The following is an op-ed from Majora K. Vocink a dedicated reader of the blog and someone that I have served with over my 20 year career.
In an age when the necessity for field work in public outreach
grows less and less with each technological advancement, the need for
responsible and focused messaging via social media and other public platforms
is paramount to the message’s success.
While the vast majority of content generated by public affairs divisions
across the Air Force is typically and benignly oriented towards serving the
community, occasionally the typical morphs into the atypical. In such cases, the presentation of the
message overpowers the message itself, and one misrepresentation undermines the
strength of the message entirely. At
best, it can come off as frivolous, and at worst, volatile.
Just such a miscalculated media effort recently came at the
expense of the professionals at Hill AFB.
Entitled The Big Picture - PSA #1 (seen above) the video intends to pan
the lens further out to capture the efforts of agencies peripheral to the
mission and emphasize the services they provide, hence “the big picture.” However, with visions of self-aggrandizement,
apathetic leadership, a general lack of discipline and direction, etc.,
embodied in the portrayal of the enlisted corps, in stark contrast to the Steve
Rogers-esque portrayal of the officer corps, this video, regrettably, only
succeeds in feeding into age-old stereotypes, thus reducing “the big picture”
to the mere caricatures portrayed in the PSA.
A very small picture indeed.

Take for another example an advertisement where an apparently oblivious celebrity waltzed
into a protest scene to a hand a police officer a soft drink, then joined the
protesters in revelry. From every
possible perspective, whether you view it from the
marginalization of a protest
movement steeped in deep social rifts, or from the contrast presented in the
riot police who had apparently just lacked a soft drink to be humanized, or the
oblivious public that apparently thought the goings-on were just a big party,
so have a soft drink and smile, why so serious?... The advertisement quickly
lost its grip of the dire reality at the core of what was happening across
America. The message was hopelessly lost
in this poorly delivered, high brow effort.
Similarly, PSA #1 strikes these discordant tones. Well, you may be thinking, “but enlisted Airmen
are not an oppressed member of a historically oppressed segment of
society.” Of course not. I also don’t tend to subscribe to such
finite, literal interpretations of thought.
However, the concept of reducing any group of people to a caricature of
itself is comparable across any demographic where caricatures are employed to
represent the group. In the case of PSA
#1, these caricatures certainly weren’t intended to be incendiary. Maybe they were strictly intended to take a
lighthearted, comedic approach. Maybe
they were intended to accentuate the hardships an Airmen might navigate. Maybe, just maybe, they were designed to
chide a workforce that the creative team behind this PSA views as selfish,
apathetic, and generally undisciplined and misguided. In any case whatsoever, these depictions
provide a very narrow perspective of a very dynamic enlisted and officer
corps. Indeed, it provides a very narrow
perspective of the talents of the team itself that created the PSA.
Unfortunately, the hard truth is that PSA #1 wildly misses the
mark, with the unintentional cost of losing the message of a strong community
with services designed to support its growth and development. This video goes down as yet another tone-deaf
endeavor in a never-ending stream that accosts our collective digital
consciousness. We are all, each and
every one of us, bigger than the caricatures thrust upon us. We can do better than PSA #1, and I, for one,
look forward to better products in the future.
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