Cock-a-Doodle-Doo-Doo: PR’s Secondary Lies and Tacit Approvals are Lies All the Same (07/31/2008)

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Less than two weeks ago, International Olympics Committee (IOC) head Jacques Rogge said:

“For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.” (AFP)

According to Reuters, about two weeks ago Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain said:

“Right now, we believe we are in a very comfortable spot in terms of our capital.” (Reuters)… And about a month ago he said: “I think that where we have marked these CDOs we are comfortable that we are in very good shape looking into the future.” (MarketWatch) Back in April he said: “The goal is to maintain our current ratings. No more capital raising; I’m sure we have enough capital.” (Reuters)

Just a month ago (in front of a Congressional inquiry about the electrocution death of a US soldier in Iraq) Pentagon Inspector General Gordon Heddell said:

“Our review has not found any credible evidence that representatives from KBR were aware of imminent, life-threatening hazards in Legion Security Forces Building #1 at the Radwaniyah Palace Complex prior to SSG Maseth’s electrocution on January 2, 2008.” (Gov. doc)

In the same hearings, Kellog Brown & Root (KBR) official Thomas Bruni said:

“Though we cannot be certain who installed the water pump [that killed Maseth] we do know that KBR did not do so.” (ThinkProgress)

A New Game: Cluck, Cluck, Woops!!!

Ah… it’s amazing to see how fast the fowl come home to roost these days. Rather than just one “duck-duck-goose,” it’s looking like a whole lot of business and public “leaders” are getting their gooses cooked.

(Yeah OK it’s a mixed metaphor, but if it walks like a duck and clucks like a chicken then you can be fairly certain it’s foul.)

Anyway, in the past few days…

The IOC was forced to admit that officials negotiated Internet censorship/restrictions with the Chinese regime. (ABC News)

Merril Lynch was forced to take a $7.9 billion write down and raise $8.6 billion in capital by selling new stock. (Bloomberg)

IG Heddell and KBR exec Bruni were forced to backtrack when indisputable documentation (work orders and sworn testimony) surfaced, indicating that both the Pentagon and KBR had been told of the electrical problem months in advance of the death of Army Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth. In fact, another soldier had suffered (and reported) electric shocks in the same facility. (ThinkProgress)

Crock-a-Doodle-Doo

When Scott McLellan’s book came out several weeks back, it provoked a torrent of criticism of the PR profession, including a rant by CBS news analyst Andrew Cohen.

PR pros were spitting mad, and among the first responders was CBS communications director Gil “Stanley Bing” Schwartz.

Gil stated in his on-air rebuttal that if PR people are guilty of anything, we are guilty of “secondary lies.” His reasoning: we assume our bosses tell us the truth and if our bosses lie to us, how can we possibly not lie to you? We just report. You decide.

Presumably he is referring to just the sort of lying we have seen over the past few weeks from Rogge, Thain, Heddell, Bruni, and a fifth character, IOC press chairman Kevan Gosper.

Frankly, I think Mr. Bing is full of it. And his claim of passive failures runs directly counter to the “C-suite advisor” postioning that pr pros love to tout as our singular value.

Merill Full of Bull?

Just look at the implicit logic of it the Merrill announcement: the firm negotiated a 20-cents-on-the-dollar deal to sell $30 billion in securities to another fund company. That CANNOT just happen in two weeks.

That kind of deal requires a full accounting to the purchaser of the value of the securities, which takes a lot of time, especially given that valuation of CDO securities is a complex task that has bedeviled Wall Street for more than a year.

Backing up from the announcement date of July 29, this valuation process HAD to be taking place (or could even have been finished) exactly as Thain was making his original statement. There is enough reason to assume he knew quite well that this huge loss/transation was pending, as well as the capital measures required to shore up the firm’s finances.

So where were the senior c-suite communications advisers? Where was “truth and accuracy [that] are the bread and butter of the public relations profession?” (According to PRSA’s response to Cohen anyway)

The conversation should have gone something like this:

Yes, Mr. Thain, I understand, but can we really say that? Banks have been making incorrect pronouncements about their quarterly results for more than a year, only to be embarrassed when the numbers come out. We’ll be hammered if we are wrong. I’d like to double-check these with accounting… and with trading… and the M&A people… and the head of our fixed income team… and… where exactly are we with the effort to shop around our CDO portfolio?

