Business | Public relations

Slime-slinging

Flacks vastly outnumber hacks these days. Caveat lector

A pie for a pie
|

A pie for a pie

FOR journalists, public-relations agents are like urban foxes: there seem to be more of them about these days, and they are more brazen than ever. Reporters were shocked, shocked to hear on May 12th that Burson-Marsteller (BM), a big PR agency, had tried to persuade newspaper writers and a blogger to scribble nasty things about Google's record on privacy, while concealing that its growing rival, Facebook, was paying for this lobbying. To make things worse, BM then erased criticism of its shady spinning that had been posted on the agency's own Facebook page. It thereby committed three cardinal sins of PR: becoming the story; getting caught; and appearing to attempt a cover-up.

The PR flacks who did Facebook's dirty work were two ex-journalists who had only recently gone over to the dark side. Their error was to put their indecent proposal in writing, in an e-mail pitch. When the blogger, Christopher Soghoian, sensibly asked who was paying them to do so, they refused—again in writing—to say, whereupon Mr Soghoian published their exchange of messages. This prompted USA Today to reveal that it had been on the receiving end of a similar PR pitch, and the Daily Beast, an online newspaper, to reveal that Facebook was the paymaster.

More seasoned PR flacks might have done it differently. First, lunch the journalists concerned, ostensibly to discuss some other story. Then, over dessert, casually slip into the conversation the poison that their secret client wanted them to spread. With luck the reporters would follow up on the scuttlebutt without mentioning its source, assuring themselves that they had got the story through their “contacts”.

Journalists may grumble privately about practices such as BM's badmouthing of Google, but few would be as brave as Mr Soghoian in exposing them, thereby jeopardising their relationship with a powerful PR agency. The incident shows how the upheaval in the news business is working for, and against, the PR firms. Newspapers and other old media are losing influence—and thus becoming less worth lobbying. But job cuts and online obligations mean journalists are also more desperate for copy, making them a softer touch. Research by Jamil Jonna of the University of Oregon (originally for a book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”, but since updated) found that as newsrooms have been slimmed and PR agencies have grown fatter, for each American journalist there are now, on average, six flacks hassling him to run crummy stories (see chart).

There are few new tricks in public relations. Mud-slinging against a client's rivals; offering newspapers ready-made articles containing plugs for a client's products; cutting off reporters who write negative stories and rewarding malleable ones with exclusives; bribing experts to lend their reputation to a client's cause: examples of all these and more can be found way back in the industry's century-long history. But the increasingly thin staffing of newsrooms seems to be encouraging the spinners to be more shameless than ever with such tactics.

Besides noting the decline of traditional news outlets, some in PR see new opportunities in the cacophony of voices in online social media. Bombarded with all that blogging, tweeting and Facebooking, consumers will surely, more than ever, be looking to a few trusted “influencers” to tell them what to think, an idea foreshadowed in “Propaganda”, a 1928 spinner's bible by Edward Bernays, PR's founding father. In some industries—technology and film-making are prime examples—the leading bloggers now have the sort of influence that used to be the preserve of revered newspaper columnists.

So PR flacks with clients in those industries now put much effort into targeting such online influencers. But as Mr Soghoian has amply demonstrated, these non-traditional journalists do not necessarily feel obliged to play by the rules.

They may not care about being cut out of the loop if they reveal PR firms' manoeuvrings; and they don't have to deal with a growling, red-faced news editor demanding to know why they didn't get a story that had been spoon-fed to a rival, more PR-friendly paper.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Slime-slinging"

The world's most dangerous border

From the May 21st 2011 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Making accounting sexy again

The profession needs a makeover to attract newcomers

A marketing victory for Nike is a business win for Adidas

The contest of the sportswear giants heats up


The pros and cons of corporate uniforms

A quarter of the American workforce wears one. Why?