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by Sheldon Rampton


  Judged by this standard, many of the “social sciences”—including the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung, and others—are actually pseudosciences rather than the real thing. This does not mean that Freud and Jung were charlatans or fools. Both were creative thinkers with fascinating insights into the human psyche, but a research methodology that derives its data from the dreams of mentally ill patients is a far cry from the orderly system of measurements that we associate with hard sciences like physics and chemistry.8

  Regardless of their scientific limitations, theories of human psychology figure prominently in the thinking of the public relations industry. What is more important than their actual effectiveness is the seemingly authoritative justification that they provide for the PR worldview—a belief that people are fundamentally irrational and that therefore a class of behind-the-scenes manipulators is necessary to shape opinion for the public’s own good. But this belief is at odds not only with the ideals of democracy but also with the fundamental and necessary ideological underpinnings of the scientific method itself. Before scientists can reach any conclusions whatsoever about the elements in the periodic table or the space-time continuum, they have to first believe that “the truth is out there” and that their investigations will take them closer to it. The public relations worldview, however, envisions truth as an infinitely malleable, spinnable thing. For consultants like Clotaire Rapaille, the truth is not a thing to be discovered but a thing to be created, through artful word choices and careful arrangement of appearances.

  “Given a choice, do you serve your client or the truth?” a reporter asked John Scanlon, one of today’s leading spinmeisters, during a 1991 interview.

  “You always try—you always serve the truth,” Scanlon replied. “But again—but the truth is often, you know, is often not necessarily a solid. It can be a liquid. . . . What seems to be true is not necessarily the case when we look at it and we dissect it and take it apart, and we turn it around and we look at it from a different perspective. . . . Whose truth are we talking about, your truth or my truth?”9

  John Scanlon specializes in representing high-profile clients, especially clients embroiled in controversy. In 1997, the trade publication Inside PR ranked him as the number-two expert in the world at “crisis management”—the PR field that specializes in helping clients fend off scandals and repair bad reputations. In 1999, for example, he represented famed fellatrix and self-proclaimed liar Monica Lewinsky as she embarked on a media tour to promote her book, Monica’s Story. Lewinsky too, it seems, had a version of the truth to tell, as did the president whose sexual relationship with her depended on what your definition of “is” is. Scanlon’s other assignments have included PR for CBS when it was sued for libel by Vietnam-era general William Westmoreland. Later, he squared off against 60 Minutes when he went to work for the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in its effort to discredit tobacco-industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, whose story was dramatized in the movie The Insider. In both cases, Scanlon’s methodology was similar: disseminate as much dirt as you can about the opposing camp in order to distract the media from the substance of the story. In the case of Wigand, Scanlon compiled a lengthy catalogue of allegations—Wigand was a shoplifter, a wife-beater, a drunk—and circulated them in the form of a detailed dossier to print and TV journalists. The Wall Street Journal eventually set out to verify Scanlon’s dossier and found that it was an amalgam of half-truths and unsubstantiated rumors, but for a time at least tobacco’s version of the truth prevailed, and a potent message was sent not only to Wigand but to other would-be whistle-blowers that they had better not come forward. Scanlon also represented Ivana Trump during her divorce from The Donald. “What we did was quite scientific,” he said. By “scientific,” however, he meant something quite different from what a particle physicist would mean. “I mean we sat down with Mrs. Trump, with Ivana early on with her attorneys and talked about what was the specific critical message that she wanted to communicate. I mean, we had a very, very clear position.” 10 But having a “very, very clear position” is an entirely different thing than seeking the truth, which is what an actual scientist would be doing.

  It would be nice to imagine that Scanlon’s fluid attitude toward the truth is some kind of aberration, but it is not. Richard Edelman, his one-time boss at Edelman Worldwide, goes even further. Not only are there different versions of the truth “in this era of exploding media technologies,” Edelman says, “there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.”11

  “Marketing is a battle of perception, not products. Truth has no bearing on the issue,” says advertising executive Jack Trout. The role of public relations, he adds, “is to deliver the exact same thing as advertising,” while using PR’s unique ability to provide “third party credibility and reinforce the product’s positioning in multiple media appearances.”12

  One of the rules of PR is that spin cannot be a demonstrable lie, a point that is driven home in every PR textbook. “Never lie to a reporter” has become an industry mantra. Fortunately, there is a loophole. Spin is the art of appearances, not substance. When there is no truth except what you create for yourself, lies become unnecessary, even irrelevant. To lie is to respect reality enough to falsify it. The practitioners of public relations do not falsify the truth, because they do not believe that it even exists. This worldview, conceived in spin and dedicated to the proposition that all spin is created equal, is spreading like a virus beyond the mediaspindustrial complex that was its original host and has begun to infect the rest of society. “We live in a world where everyone is always battling for the public mind and public approval,” says PR historian Stuart Ewen. “I think the public believes there is no truth, only spin—in part because much of the educated middle class spins for a living.”13

