Renee "McMontagne" brought NPR listeners another McDonald's PR story yesterday morning. On April 5, Montange and her Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep uncritically previewed McDonald's big PR campaign revolving around a one-day hiring blitz to "recast its jobs not as dead-end work, but in ads starring its happy employees as desirable employment" (FAIR Blog, 4/6/11). I noted that McDonald's heiress Joan Kroc gave NPR a 9-figure bequest a few years ago.

Well, Montagne returned to the story yesterday with an on-the-ground report from the scene of a McDonald's hiring event in Philadelphia, where an NPR correspondent interviewed three of those "happy employees" recasting McJobs as, in the words of one of them, "more than just flipping burgers and working on fry. There's a potential for you to come through all the ranks."

What percent of the 50,000 jobs McDonald's is hiring for will be full time? How many will get laid off after the summer rush is over? What are the odds that any of them will actually advance? NPR didn't bother asking. But based on the McDonald's press release that says it will be spending $518 million on the new hires over the coming year, MSNBC.com (4/4/11) pointed out that works out to about $10,000 per worker--which kind of sounds exactly like a typical McJob.

NPR Morning Edition (4/5/11) keeps its audience informed about important business news (that just so happens to be about an image-burnishing campaign by the company whose heiress gave them a 9-figure bequest a few years ago):

RENEE MONTAGNE: And our last word in business today comes from another Illinois-based employer. The word is McJobs.

That word has meant low-paid work at a particular fast food chain. But McDonald's is trying to, quote, "turn the word on its ear," as one marketing executive put it to Ad Age magazine.

Yesterday, McDonald's launched a McJobs campaign, with the goal of recruiting 50,000 workers. It's aiming to recast its jobs not as dead-end work, but in ads starring its own happy employees as desirable employment.

And that's the business news on Morning Edition, from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, host: Don't you mean Renee McMontagne?

(laughter)

INSKEEP: Just checking on that...

MONTAGNE: No, McInskeep. Hello.

INSKEEP: And I'm Steve McInskeep.

Raw Story (2/22/09) has a report that illustrates, in passing, the ridiculousness of how copyright law is applied on the Internet.

The story concerns a McDonald's employee in Arkansas who threw an abusive customer out of the restaurant and got shot, and the hamburger company's refusal to pay the injured employer workers compensation because the worker's "injuries did not arise out of or within the course and scope of his employment."

Surely there's a legitimate public interest in the question of whether corporations pay compensation in such cases.  And if you want to have an informed opinion on this particular case, it would help to be able to see what actually happened.  The good news is that there is a videotape of the incident.  The bad news, as Raw Story reported:

A surveillance video of the incident, which had been posted to YouTube, was taken down after McDonald's charged copyright infringement.

It's unfortunately common for media companies to squelch criticism of themselves by claiming that their critics are violating their copyright.  But here you have a corporation that is not in the media business using copyright law to try to prevent people from seeing a video that they have no discernible commercial interest in, simply because people seeing the video might think less of the company. This is a perversion of copyright law, which is supposed to "promote the progress of science and useful arts," not assist in damage control operations for big businesses with PR problems.

Raw Story updated their story by noting that the video is once again available on YouTube, via a local news report from station KARK. Whether McDonald's will try to get that taken down as well, or whether the company has decided that such censorship efforts are actually counterproductive, remains to be seen.  But the public's access to information about public questions should not be held hostage to corporate PR strategies.