Taking out the Trash [1]
Submitted by Bob Burton [2] on
On parliament's last day before its summer break, the British government publicly released thirty ministerial statements, including one listing the salaries of "special advisers," one detailing the siting criteria [3] for new nuclear power stations and another detailing [4] the guests entertained at Prime Minister Gordon Brown [5]'s official residence, Chequers. The document dump was dubbed by some as "take out the trash day," after an episode [6] of the fictional television series on the White House, the West Wing. Mike Granatt, a former head of the British government's Government Information and Communications Service and now a partner in the PR firm Luther Pendragon [7], explained to PR Week, "You shove everything out on one day and you hope the volume of it means there's only a certain amount of room in the papers and on TV and radio, so that squeezes it. And, secondly, you take the hit at once."