Ooooo Noooo, Et tu Brooootay?

The Shredder has a funny take on the County’s response to Lisa Schicker’s request that they look into alleged conflict of interest issues over the contracts for the Hideous Los Osos Sewer Project. www.newtimesslo.com/shredder/3358/poop-cachoo/ What makes the Shredder’s piece doubly funny is this:

One of the key problems with The Los Osos “Story” is that once you re-brand and reframe the story as LON (Los Osos Nuts, as the Shredder calls them) then anything anyone from Los Osos brings forward – no matter how factual or true -- can be dismissed as Looney Toons. When the “media” buys into that “story,” then it’s really hard to overcome. “Market-based” and media-savvy people know just how to reframe and re-brand the issues, i.e. “anti-sewer obstructionists” becomes a lazy but useful buzz word to falsely describe and so demean and dismiss anybody who raises a concern, even legitimate concerns and ideas that actually do get incorporated in the project, like returning water to the basin, which was proposed by those wacky Los Osos Anti-Sewer Obstructionist Crazies, The Sustainability Group. And once it’s reframed, the false story takes on a life of its own that absolutely defies correction. Worse, the consequences of that false story can be catastrophic on a community that is falsely branded – after all, a town full of LONs and “anti-sewer obstructionists crazies” can easily be demeaned and dismissed as a community deserving of regulatory incompetence, botched political and technical decisions, and a continued failure of due diligence and oversight, all failures carrying a devastating price tag, all failures that did not need to happen in the first place had the powers that be – including The Press – done their jobs properly.

Better still, once re-branded, instead of having to do the difficult job of sorting through the message to separate the wheat from the chaff, it becomes easier to lump it all together, shoot the messenger and then toss the whole thing out as LON chaff. So, lies are truly enduring, especially when they have so many handmaidens with vested interests to keep them alive.

Though it’s funny to see Shredder falling into that “rebrand & re-frame” trap since he/she’s usually waaaayyy more savvy than that. But, Shredder is right about one thing: It’s pointless to ask foxes to investigate their own chicken coops. That’s what the Watchdog Press is for . . . oh, wait . . . Shredder’s right. Forget that. Silly me.