npo.nl

Very Interesting Dutch Television Program on Lobbying http://www.npo.nl/rambam/08-04-2013/VARA_101307288 Sadly the program is in Dutch, but there is a lot of social engineering at work here and I can try to explain the premise of the program in English. So basically they wanted to find out to what extend lobbying works. And if they could do it themselves. So they set up a shady company with commercials and the whole shebang. Because in Dutch there's the expression a "zaadverhaal"(literally semenstory, pretty much means bullshit) they decide to go for a sperm donation bank. After setting up a company website and everything they decide to pick a lobbyist that they want to help them. In the show this is shown as if they're picking one blindfolded but I'm sure they have done some investigation beforehand. So they call this lobbyist and he wants to meet them. They dress up very nicely and head out to the place where they were going to meet. They have hidden camera's with them and parts of the conversation are shown. Apparently the lobbyist has been in politics for about 20 to 25 years already. He tells us how new politicians often go to lobbyists because they have a treasure's worth of information. He describes himself as an oil syringe that can make an operation go smoothly, but he can also throw sand in there to halt it's progress. The creators of the show tell him a bullshit story about the fact that waiting lists at sperm banks are long, and their aim is to reduce those times. After this first talk they're pretty giddy about how the guy asked barely any questions about the subject of their company at all. This is pretty much the core. This entire show is about over-bluffing people that don't dare to actually look into the numbers, and where those numbers are coming from. The ironic thing is that this is also the lobbyists job, trying to make something sound convincing no matter how wrong it actually is through giving lots of shallow data and avoiding actual q