PR v. the media

This section looks at the running battle between PR people and the media.

Financial Post rips into PR

The May 10-12 Financial Post attacked the behind-the-scenes influence of public relations in the news we see and read, estimating that at least half of the news originates with PR people. (Unreported by the Financial Post is the relationship between greater PR content and reckless cost cutting in news rooms, but we digress &ldots;)

Much of the FP story was old news, including Hill & Knowlton's US$10.7-million job to drum up support for the Gulf War, which is said to have included the notoriously false story about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators, as told to Congress by a 15-year-old who was actually the daughter of Kuwait's US ambassador.

The odd thing about all this is that, for professionals so menacingly capable of warping the minds of the public and media, that same public and those same media have an immovably low opinion of the PR profession. This is especially ironic, since good PR people follow a stern code of ethics and often push clients to do the same.

FP could learn a thing or two from PR people with the really tough jobs. The May issue of Canadian Business looked at the PR people for really unpopular causes, such as the tobacco and fur industries. Far from hoodwinking the gullible press, these people suffer personal and professional problems best summarized by the headline: "Occupation: Pariah."

Wall Street Journal looks at PR

On March 25, the Wall Street Journal noticed that large corporations are reaching their employees with closed-circuit TV, faxes and e-mail instead of with printed newsletters.

However, while the WSJ speculates that this is the end of employee newsletters, David Murray of the Ragan Report wryly observes that he "fondly recall[s] reading 'employee newsletters are obsolete' stories in every decade since communicators began panting wildly about video in the 1960s."

On a more positive note, on March 20 WSJ lauded the PR staff at General Mills for using PR as a cost-effective marketing tool, but many communicators objected to the article's emphasis on media stunts.

PR gets a beating from the Globe and Mail

You expect a newspaper to get both sides of a story, but you don't usually expect to see the two sides in different stories.

Yet, two stories in the Globe and Mail this week in 1999, one in the Saturday "Canada" section and another in "Report on Business," show very different sides of PR.

The Saturday story, by Guy Crittenden, is the usual bash that reporters love to write, complete with the casual use of the highly derogatory term "flack." Crittenden also manages to confuse lobbying (privately influencing specific individuals) and public relations (publicly influencing specific audiences).

More tellingly, though, Crittenden's ominous warnings about all-powerful PR people is balanced by Jared Mitchell's feature in ROB. Reporting on the national Canadian Public Relations Society conference in Montreal, Mitchell describes a professional demoralized by its lack of corporate influence, a far cry from Crittenden's behind-the-scenes puppeteers.

Interestingly, that lack of influence has a lot to do with the perceptions of people such as Crittenden. Too many people think PR is about making bad news go away, instead of about making good news happen.

The difference is critical. We're either spinning our wheels doctoring messages, or we're building relationships with key publics. Mitchell describes this as reputation management, but it's really just classic PR. And it's the kind of PR that works.

If we could convince more of our colleagues of this, then PR might indeed become the kind of influential force that Crittenden fears, albeit one whose success is based, not on malevolent influence peddling, but on sound two-way communication.

Media credibility, part I

·In March, an American Spectator writer admitted that he made up his sources for stories on Clinton and the state troopers, while Salon discovered that American Spectator was being bankrolled by a foundation dedicated to "getting" Clinton.

·CNN and Time had to apologize for a heavily fictional story about a military operation in Vietnam. Worse still, CNN anchor Peter Arnett distanced himself from the story by saying that his name was attached to it for marketing purposes only.

·Writer Stephen Glass of The New Republic and Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith were both fired for making up stories.

·A Cincinnati reporter was caught stealing e-mail from Chiquita.

·A CBC reporter e-mailed tactical advice to one of the protesters who had been pepper-sprayed at Vancouver's APEC conference, even though the reporter was also covering the story.

Media credibility, part II

Don't like what the media say about you? Just rent them instead.

Both USA Today and the New York Post allow advertisers to "buy" whole issues. These aren't newsstand issues, but special vanity issues for that advertiser's internal use. The Post, for example, published 3000 special issues in August with a front page dedicated entirely to an HBO movie, while USA Today ran a special edition for Glaxo Wellcome.

ABC loses one ...

Metabolife makes a controversial weight-loss product that may be associated with serious health problems. When the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 looked into the controversy, it found itself under counter-attack from the company.

Metabolife had videotaped ABC's interviews with its executives and decided that the ABC report was a hatchet job that failed to provide the full story.

Determined to contain the PR damage from the story, the company uploaded the full, unedited interview to its Web site and took out ads in major American publications urging people to watch both the ABC program and the Web site videos, and then make up their own minds.

Many journalists sniffed that what upset Metabolife was that its PR message was spun in ways it didn't like, but whatever the case, the company has changed the rules of news coverage. A media outlet with an axe to grind no longer controls public access to information, and aggrieved sources can confront the media directly by using their own Web sites to challenge stories they feel are unfair.

... and wins one

In another ABC-related story, the network infiltrated its reporters into Red Lion, a US grocery chain. The reporters secretly videotaped unsanitary practices. Red Lion argued that ABC had committed fraud because its reporters had lied in order to become Red Lion employees. Until recently, ABC News was on the losing side, but a judge has finally tossed out Red Lion's case.

PR in the news

One of the hardest PR stereotypes to break is that of the "girl publicist," the pretty young thing who got into PR because she "likes people."

Witness the December 7, 1998, issue of "New York" magazine. The cover features two bottle blondes on cell phones and a cocktail-party-dress brunette grinning in the background. Called "Power Girls," the cover story included this inspiring sub-head: "Perky, pretty and remarkably plugged-in, a pack of young publicists have become the darlings of New York's demimonde. But be careful--they bite."

One of these giggly "power girls" told the reporter that when "you like to talk on the phone, but you don't know what to do with your life," there is "really only one thing to be: a publicist."

Missed the story? Don't worry. Columbia Pictures has apparently paid half a million bucks for the movie rights.

(Attention, power girls: If you're part of the PR game because you "like people," it had better be because you're a cannibal.)

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