  You’re Stupid and You Smell Bad

  The age of spin has also cheapened the practice of democracy, as Scott Cutlip ruefully admits. A dean emeritus of journalism at the University of Georgia, Cutlip was a longtime PR industry practitioner and one of its leading historians. His own “baptism in PR,” as he put it, began in 1936 when he served as press secretary for a Democratic candidate in the West Virginia gubernatorial primary. “Political PR was startingly simple in those days of small campaign budgets: no TV, no opinion polls, no handlers, no campaign consultants,” he recalls. “Statewide candidates had to rely on speeches in county courthouses or rural schools; handshaking up and down Main Street, and what publicity could be squeezed out of ‘The Speech’ for the local newspapers and possibly an interview on the local radio station. This brought the candidate face to face with voters; he heard their complaints, their needs, their aspirations. In contrast, today the major candidates—President to Governor to Senator—are carefully shielded from contact with the voters save for the customary pressing of flesh along the airport fence or at $1,000 receptions.” Today’s multimillion-dollar campaigns, he notes, are “themed to the latest opinion polls, powered by glitzy TV commercials that convey shadows, not substance, and managed by carpetbagger consultants. . . . Is this progress? Does it serve our democratic process? My answer is no.”14

  The result of all this sophisticated PR is that although Americans still give ritual lip-service to democracy, the concept has lost much of its meaning. In fact, it has become boring and irrelevant in most people’s lives. Our political process functions formally the way we think it should—campaigns happen, votes are cast, someone ends up taking an oath of office—but the ugly truth, as we all know, is that the campaign promises are empty rhetoric, based not on what the candidates believe but on what their expert pollsters have told them we want to hear. If you ask the managers of these ever-more-expensive propaganda campaigns why they have vulgarized the democratic process, they will frequently tell you that the problem is not with them but with the voters, who are too “irrational,” “ignorant,” or “apathetic” to respond to any other kind of appeal. Like Clotaire Rapaille, they have come to the conclusion t
hat there are words they must not use, concepts they dare not utter. Apparently people today are less hungry for serious talk and less capable of comprehending it than the half-literate voters a century and a half ago who turned out in multitudes and sat for hours listening to the debates between Abraham Lincoln and William Douglas.

  “The minute you begin to view the public as something that doesn’t operate rationally, your job as a publicist or journalist changes,” Ewen observes. “The pivotal moment was when those who provided the public with its intelligence no longer believed the public had any intelligence.”15 It is disturbing to see how frequently this ideology, which corrodes democratic values in an acid bath of cynicism, surfaces today among the political insiders who claim to govern in the name of democracy and popular sovereignty. “On issue after issue, the public is belittled as self-indulgent or misinformed, incapable of grasping the larger complexities known to the policymakers and the circles of experts surrounding them,” observed author William Greider in Who Will Tell the People, his 1992 study of the Washington political establishment. “The public’s side of the argument is said to be ‘emotional’ whereas those who govern are said to be making ‘rational’ or ‘responsible’ choices. In the masculine culture of management, ‘emotion’ is assigned a position of weakness whereas ‘facts’ are hard and potent. The reality, of course, is that the ability to define what is or isn’t ‘rational’ is itself loaded with political self-interest. . . . For elites, the politics of governing is seen as a continuing struggle to manage public ‘emotions’ so that they do not overwhelm sound public policy.”16

  Not only are we the people too dim-witted to understand the world, some advisers believe that we are mentally ill, suffering from “chemophobia,” “technophobia,” or some sort of “infantile regression,” to choose just a few of the pseudoscientific terms that have been coined to diagnose our condition. James Cox, a consultant to rendering plants that dispose of the spoiled leftovers from slaughterhouses, came up with the phrase “hypermotivated complainant” (HMC, for short) to characterize people who object to the odors that emanate from his clients’ factories. An HMC, he explained, is “reacting abnormally,” suffering from “a form of Parkinsonian madness.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reached similar conclusions as it worked to overcome “public acceptance barriers” to its disposal plans for sewage sludge. The main problem, it concluded, was “the widely held perception of sewage sludge as malodorous, disease causing or otherwise repulsive. . . . There is an irrational component to public attitudes about sludge which means that public education will not be entirely successful.” Unlike the manic masses, the EPA in its expert wisdom knows better than to trust people’s noses: “It is difficult to say to what extent odors emanating from sludge may be imagined,” it concluded.

  “My child is currently enrolled in Watauga Elementary School,” says Tamara Rich of Ridgetop, Tennessee. “Both his school and our home are approximately 1,000 yards from a sludge dump called ‘Show Me Farms.’ Although the experts will tell you there is no danger, they will also tell you there is no smell. For the past year, more often than not, people gag when they walk out the door. Our school has not been able to open windows or let the children play outside on most days. Of course, my house is now on the market, with little to no hope of selling. Ridgetop citizens seem to be having a high level of strokes, defined as due to unknown toxins by Vanderbilt Hospital. There’s also been a lung malfunction for one child that was also labeled by Vanderbilt as unknown toxins.”

