The article in question titled “Pity The Men On Top” by Susan Jacoby compares the glamorous life portrayed on the chattering class’s current favorite TV show, “Mad Men” to the drudgery that most professionals experienced during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Here’s the passage in question, and it’s the opening of the article:

“WHEN I dream about my father, as I do even though he has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, I always wake up when I hear the crunch of tires rolling over rock salt — an unmistakable sound evoking the winters of my Michigan childhood in the 1950s and early ’60s. Dad, an accountant, would pull his car out of our icy driveway and head for his office long before first light. This was tax season, and he could keep his business and our family financially afloat only by working 80-hour weeks.

You won’t find Bob Jacoby or his unglamorous middle-class, middle-income contemporaries in “Mad Men,” the AMC series beginning its sixth season on Sunday. If we are to believe the message of popular culture, the last men on top — who came of age during World War II or in the decade after it — ran the show at work, at home and in bed.”

Let’s take a look at the comparison between the glorified fictional image and reality, which is represented by the single anecdote of a single real white male. What we read about in the real example are the facts of work: getting up early, working overtime, worrying about finances. In contrast, all we read about in the details of the “Mad Men” myth is status related: “ran the show at work, at home and in bed.” It’s a false comparison, because the author tells us her dad ran the business, so he was just as much in charge as the Mad Men, and more in charge than those in the TV series who don’t have ownership interests in the fictional ad agency at the center of the action. We can only imagine that he was also in charge at home, at least when it came to finances.

Later on, Jacoby writes that most blue or white collar jobs didn’t provide the income or freedom to allow for “hotel rooms for trysts with girlfriends.” Her example, though, is not a blue collar or white collar working male, but her father (again), a business owner of a professional service firm. She claims that he didn’t have time for an affair, he worked so hard. Let’s give her and her dad the benefit of the doubt and merely point out that he doesn’t represent the entire class of upper middle class professional white males in the post-World War II era.

I’m not saying that “Mad Men” is a realistic depiction; in fact it is not. Nor am I saying that the life of most upper middle class white professional males in the ’50s and early ’60s was not drudgery, although I suspect it had more joy in it than was in the lives of repressed and suppressed educated upper-middle class women, poor minorities or unskilled nonunionized laborers of that period.

What I’m saying is that to advance her argument—whatever merit it has—author Susan Jacoby makes a false comparison as a means to argue by anecdote. The polite term for this kind of illogical reasoning is to call it propaganda.

Surveying a mere 80 people doesn’t provide statistical certainty that the results reflect realty. In fact, the 80 people could be said to people an imaginary Parade universe, which we can otherwise call the alternative world of work that Parade wants us to see it. Some readers think I cover Parade too much, but it is the most well-read magazine in the country by virtue of it being included as part of the Sunday issue of virtually all daily newspapers. In its quiet way, Parade is one of the most influential arbiters of values and mores in the mass media.

So how does Parade’s survey do when it comes to reflecting the real world?

Not well.

For example, about 60% of the people surveyed by Parade make under $75,000 a year, whereas in the real world about 88% of people earn $75,000 or less according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In Parade’s world, the most common way to earn $75,000-$125,000 a year is to work for the government in some specialist or managerial capacity. I couldn’t find easy statistics on what percentage of people earning from $75,000-$125,000 work for local, state or federal government, but I can’t imagine that it’s anywhere near the 55% of all employees in this salary segment that we see in Parade’s alternative world of work. Could the subliminal effect of seeing all these well-paid government workers be to make the lower wage earners think that government workers are unfairly paid? Now wouldn’t that play right into the right-wing program to foster resentment against unionized government workers.

Surely the less moneyed readers couldn’t resent any of the nine people in the survey who make more than one million dollars a year. None of the million-dollar earners, by the way, earn less than $8.0 million.

Why no resentment? Because they are all celebrities—athletes or entertainers. Typically, we admire celebrities and only resent what they earn in comparative terms—(as is: LeBron James doesn’t deserve to make more than Tom Brady, for example).

Among the million-dollar earners on Parade’s list there is not a single CEO of a big company, nor any professional investor or investment banker, nor any very successful physician or attorney. By contrast, the Parade survey lists only owners and executives of businesses as earning between $125,000 and $1.0 million, and all of these earn considerably less than $500,000. It seems to me that the message here is that business owners and executives don’t make outsized amounts of money—they only make a little bit more than the average Jane and Joe.

