing modern slavery on migrant workers employed on World Cup-related projects; doubts about its ability to host one of the world's foremost mega sporting events; charges of funding and supporting militant Islamist groups; and adopting a foreign policy that puts it at odds with its neighbours and at times with its most important allies.

Faux Transparency: Ethics, Privacy and the Demise of the STOCK Act's Massive Online Disclosure of Employees' Finances

In 2012, the U.S. Congress enacted the STOCK Act, legislation that would have created an unprecedented level of transparency in the federal government. As originally passed, the STOCK Act mandated the creation of a searchable, sortable database of the financial interest statements filed by members of Congress, highly paid Congressional staff, and 28,000 executive branch employees. Never before would the private financial holdings of so many government officials be so easily accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. Many of these employees were alarmed at the prospect of this public posting of their information, objecting on both legal and policy grounds, filing lawsuits and launching a public relations battle. In response, Congress delayed the web-posting provisions three times, ordered a study by the National Academy of Public Administrators (NAPA), and then quietly repealed most of these transparency mandates. This chapter places the STOCK Act in the larger context of government ethics regulation, explores the role that transparency can play in preventing or detecting conflicts of interest, identifies significant weaknesses in the federal government’s current ethics system and makes recommendations for improving that system.

One Hypothesis about the Decline and Fall of ACORN

After 38 years of longevity (1970 to 2008), including huge growth over its last decade, in 2008 and 2009 the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was rocked by an embezzlement scandal and two controversies and declined precipitously. By the spring of 2010, all city and statewide ACORN operations had either disaffiliated from the national organization or collapsed altogether, and in November 2010 ACORN filed for bankruptcy. Because ACORN was widely considered the nation's largest and most powerful group organizing the poor, the organization's breathtakingly swift destruction warrants analysis. This commentary analyzes one hypothesis that might have contributed to ACORN's vulnerability to smear campaigns: the organization's long-time practice of combining direct action organizing with individual service provision. THE IRONY OF ACORN'S RAPID DEMISE In early 2008, by most empirical measures of organizing strength, ACORN appeared to be a strong and powerful community organization. Over the preceding 10 years, ACORN had been instrumental in numerous campaigns and victories on a wide range of issues such as winning living wage ordinances (Luce, 2009), increasing the minimum wage (Atlas & Dreier, 2006), fighting predatory lending practices of major financial institutions (Hurd, Donner, & Phillips, 2004), winning a guarantee of affordable housing in the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards mega-development (Atlas, 2009) among dozens of other neighborhood, statewide and national victories. ACORN Housing was helping over 6,000 moderate-income families per year purchase their first homes. In 2008 ACORN Service Centers filed income taxes at no charge for over 50,000 people, resulting in over $65 million dollars in Earned Income Tax Credit/Child Tax Credit returns to low-income families (Rathke, 2009). ACORN was considered the only community organization in the United States that had the ability to coordinate campaigns from the neighborhood to cities and states, all the way up to national policies and corporate campaigns (Dreier, 2009). An independent study by Ranghelli (2006) of the National Center for Responsible Philanthropy, using conservative assumptions, estimated that ACORN campaign victories and services over the 10-year period between 1995 and 2004 resulted in over $15 billion of direct economic development for low- and moderate-income ramifies. According to ACORN's former Chief Organizer Wade Rathke (2009), by 2005 ACORN's combined operations (organizing, housing and tax preparation services, research, and voter registration) employed over 1,000 people, in 85 offices; serviced 400,000 dues-paying members; and raised and spent around $100 million dollars a year. It is beyond the scope of this commentary to analyze all the factors that contributed to ACORN's demise, but from spring 2008 to fall 2009 ACORN was rocked by three separate scandals or controversies that resulted in a public relations disaster for the organization. Most foundations decided to stop funding the organization, and dozens of government bodies (city, state, national) voted to stop funding any ACORN-affiliated organization. Although ACORN fired staff and made numerous internal reforms, it was unable to win the public relations battle in both the mainstream and right-wing media. Because two of these issues (an internal embezzlement of almost $1 million and controversies around voter registration drives) have already been analyzed (see Atlas, 2010), this commentary briefly describes and analyzes one aspect of the final controversy that ACORN encountered, the videotape smear campaign conducted by Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe. This analysis addresses this question: Did ACORN's organizing model of combining direct action organizing with service provision make it more vulnerable to smear campaigns? Because O'Keefe has recently institutionalized his model of citizen journalism, other progressive organizations should try to learn from ACORN's demise to avoid a similar fate. …

Activism and the Limits of Symmetry: The Public Relations Battle Between Colorado GASP and Philip Morris

Litigation has forced tobacco companies like Philip Morris to disclose more than 7 million internal documents, including previously confidential public relations plans. We draw from this archive, as well as from activist materials, to demonstrate that, despite vigorous industry efforts to thwart them, activists in this case employed strategies of values advocacy and inoculation and capitalized on economic benefits to persuade publics. This watershed case poses continued challenges for the 2-way symmetrical or mixed-motive theoretical model of public relations. Accounting for public relations activism and understanding its voice in influencing contemporary public debate requires that scholars move beyond this widely accepted model that stresses compromise between activists and organizations. An alternative rhetorical theory of activist public relations is posited to account for groups that refuse to accommodate opponents.

Public relations battles and wars: journalistic clichés and the potential for conflict resolution

The association of public relations with images of hostile relationships and metaphors of violence in the Canadian print news media was explored. A search of the on-line data base Canadian Newspaper Source provided a sample of articles which used the terms public relations battle or public relations war to describe a variety of communications between organizations and publics; analysis suggests the phrases were inflammatory, and often did not accurately reflect intent and/or reality. The implications of journalists’ use of these metaphors of violence were discussed in the context of public relations as a means of bringing about harmony in relationships.