Either all the C-suite comms advisers had been quarantined in the hen house, or they all had their heads up… under their wings. It looks like they just sat by and let their CEO make one blatantly misleading statement after another.

How to Look Like a Four-Star Ass, in One Easy Lesson

When you’re preparing for Congressional testimony about the death of soldier in wartime, it’s hard to believe that a senior Pentagon press officer would not be there to vet your comments. Especially given this Administration’s proven aggressiveness in spinning the press on military matters.

You might imagine the PR person saying:

Are you sure Mr. Inspector? We’ve had 16 electrocutions so far in Iraq, and the three newest ones just leaked out this week. It’s looking really ugly. Do we have all the reports? Have we talked to the guys in the field? Are we sure we can count on KBR to be accurate? What did the investigation uncover? Have we reviewed the depositions in the civil suit?

Now, the geeky Senator from California could easily lay his hands on incriminating evidence – including sworn testimony in State District Court in Pennsylvania, in the lawsuit filed by Maseth’s widow.

How the hell can the Pentagon IG claim he did not have access to the very same documents?? And how are we supposed to believe that the crack Pentagon communications team was also unaware of the publicly available evidence in the very case he was testifying about??

The IOC: Vile, Bile, and Censored with a Smile

The most egregious and villainous bit of dissembling came from none other than the chairman of the IOC press commission, Kevan Gosper.

Originally, IOC president Rogge issued blanket assurances that Internet access would be free and unfettered. Well… not so much. Once reporters got to China, they found that Internet access was indeed restricted. Say it ain’t so!

Then, yesterday Gosper told the South China Morning Post:

“If you have been misled by what I have told you [over the months and years] about there being free internet access during the Games, then I apologise.

“We negotiated [with Bocog] terms and conditions that would allow journalists access to the internet that was unimpeded and uncensored, and would allow them to report on the Games, but not necessarily on Games-related activities [or] about what else happened elsewhere in China.”

Ok so NOW we get to the hair-splitting reality. What he meant was that Internet access would be free and open for reporting on “the Games.”

He’s so terribly sorry if you thought that meant total access… which was actually one of the conditions of bringing the Games to Beijing… and one of the goals of elbowing open the doors of a closed society. That would never happen. He says sanguinely:

“You are dealing with a communist country that has censorship. You are getting what they say you can have.”

So, he knew from the get-go that China would be censoring internet access. But the truly mind-blowing thing is… What the hell did he think was going to happen when thousands of reporters showed up in Beijing and found their web access censored???

Didn’t he think they’d call him on it??? Didn’t he realize that every single one of those reporters would write about it???

Talk about blowing off your own foot with a bazooka. That is truly the most moronic miscalculation I think we have ever witnessed in the history of press relations.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Getting Caught

These examples, though they number only three, give some insight into why people assume PR pros are all liars. And we do ourselves, and our profession, no favors by either perpetrating or tacitly condoning conduct like this.

We run off at the mouth about how we are “strategic advisers to the executive suite,” how we “add value to the organization,” how we promote “integrity and authenticity.”

Well, these three organizations (IOC, Merrill Lynch, and the Pentagon) represent the pinnacle of global professionalism in their respective fields. And there is no way you will convince me that their communications teams are not similarly endowed.

Which is why the steady drip-drip-drip of high-profile public misrepresentations like these reveal us to be either ineffectual or complicit. Either way, it’s not the kind of professionalism that wins us any points. And it happens all the time, in big ways and small.

So while we may not be guilty of “lying” – the big, flat-out, honking untruth – if we practice communications at the level we claim, then all this hemming and hawing, and failing to remember, and massaging of the facts happens in our full view.

Crowing about PR’s ethics and integrity don’t make it so. And let’s not pretend that we don’t know, or at least suspect that something’s amiss.

That really would be a lie.