Say it Ain’t So. Crises Create Communications Carpet Baggers
John F. Kennedy once said: “When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters — one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.” Sadly this quote is extremely apropos when it comes to the public relations industry’s pathological need to convert a human crisis into a communications opportunity.
Members of our profession looked at the recent devastating wildfires in Southern California, which forced the evacuation of three quarters of a million people and wrought the eventual destruction of over 1,800 homes, not as a human tragedy, but as a marketing opportunity. Within days bulk email pitches were burning up the in-boxes of journalists everywhere — pitching everything from experts on telecommunications networks (for all those displaced workers whose offices had gone up in flames) to a pitch for the real crisis facing Americans, the lack of funds for university-bound students.
Like those carpetbaggers who swept into the post war Southern states exploiting the Confederates’ poverty and misery, there is sadly a current version of such opportunistic behavior in today’s PR profession where executives sit around a table frantically brainstorming news hooks that the crisis de jour may provide for a pitch for a company and its products, however tangential they may be to the issue at hand. We witnessed this during an equally high profile tragedy when the shootings at Virginia Tech University last year brought mis en scene pitches from PR people representing cell phone texting and messaging services. An important new technology with obvious implications in situations like this? Absolutely! Did it smack of crass, mercenary opportunism? Without question. One pitch even went so far as to say the tragedy could have been averted had its client’s system been adopted by the University in advance. Is it surprising that journalists respond to such efforts with disdain?
Of course, just when we think that our profession has hit an all-time low, the current Administration in Washington demonstrates that it can trump us with acts so amateurish and blatantly manipulative that if it were the basis of a movie script you would find it too ridiculous to be true. I am talking, of course, about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s phony news conference about assistance to those victims of the wildfires in southern California. Now if any organization had a credibility issue that needed resolution, it would be post-Katrina FEMA. For some reason, a number of senior officials there thought that a news conference that was not announced to beat reporters, allowed only television crews with no reporters/producers, and was populated entirely by FEMA employees asking the “hard” questions of FEMA deputy administrator Harvey Johnson , was not only ethical, but believable. It is hard to imagine that in the midst of pulling this charade together, no one stopped and wondered how this Barnum & Bailey side show could be successfully pulled off. Even Michael Chertoff admitted, “I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I've seen since I've been in government,” which has to be a pretty low bar.
The question is, have communications professionals — whether they reside in Washington D.C.’s halls of power or the board rooms of PR firms — created a world of spin that defies logic, intelligence and humanity? Was the FEMA faux conference simply a tell-tale reality of the media world we inhabit, where the news is less important than the pitch, the stagecraft employed to sell the story more important than the story itself?
So where does this leave us? These moments of shame should really be moments of truth for our profession. Even in the rush to pitch, pitch, pitch (which becomes ever more frenzied as cable and now the Internet have shortened news cycles to minutes) we must slow down and ask ourselves, “what is the right thing?” and not “what is the right pitch, right now?” If we really want to close the divide between the flaks and the hacks, we need to do a better job crafting our pitches so they provide journalistic value and humanity. If we do this, we may succeed in overcoming the image of public relations professionals as carpetbaggers in the digital revolution.
