Are we doing well?

The management of public opinion is among the tasks of every government. In a developed democracy one would argue that this management must focus on a continuous and systematic explanation of the government's strategy for the achievement of explicitly stated goals, so as to dispel confusion and remove unavoidable obstacles to policy making. This, for example, was done by former PASOK premier Costas Simitis when he sought to achieve Greece's integration into the eurozone - which New Democracy, as the main opposition of the time, had bet would not be achieved. Often, however, the management of public opinion devolves into simple manipulation.

An extreme example of such practice was shown recently with the misleading presentation of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on foreign direct investment in Greece. The report shows that FDI fell by 36...