Deadly Spin

by Wendell Potter

  Even so, Hill was still dissatisfied with the number of women smokers in 1929. His insistence that Bernays come up with a way to get women to smoke outdoors as well as indoors led to the PR man’s most notorious staged event. Bernays obtained a list of New York City debutantes and invited each one to join other women demonstrating their support for the equality of the sexes by walking together in the city’s Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in 1929. Additional women were recruited through ads signed by prominent local advocates of women’s rights. All the information stressed that as the women walked, they would light symbols of equality, their “torches of freedom”—cigarettes.

  The carefully scripted event went without a hitch, despite fewer than a dozen women showing up. Photos of them—defiant, stylishly dressed female smokers making their way through the parade—were published across the country, and several “torches of freedom” marches followed in support. Women, in other words, took the bait and proclaimed their determination to squelch the old taboo against smoking as the start of a movement to establish their equality with men.

  Recounting the event in The Father of Spin, author Larry Tye explains that Bernays almost always failed to point out that the campaign was funded by American Tobacco and that letters used to recruit participants never mentioned the source of the idea or the funding behind it. Ironically, Bernays, who lived to be 103, supposedly never smoked and once admitted that he did not like the taste of tobacco. “I prefer chocolate,” he said.6

  DECIPHERING PEACETIME PROPAGANDA

  Bernays, better than anyone, demonstrated the successful adaptation of wartime PR and propaganda techniques for use in postwar and depression-era America, but these increasingly brazen efforts did not go unnoticed or unopposed.

  Between 1937 and 1942, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis worked to expose domestic propaganda that the group considered a potential threat to American democracy. Although the name itself sounds like propaganda, the IPA was a legitimate organization, created “to teach people how to think rather than what to think.” Made up mostly of social scientists and journalists, it published newsletters that “examined and exposed manipulative practices by advertisers, businesses, governments, and other organizations” and sponsored related programs within high schools, colleges, and civic groups. It had no political affiliation.

  Although the group was disbanded during World War II (reportedly because of the wartime conundrum of examining not only enemy propaganda but Allied tactics as well), the IPA left a notable legacy: its list of eight “Rhetorical Tricks” used by propagandists remains strikingly relevant to PR today. It includes the following basic propaganda/PR ploys:

  1. Fear Organizations with the most to lose are most likely to resort to fearmongering. Their information may mention the loss of jobs, a threat to public health, or a general decline in social values, standard of living, or individual rights. It may also vilify a specific cause or even a specific person in order to create the desired point of view.

  2. Glittering generalities This approach arouses strong, positive emotions by using words and phrases like “democracy,” “patriotism,” and “American way of life.” Virtually all types of organizations use the tactic to create support for themselves, but when combined with negative messaging, the implications can be insidious.

  3. Testimonials Celebrities or recognized experts are frequently recruited or hired to provide testimonials about a product, cause, company, organization, or candidate. Good examples are the photos of famous athletes on Wheaties boxes and the endorsements of causes of all stripes (from animal rights to the right to own guns) by actors and musicians.

  4. Name-calling Blatant insults can be a very effective public relations tool. The organization doing the name-calling may associate the target of the insults with a negative or unpopular cause or person. Defending against name-calling can be difficult. Negative terms tend to stick, even if they are undeserved.

  5. Plain folks Anytime a business executive poses with rank-and-file employees or customers, he or she is claiming to be “of the people.” The same goes for politicians who attempt to identify themselves with their constituents; with every election cycle come the candidates who claim to be “Washington outsiders” even if they’ve been in office for years. Being identified with “plain folks” is both good business and good politics, but it raises the possibility of being labeled a hypocrite.

  6. Euphemisms PR practitioners often select words that obscure the real meaning of actions or concepts. The tactic is sometimes called “doublespeak.” For instance, an employee may be “transitioned” rather than “fired,” and a “lie” may be called a “strategic misinterpretation.”

  7. Bandwagon The overriding bandwagon message is that everyone else is doing or supporting this—and you should, too. Opinion polls can create the impression that a large percentage of people are on the bandwagon, but poll results may reflect only a designated sliver of the population, and they can be shaped in advance by structuring questions to trigger an expected response.

  8. Transfer Similar to testimonials, the transfer approach involves the approval of a respected individual or organization. The IPA described transfer as “a device by which the propagandist carries over the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect and revere to something he would have us accept.”7

  ETHICS? WELL, SOMETIMES

  As I said, PR has also been used to great and positive effect for deserving individuals, organizations, and causes. When skilled PR professionals do their jobs ethically, society benefits. For example, initiatives to end disease and poverty, to find missing children, to promote literacy, and to reduce violence have benefited from well-designed and well-executed PR campaigns.