Parade’s alternative world of work, then, is a meritocracy in which to reach the top you have to have a lot of talent in some very specific areas—athletics, singing, dancing, performing. While Parade’s world is primarily rich and poor/lower middle class, there is actually a higher number of people in the middle and upper ends of middle class income levels in Parade’ s world than in actual life. The Parade world also seems somewhat fairer than the real world because there are no bosses making millions and tens of millions of dollars a year while their employees work for almost nothing. There are no investment bankers manipulating the finances of companies to skim off profit while workers lose ground to inflation. The only business owners we see are close to being regular and hard-working guys and gals.

All we have at the top of Parade’s alternative world of work are the mythical gods and goddesses who the mass media erect as role models showing us how we should live our lives, the alpha and omega of our value system—the celebrity.

All in all, the Paternos and their attorneys and public relations counselors did a stellar job of implementing their PR plan.  From the technical standpoint of controlling the media and articulating a set of messages, it was a flawless execution of strategy.

Too bad they didn’t think through the strategy first, because it was wrong.

First of all, it was wrong from the ethical standpoint. The Paternos created another news cycle of stories, thereby inflicting another cycle of pain on the dozens of damaged boys and men victimized by the monster Sandusky.

Let’s assume, though, we’re talking about a business decision only, and not an ethical one. A business decision focuses solely on what’s best for the business (and not the collateral damage that might be inflicted on others). In this case the business is the Joe Paterno legacy and the money that the Paterno family can make from it. From the business standpoint, it was a terrible decision, ranking among the worst since the chairman of BP pretended not to have facts about a disastrous oil spill that as head of the company he should have had or when the chairman of Mylan Inc. claimed that a Federal Drug Administration (FDA) investigation was completed even after the FDA said it wasn’t.

It was just plain stupid for the Paternos to think that releasing an obviously partisan report would move people to exonerate Paterno. If the Paternos had engaged me as their PR counsel, I would have told them to shut up and do nothing for the time being because whatever they said would only make people believe more ardently what they currently believe about the scandal. We won’t know for certain until someone does a legitimate survey, but early reaction in the media suggests that the Paterno plan did fail:  While ardent Paterno supporters have rallied behind the report, those convinced by the Freeh report are criticizing the Paternos, although always with a great deal of respect.

It’s something I call the “mirror” effect, when the new facts or new point of view do nothing but convince people of what they already believed. The new information in a sense holds a mirror up to the people consuming the information. What people see in the mirror is themselves—or to be more specific, their point of view.

Unless the Paternos’ report had showed that Freeh lied or neglected to include exonerating facts, it was bound to have a mirror effect on the public. Too much has already been written and opined on the subject.  Media saturation has already cast in stone both the facts and the way that most people are reacting.

Not only did the Paternos’ PR campaign probably not convince anyone  (or convinced very few) of Joe-Pa’s innocence, it created an additional news cycle, so for one more time, the news media preoccupied itself with the horrible scandal. That can’t help Joe-Pa’s reputation or Penn State’s (even if we forget about the victims). 

In any crisis situation, we look for a key fact that pretty much sums up the argument the client wants to make. For example, years ago we had to close down a large factory in a small town and expected trouble from elected officials and problems with the workers. As it turned out, if all the employees of the division had worked for free during the prior two years, the company would have still lost money. That was the key fact we told everyone, and what could have been harsh criticism disappeared. Everyone had the common sense to understand that the business was just not viable. 

In the Penn State child abuse situation, the key fact is the conversation that Joe-Pa had with his assistant Mike McQueary in which McQueary told the head coach he caught Sandusky with a boy in the showers. Paterno kicked the matter to the administration and then neglected to follow-up aggressively to see what was being done.

No matter how hard the Paterno family tries, they can’t get away from that key fact, which establishes that Joe-Pa was culpable.  But that key fact also limits the extent of Paterno’s culpability. No matter what the truth really was, his guilt is tied to the one act (really several acts bundled into one) of not following up on the McQueary accusation.

As time goes by, the public is going to remember fewer of the details of the Sandusky scandal. Paterno’s involvement, tied up as it is in the one action, will seem less terrible, especially when compared to Sandusky’s and perhaps several high-ranking Penn State administrators.  Over time, the football-loving public would weigh Joe-Pa’s legendary reputation and won-loss record against this one (terrible) mistake. Paterno would (and probably still will) end up to be revered as a great, if flawed man. That may not help the current Paterno business franchise today, but nothing can help the current reputation of Joe Paterno except time. 

The impatient and seemingly insensitive Paterno family would have been better off letting the sleeping dog lie.