  From the point of view of the technocrats and spin doctors, the Tamara Riches of the world are just “hypermotivated complainants,” and their stories of illness, inconvenience, and injury are merely “unfounded anecdotes” that should not be taken seriously. Given the public’s evident inability to smell the difference between sludge and shinola, someone has to do our thinking for us, and that’s where the experts come in.

  Spinning the Moral Compass

  It would be a mistake to think that the practitioners of public relations are blind to the ethical dilemmas posed by their profession. They talk about them, even joke about them. At a two-day industry trade seminar in 1998 called “Media Management ’98,” PR industry consultant Jim Lukaszewski delivered two workshops, leading off each with slide presentations of cartoons that provided a PR version of gallows humor. “I admire your honesty and integrity, Mr. Wilson, but there’s no room for them in this firm,” went one punch line. In another, a CEO informed his flack that “we’re laying off half our staff and raising executives’ salaries. Announce it to the media and put a good spin on it.”

  After the chuckling subsided, Lukaszewski introduced himself as “a specialist in managing other people’s bad news. If there’s a million gallons of toluene under your parking lot, I’m the guy you want to call.”17 A consultant to Fortune 500 companies, he has worked with senior executives on issues such as product recalls, plant closings, chemical spills, and hazardous-substance exposures. In advertisements in PR industry trade publications, he describes himself as an “expert’s expert.” He helps clients prepare themselves to be interviewed on 60 Minutes or Nightline, or to give testimony in front of congressional hearings. He also teaches communications at New York University and has written numerous articles for publications such as Public Relations Quarterly, PR Reporter, and PR Tactics.

  On his website (www.e911.com), Lukaszewski gives examples of some of his recent work. As the following excerpts show, his clients are typically major corporations that have been targeted for criticism by environmental, human rights, labor, and other citizen groups:• “Provided . . . counsel to a large state-owned petrochemical company in South America related to its efforts to relocate neighboring villages now too close to its growing manufacturing facilities. The strategies developed addressed issues related to litigation, activist intervention by nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups from other areas of the world, anti-government action, the damage caused by cultural intervention, and long-term community-company relationship building.”

  • “For senior environmental officer of Canadian natural resource company, provided strategic response recommendations for managing aggressive campaign by U.S. environmental groups against the company and its largest U.S. customer.”

  • “Helped prepare executives of major U.S. defense contractor for annual meeting disruptions by anti-nuclear activists.”

  • “Prepared directors, senior managers, and locally based executives of national financial cooperative for public demonstrations against farm foreclosures.”

  • “Guided Fortune 500 toy manufacturer through attack by largest U.S. animal rights organization over the issue of animal testing.”

  • “Developed specific, targeted, pro-active face-to-face communications response to noise, odor, and quality-of-life complaints by neighbors of a mid-size manufacturing facility.”

  • “Counseled senior executives of major U.S. retailer/merchandiser facing very public action by a national and international labor organizations protesting manufacturing practices in Central and South America.”

  In person Jim Lukaszewski is amiable, unflappable, and seemingly sincere. A member of the Public Relations Society of America Board of Ethics, he comes across as something of a moralizer within the industry, arguing that ethical behavior is the only way to avoid bad publicity in today’s world. Where does the “ethical” part come in? At Media Relations ’98, Lukaszewski explained that he advises clients “to resolve the situation with the activist. It’s unavoidable. We’re eventually going to have to sit down with them. Let’s do it today. We’re probably not going to make them happy, but we can probably resolve it down to where they don’t have a case. . . . Honorable action, on the ground, is the crucial ingredient, not media coverage. . . . If you’re a crook, if you’re a slimeball, then the media strategies I recommend will not work.”

  These comments came during a provocatively titled panel discussion on the subject “When the Press
Attacks: Should You Stonewall or Cooperate?” Debating Larry Kamer of Kamer/Singer Associates, Lukaszewski took the side in favor of stonewalling. “Respond to the media only when your message goals are served,” he said. “There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says you have to call the press back.” In order to communicate effectively in crisis situations, he advised that people should stick to scripted messages or shut up altogether. To keep friends and relatives quiet as well, he joked, “duct tape is very handy.”18

  The following day, Lukaszewski’s message seemed at first to be diametrically reversed. Speaking at a workshop titled “Face the Press,” he argued that PR strategy should be based on four principles: (1) “openness and accessibility”; (2) “truthfulness . . . unconditional honesty is the only policy”; (3) “responsiveness . . . recognition that any constituent concern is by definition legitimate”; and (4) “no secrets. Our behavior, our attitudes, our plans, even our strategic discusions must be unchallengeable, unassailable, and positive.”19

 

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