Articles by Noel Turnbull

Albert O. Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction is important because it explains how conservatives oppose change and what sort of narratives they use to do so.

What do political advisers do when their team loses and can no longer work for the government? Usually they head off to a lobby group or law firm to bide their time.

While George Pell generates plenty of controversy, so far he has yet to meet the levels of Archibishop Daniel Mannix — the subject of a new biography. There are some interesting parallels with the current crop of Catholics, writes Noel Turnbull.

How do we judge the political pundits and economic forecasters that roll up to give us their predictions, only to be proven completely and utterly wrong? A Nobel prize winning scientist is calling them to account.

Despite the well-funded groups in the United States that push climate sceptic propaganda, more Americans than ever believe in climate change and its links to extreme weather.

The lengths that politicians and business leaders will go to convey leadership and responsibility can mean some very irritating language choices, writes Noel Turnbull.

Alan Jones probably didn’t seek PR crisis management advice before delivering his apology to Julia Gillard yesterday. They would have told him he handled it very badly.

What is it about Louise Adler that gets people talking? The chatter about the Melbourne publisher goes to what is unique about Melbourne and modern management.

Politics is often characterised as theatre and probably never more so in areas — such as security — where symbolism is often more important than logic and probability.

The US military, for instance, is the largest employer of PR people in the world and in Melbourne the number of PR people outweighs the number of journalists.

The media — particularly magazines — are heavily dependent on monarchical stories, regularly reporting on them through the frame of pageantry, soap opera, scandal and fantasy.

Evolutionary psychology often seems like a “just so” story and it has the unfortunate quality of not being, unless we discover time travel, falsifiable. But it does have some very useful insights into how we think and act today.

The Disney Channel has managed to pull off a very successful PR coup.

The latest census figures ought to cause some red faces among advertising agencies, PR people and politicians.

A new report has shown some light on the state of the Australian PR consultancy industry and suggests that the once-dominant players are no longer quite so dominant.

In the 1970s, legendary journalist and editor Richard L’Estrange (commonly known as Dick the Odd) described the then Victorian parliamentary press gallery as “a club”.

If you have a dismissive attitude to public relations, you will be delighted to discover that research has uncovered something very interesting about young PR students.

Everybody in PR agrees that social media is revolutionising PR — it’s just that most of them are a bit vague about exactly how.

The modern science-fiction genre has moved on from bug-eyed monsters and spaceships and is now more likely to explore alternative worlds and realities — often interacting or existing simultaneously.

Australians pride themselves on their resilience and the belief in our resilience is so strong that it can be used as a basis for a national narrative.

The PR industry is experiencing a bit of a kerfuffle at present.

It seems like a bit of a mystery when you hear at an atheists’ convention what a good job Christians are doing to help defend the rights of women against fundamentalist Muslims.