  But PR tactics are also used to create subversive front groups, discredit legitimate individuals or organizations, spread false information, distort the truth, and instill fear. In the recent debates on health care reform, we saw PR used to leverage fear so effectively that it convinced a good number of people to take positions contrary to their own best interests.

  While most practitioners adhere to basic standards, there is no law to prevent any of them from violating the ethics of the profession, although scores of PR organizations have adopted guidelines for proper behavior. PRSA points to its own voluntary Code of Ethics as the industry standard. “Ethical practice is the most important obligation of a PRSA member,” states the preamble. To that end, the code itself emphasizes the importance of honesty, expertise, and accountability in conjunction with loyalty to and advocacy on behalf of clients. PRSA members sign a pledge that espouses “truth, accuracy, fairness and responsibility.”

  PRSA boasted more than twenty-one thousand members in 2010 (I’m one of them), plus an additional ten thousand members in its student organization, the Public Relations Student Society of America.8 Any member can report a violation of the code, and the organization has a process for reviewing and evaluating such reports. But there is no ongoing monitoring of the standards among members, and the concept of ethics can be easily lost in the enthusiasm of working for a high-paying client.

  One of the most notorious examples occurred in 1986, when Anthony Franco, president of PRSA at the time, resigned after the SEC charged him with insider trading of a client’s stock.9 Today, the group’s board of directors reserves the right to bar or oust individuals who violate the Code of Ethics, but the code’s “emphasis on enforcement” was formally eliminated in 2000.

  Many other practitioners have made headlines when caught carrying out campaigns that were based at least in part on deceptive PR practice. One of the most publicized cases, largely because it involved the nation’s largest PR agency and also its biggest public company, took place in 2006.

  The year was a rough one for Wal-Mart. The gargantuan retailer was being widely criticized for paying workers low wages and not offering health benefits to many of them, so it turned to its PR agency, the industry-leading Edelman, to improve its image. As one of the most
media-savvy agencies around, Edelman chose to use the burgeoning niche of social networking as a tool to enhance the public perception of Wal-Mart. Renowned for touting ethics as a touchstone of the PR business, Edelman proceeded to leap over the ethical line by using a practice called “astroturfing.” The term means creating a false grassroots movement so that a carefully crafted campaign or event seems to be happening spontaneously.

  In March 2006, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported that Edelman was recruiting bloggers to publish pro-Wal-Mart information. Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor with Edelman at the time, provided regular e-mails to the bloggers, who used the material at their own discretion, with or without attribution.10

  In October of that year, Edelman (a firm I once hired to do some work for CIGNA) took another public hit on behalf of Wal-Mart when BusinessWeek.com exposed an ostensibly independent blog titled Wal-Marting Across America as an Edelman project. This fake blog (or “flog”) was presented as a middle-class adventure, with a couple—Laura and Jim—chronicling their cross-country RV trip by stopping in Wal-Mart parking lots along the way. Many of the people Laura and Jim encountered (and interviewed) were Wal-Mart employees, uniformly happy with their job and their employer. BusinessWeek.com blew the cover by outing the two as freelancers. Money for the RV, the gas, and fees for Laura and Jim came from a Wal-Mart-funded group called Working Families for Wal-Mart.

  Edelman’s CEO, Richard Edelman, confessed in his own blog that the agency had violated its stated ethical standards by setting up the “Laura and Jim” road show. However, he stressed that he was not personally involved in the project, which lasted only a few weeks before being busted. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, disavowed any connection to the debacle.11

  Although there was speculation at the time that Edelman might suffer because of the bad publicity, there has been little, if any, negative long-term consequence. In fact, Adweek named Edelman the 2009 PR Agency of the Year, and Advertising Age declared the agency to be the top PR firm of the decade. The Advertising Age announcement, issued on December 14, 2009, included this statement: “The only major hiccup these past 10 years was the Wal-Mart Across America blog snafu back in 2006.”12

  PR also crosses the line when trying to repress or create doubt about information that could be harmful to a client. In 1994, for example, a whistle-blower from Ketchum PR disclosed that the firm had attempted to discredit a book called Diet for a Poisoned Planet. Because the book contained information about the dangers in some foods and might damage Ketchum’s clients in the food industry, the agency took extreme steps to undermine the author’s book tour. Ketchum, the sixth-largest PR firm in the United States at the time, obtained a copy of the author’s schedule and arranged for someone to follow his itinerary and counteract his statements at every stop. In addition to spreading negative information about the author, Ketchum also used its influence to have as many of his major interviews canceled as possible.13

  Edward Bernays, the master manipulator himself, was also forced to face the potentially horrific consequences of his own PR tactics. In 1928, he wrote in Propaganda, perhaps the most famous of his books, about the necessity of manipulating public opinion: “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”14

