On the Job: Games P.R. People Play

[Guest guest]

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/games-mundy.asp

 

Columbia Journalism Review

 

 

On the Job: Games P.R. People PlayCorporate damage control turns tough

 

 

BY ALICIA MUNDY

 

Early on the morning of June 14, 2001, I was about to go live on the Today show

to discuss my book on the fen-phen scandal when the host, Maria Shriver, leaned

forward and very kindly said, " I'm really sorry about the way we're doing this

interview and the questions I have to ask. You understand, don't you? "

 

The questions were indeed somewhat adversarial, but my appearance had been two

weeks in the making and NBC's corporate lawyers had gotten involved. I had spent

several days in lengthy conferences with the producer, going over questions she

said she'd been told by network attorneys to have Shriver ask me on the air. The

producer acknowledged that it wasn't the normal book interview format.

 

It seems that the pharmaceutical company, Wyeth-Ayerst, had been calling. Wyeth,

a major conglomerate, makes Dimetapp and Robitussin, as well as hormone

replacement products and other drugs, and was a huge advertiser with NBC. They'd

apparently been in negotiations with NBC's counsel over my pending appearance.

My book detailed what Wyeth's people had really known about their deadly diet

drugs, Pondimin and Redux, using their own internal documents and depositions.

‘I want to cause you legal pain. I want to take control of your story away from

you.'

 

I thought the interview went well. I skimmed over one question and read for

millions of viewers a copy of an incredible internal Wyeth e-mail, in which a

company supervisor dissed lung-disease victims. I left satisfied, but remained

curious about the dynamics behind the scenes.

 

The answer came this summer in an extraordinarily revealing panel at the annual

convention of Investigative Reporters and Editors, in Washington. Turns out I'd

been hit with just one of the newly aggressive tactics some corporations and

politicians are using to derail negative stories. It's not altogether new, but

the level of aggressiveness is part of a trend that is turning investigative

reporting into a full-contact sport.

 

In the conference and in follow-up interviews, the panelists detailed how these

tactics work - and ways to fight back. The public relations pros on the panel

also showed that such tactics frequently succeed in killing or maiming a story

because of three general weaknesses on the media's part: mistakes in reporting

or a perception of the reporter as disorganized; intermedia competitive

jealousy, which is pathetically easy to manipulate; and the increasing tendency

by many editors (particularly for magazines), TV executives (particularly local

news general managers), and internal attorneys to " cave " in the face of even

vague suggestions of legal threats.

 

The panel, titled " PR Attacks and Counterattacks, " was moderated by Mark

Feldstein of George Washington University. With him was a former local TV news

colleague, Kent Jarrell, who went over to the dark side — to P.R.. and " crisis

management " — in 1996, and is now a senior vice president for litigation

communications at APCO Worldwide. Jarrell was joined by Don Goldberg, a survivor

of the Clinton White House, who toils for the government relations firm Navigant

Consulting. The working stiff was Sam Roe, a Pulitzer finalist from the Chicago

Tribune.

 

" I want to cause you legal pain, " Jarrell told the IRE members. Sharing secrets,

he explained to me later that a frequent strategy is to " get the story about my

client away from the reporter, away from the producer, and up with the general

counsel " — a kind of legal leapfrog. Thus, the smart crisis managers will often

refuse to deal with the reporter, sometimes alleging bias from the first contact

and interview; they won't wait long to draft letters from the corporation's

high-priced outside law firm.

 

 

" I want to take control of your story away from you, " Jarrell says. This stalls

the story, and it frequently puts the fear of God into the media organization

— " Do we need this hassle? Is this story worth it? " The lawyers nitpick, and even

solid reporting can become suspect internally.

 

Jarrell and Goldberg also detailed other interesting tactics. For example, how

they try to control the timing and the placement of their clients' bad news.

During Clinton's second term, Goldberg, then a special assistant to the

president, was stuck with the impeachment scandal, and he knew that anything

damaging to the president that Republican senators heard would be leaked

immediately. His proactive position with bad news was to do " document dumps " on

Friday afternoon, hiding major embarrassments in plain sight. Reporters,

overwhelmed by hundreds of pages of unindexed material, would be able to

highlight only a few " bullet points " in a story. And because our competitive

culture is so predictable, it was a good bet that no one would follow up after

the weekend, once it was no longer " news. " The White House counted on

dysfunctional competition to protect its mistakes.

 

Goldberg and Jarrell both say it's easy to get a major story played down by

capitalizing on such competition. Jarrell, for example, says he likes to use the

London Financial Times to get a story out — it drives The Wall Street Journal

nuts and creates a dilemma for the Journal about how to follow it up. The

Journal has either to find a fresh angle or ignore its competitor's scoop

entirely.

 

Then there's The Associated Press, which they said can be particularly useful

just before a weekend. Goldberg says that when employees from a division of one

major company he represented after leaving the White House were facing an

indictment, he told an AP reporter that the company, whose employees were being

indicted by the Clinton Justice Department, was a major donor to the Republican

party. " I needed the reporter to buy the possibility that the indictment was

politically motivated, " he explained. The story broke late Thursday with a lead

incorporating the company's political contributions to the GOP, setting up the

perception that Clinton's folks were simply being spiteful. " After that, it

didn't matter what the rest of the story said, " says Goldberg. And, of course,

The Washington Post and The New York Times were " never, ever " going to run an AP

story on their front page, says Feldstein. The indictment, he says, ran in major

papers nationally, but on the inside, on a Saturday,

with minimal exposure the next week.

 

Sam Roe is not thrilled about this new level of aggressiveness. After his

award-winning 1999 series in the Toledo Blade on a scandal in Ohio nuclear

plants, he was on the receiving end of a 185-page critique written by a marquee

law firm, Kirkland & Ellis. Roe's six-part series accused government and

industry officials of putting production ahead of worker safety in the

manufacture of beryllium, a metal used in making nuclear bombs, among other

things. The central target of the six-part series, Brush Wellman Inc., sent that

P.R. missive to the office of the Pulitzer Prize board and other journalism

monitors, including CJR (May/June 2002). " My heart skipped a beat " Roe says, and

of course, the attack tied up editors and lawyers. " It has a chilling effect. "

 

But there is a way to fight back, Roe says: To counter the counterattack, show

the relevance of such high-power tactics to the story. Roe says that some

statements lawyers made in their attack letter actually helped the Blade in

follow-up pieces. The paper detailed allegations that the big law firm of Jones

Day, through some of its tactics against the Occupational Safety and Health

Administration regulators, was essentially helping the beryllium industry

continue to harm the public. " Make their P.R. campaign and legal maneuvers part

of the story, " Roe says. " Use it. Expose it. " Jarrell agreed that it can be

effective.

 

Next defense: " Annotate your notes, " says Jarrell - that means incorporating the

whole quote in the notebook. When your lawyer says, " Why did you use this part

of the quote? The subject says you took it out of context, " you're ready to show

the attorney the whole interview.

 

When he worked for Dateline NBC, Feldstein told the panel, he used to put his

interview leftovers and footnotes in a binder. If you come in to defend a story

that you want to air, and the target's lawyer is trying to slow it down, you

need to show that your work is organized and complete. " If your lawyer thinks

you're sloppy, it won't matter how good the reporting, " says Feldstein; your

lawyer will worry, and water it down.

 

Ultimately, " if you've got your facts right, there's not much I can do to stop

you, " says Jarrell. " I can just hold you up for a while. "

 

But if your editor folds?

 

That's when you go someplace else, says Jarrell.

 

There are an awful lot of weak media leaders out there these days, he says,

adding, " We know who they are. "

 

 

 

 

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