Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The Rise of the High-Tech Preemptive Media Strike | Slog | The Stranger's Blog | The Stranger | Seattle's Only Newspaper:

I’m fascinated by this new public relations strategy, in which the subject of a potentially negative investigative story uses technology to try to torpedo the story-in-progress (and, in doing so, tries to get his or her own version of things out to the public first).

We saw an example of this here in Seattle earlier this year, when one of the people behind Real Change used his blog to launch a preemptive strike against a Seattle Weekly story-in-progress.

Today finds Scientologists using the same kind of techno-guerrilla tactics against the BBC.

Faced with potentially negative press from an upcoming BBC documentary, Scientologists filmed the people filming the documentary, created their own “counter-documentary,” distributed it widely on burned DVDs, and have now released a YouTube video showing a BBC documentary reporter losing his cool and berating the shadow-documentarians.