  In 1933, according to his autobiography, a foreign correspondent who had just returned from Germany dined at Bernays’s home. The guest told Bernays, the son of Jewish parents, that he had recently been in the home of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Reich minister of propaganda in the rising Nazi regime, and had noticed at least one of Bernays’s books in Goebbels’s library. The guest told Bernays that Goebbels was using the book as a foundation for a campaign against Jews.15

  Even more disturbing, the führer himself discussed manipulation of public opinion in his book, Mein Kampf, in terms that could be used by one of today’s PR counselors. Hitler wrote, “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered.”16

  Bernays fretted publicly about ethics in PR later in his life. Looking back, he said that had he known the dangers of tobacco, he would not have accepted the American Tobacco account. “No reputable public relations organization would today accept a cigarette account since their cancer-causing effects have been proven,” he wrote in 1986.17 Also late in life, Bernays appealed to PRSA to police its ranks, arguing that circumstances allowed unethical behavior without any sanctions, legal or otherwise. “There are no standards,” he said. “This sad situation makes it possible for anyone, regardless of education or ethics, to use the term ‘public relations’ to describe his or her function.”18

  LIKE WATCHING SAUSAGE BEING MADE—

  OR WORSE

  The best public relations is invisible. While it’s easy to spot advertising—the stuff that blatantly urges you to go buy something—PR subtly convinces you to change the way you think. Advertising urges you to do something now; PR is patient. Advertisers pay for the time and space devoted to their messages. Good PR usually gets free media space because it is presented as unbiased information.

  Dedicated PR pros consider their profession a science, grounded in research, strategy, and evaluation. They’re trained to craft effective messages and to place them in media that will most effectively reach their target audiences. Good PR leaves little to chance. Good PR is about control.

  Large companies typically have large PR departments, in which individuals may be assigned to particular media or to segments of the firm. Structure is tight, and jobs are well-defined. Big firms, as well as many small ones, also use independent PR agencies, periodically or on an ongoing basis. Media relations specialists, whether company or agency, deal with news-media representatives, planting stories, spinning information to a client’s advantage, and choosing the best media to reach the target audiences.

  News releases explaining what happened at an event are commonly written before the event takes place. Corporate executives go through “media training” to prepare them for speaking directly to reporters. Mock press conferences are held to give execs practice. PR staffers prepare a list of expected questions and appropriate answers for them in advance of media interviews. Few politicians and virtually no business executives write their own speeches. All good executives, like politicians, are taught the cardinal rule: Stay on message.

  For many years, I was the designated media relations person, the company’s public presence, the mouthpiece for management. Mine was the face presented to the media whenever my company was in the spotlight, voluntarily or otherwise. Never—not once—did I answer questions or make statements on behalf of my employer without knowing in advance what I would say.

  PR people are good at manipulating news media because they understand them. A large number of practitioners are former reporters—like Lee and Bernays (and me)—who know what kinds of stories get attention, as well as who decides what gets coverage and what doesn’t. Conversely, news outlets are increasingly dependent on public relations departments and agencies for content. As budgets drop, especially at newspapers, there are fewer reporters and fewer resources for investigative journalism. Canned information from companies is used “as is” more frequently, often without fact-checking.

  In addition, PR people cultivate reporters, ostensibly for friendship or mutual benefit, but more realistically for manipulation. And in a disturbing trend, reporters can increasingly be cow
ed by powerful public relations reps because PR controls access to major news-makers in both business and government. I should know. For years, I was the gatekeeper to the CEO and other top executives at CIGNA. No reporter got to them except through me. I decided who had access and on what terms.

  Unexpected things happen, of course, but PR people have a plan for that, too: crisis management—always in place, ready to be tweaked to fit individual circumstances, and set to be implemented on a moment’s notice. A major negative event will kick the process into gear, and if the plan is executed well, the public will eventually perceive nothing more than a company that responded quickly and honestly to a problem.

  The 1982 Tylenol tragedy is a textbook example. The entire country was stunned by the news that seven people in Chicago had died after consuming cyanide-laced capsules of Tylenol. Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, immediately worked with news media to notify the public of the potential danger. The company recalled Tylenol from all store shelves voluntarily. Behind the scenes, Johnson & Johnson’s CEO formed a strategy committee to determine the best way to prevent further deaths, and he worked extensively with his public relations staff and an outside agency to plan for the reintroduction of Tylenol in tamper-resistant packaging.

  The result: 90 percent of the polled public said they did not hold the company responsible for the incident, and Tylenol sales began to skyrocket shortly after the product was back in stores. The Washington Post praised the firm for its performance, noting in an editorial, “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster.”19 The poisoning case was never solved.