The Framing of Farmed Fish: Product, Efficiency, and Technology

Abstract This paper examines the ways in which both fish farmers and environmentalists use frames to socially construct the salmon fanning industry in British Columbia. Advertisements and other promotional materials contain movement actors' justifications for promoting or opposing the industry; these rationalizations are good reasons for understanding fish fanning in a particular way. Because salmon farmers and environmentalists must both rely on what people already know, they create frames that direct the viewer's gaze of salmon aquaculture in surprisingly similar ways. We found that frames created by both proponents and opponents of the industry are structured around the inter-related concepts of production, efficiency, and technology. As a result, fanned fish become natural-social hybrids. Fanned salmon are framed in both common-sensical and hyper-real ways as naturally efficient bits of living technology. Resume Cet article examine comment les pisciculteurs et les ecologistes utilisent des cadres pour Ia construction sociale de la pisciculture du saumon en Colombie-Britannique. La publicite resume les justifications. que les divers acteurs utilisent pour promouvoir ou s'opposer a la pisciculture; ces rationalisations sont de bonnes raisons pour comprendre la pisciculture d'une certaine facon. Comme les eleveurs desaumon et les ecologistes doivent chacun compter sur ce que les gens savent deja, ils creent des cadres qui dirigent l'attention de l'observateur de facons tres similaires. Nous avons trouve que les cadres crees a Ia fois par les partisans et par les opposants la pisciculture sont bases surles concepts etroitement lies de production, d' efficacite et de technologie. lien resulte que le poisson d' elevage devient un hybride naturel-social. Les saumons d'elevage sont cadres la fois suivant le sens commun et d'une facon hyper-reelle, comme etant des particules efficaces de technologie vivante. Introduction This paper analyzes the framings of salmon farming as social constructions rather than as objective ways of interpreting the controversy around this industry. Salmon farming in British Columbia has been embroiled in a public relations battle for the past several decades. Environmental and industry groups vie for influence over the social construction of fish fanning by creating and disseminating competing frames. Frames define situations by making them meaningful. They tell us what is going on, by placing an event or issue into a socially understood context. In an effort to communicate meanings to would-be supporters, both salmon farmers and environmentalists engage actively in the framing of the industry through advertisements, brochures, and press releases. Framing, as developed by Goffmann (1974), is a type of social meaning-giving activity that occurs across a wide range of phenomena, from everyday talk to news occurrences, ceremonies, and make-believe events. Benford and Snow (2000) and Snow et al. (1986), developed the framing perspective through their concepts of alignment, in which they argue that certain pre-existing values and beliefs are invigorated for a particular framing purpose. Indeed, there exists a now rich literature on the frame analysis of public discourses that examines how meanings come about and become socially distributed. To name just a few examples, Gamson and Modigliani (1989) examined nuclear power in relation to the culturally available meanings used in constructing frames; Coy and Woehrle (1996) used frames in their discussion of the Persian Gulf War, and Doyle et al. (1997) found the BC Forest Alliance was able to greenwash the practices of forestry companies by framing the industry in terms of environmentalist values. Recently, however, Benford (1997) has critiqued the framing perspective as leading all too often to the treatment of frames as things, rather than as dynamic processes of meaning construction and transformation. …

In the words of experts: the interpretive process of the food irradiation debate

Irradiation has been touted as a way to safeguard the food supply. When we asked oyster harvesters in Southern Louisiana about their awareness and knowledge concerning this postharvest technology, we found that nearly half of them had never heard about it. We decided to look closer at the irradiation debate that has been taking place in two regional newspapers (Louisiana and Florida) to try to understand why the coverage of this issue may not be of interest to oyster harvesters. We interviewed reporters and sources who were involved in this coverage, and argue that one possible reason is that journalists have decided who the experts are on the issue, and have framed the controversy over irradiation as a public relations battle, and sources have not been overly opposed to this type of newswork. This type of journalism may have the effect of alienating those individuals whose livelihoods may be greatly impacted by the adoption of this technology. In addition, these findings have implications for individuals and groups interested in attracting the media spotlight concerning food safety issues.

Plain Speaking about Indian Nuclear Testing

From India's point of view, its 1998 nuclear test programme was a response to a failure to secure a commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons within a specified time during both multi‐ and bi‐lateral negotiations. That India possessed nuclear weapons technology had been known since 1974 and, as a signatory neither of the Non‐Proliferation Treaty nor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, its detonation of a number of devices in 1998 was not in violation of either. To build a nuclear weapons capability while seeking their elimination internationally might seem disingenuous, but India has seen the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology by two aggressors—Pakistan and China—while the West stood by. The Indian government lost the public relations battle after the tests, but the Western response, including sanctions, can only serve the interests of Indian nationalists.

Plain speaking about Indian nuclear testing

From India's point of view, its 1998 nuclear test programme was a response to a failure to secure a commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons within a specified time during both multi‐ and bi‐lateral negotiations. That India possessed nuclear weapons technology had been known since 1974 and, as a signatory neither of the Non‐Proliferation Treaty nor the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, its detonation of a number of devices in 1998 was not in violation of either. To build a nuclear weapons capability while seeking their elimination internationally might seem disingenuous, but India has seen the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology by two aggressors—Pakistan and China—while the West stood by. The Indian government lost the public relations battle after the tests, but the Western response, including sanctions, can only serve the interests of Indian nationalists.