By MARIA FOTOPOULOS is a public relations professional in Los Angeles and may be reached at
FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY Scott McClellan made Santa Monica his second in-store stop last week on his U.S. book tour to discuss “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” writing which confirms what most of us already know having lived through eight years of Bush failures.
But from McClellan’s memoir has come a side story that’s raised the ire of an entire industry.
Imagine you were a member of the legal profession and one of the three major television networks said, “All lawyers are liars and the ultimate white liners; they are the scourge of the country.”
You might be a little upset. Well, that’s essentially what CBS News did on that most-often benign of shows, CBS Sunday Morning. But lawyers weren’t the target; the charge was against public relations practitioners. The person making the broadbased, ill-founded rant was CBS’ legal analyst Andrew Cohen, who put McClellan in the role of poster child for the entire public relations profession.
Cohen said, “Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.”
He went on to say, “The reason companies or governments hire oodles of PR people is because PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful. Misinformation and disinformation are the coin of the realm ….”
Are there bad PR people? Of course. Does the whole profession stink? Of course not.
Accuracy and truthfulness are the underpinnings of public relations. What I heard repeatedly in my first corporate PR job was the importance of building relationships — relationships built on being a reliable, credible source, one who responds in a timely manner with accurate information. If a PR person loses credibility with the media and the public, he’s got nada.
And what exactly do PR people do? They are one component (not always though, of course) of a journalist’s story. They offer information necessary for a journalist to write a factually accurate story. A good PR person has a thorough understanding of the business he’s working for or the client he’s representing — “a place at the table”— so he knows of what he speaks.
As with other professions, public relations has professional organizations that develop standards and best practices, as well as offer continuing training. Two of these organizations, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), offer accreditation programs, which require a deep understanding of the profession, including ethics.
McClellan is accredited by neither organization.
When McClellan went to work for then Texas Gov. Bush, he was all of 30 years old — not exactly a seasoned professional. As McClellan tells it, he was very optimistic and idealistic going to Washington, D.C., working for a man who had a 70 percent popularity rating while governor. McClellan says he had great expectations of working in a bipartisan manner.
Obviously that didn’t work out, and McClellan, who left the White House in 2006 as the second of four (thus far) press secretaries for Bush, has had time to sort out why as he wrote through his book.
Cohen’s biggest miss in painting the entire PR profession black, with McClellan as the epitome of lying PR liars who lie, however, is that McClellan was working in an organization that’s completely distorted, ill-equipped for the commission of its responsibilities and manipulative.
A rotten organization breeds a rotten culture and rotten players, regardless of their original intent or “natural” tendencies. The real side story is what happens when an unseasoned but reasonable and principled person ends up working for an organization that begins failing and continues in a downward spiral.
Given what we know of the Bush White House, discussion and dissension are not admired. Anyone who has worked in the average large corporate setting knows voicing contrarian views generally is not viewed favorably — and thus most people fall in line. Group think prevails. Add on 18-hour days and just trying to do one’s job.
Yes, this is beginning to sound like an apologist’s brief for McClellan. It’s not. Let’s go back to the Bush administration as a rotten organization. Such an organization would want a weak player in the press secretary role. This is a job seen as a necessary evil, but not a position to truly serve the function of intermediary in getting out the truth.
So Mr. Cohen, cut some slack to the good PR people and even to McClellan and leave your contempt for the people — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condee, Perle, Wolfowitz — who truly deserve that special place in Hell.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 26, 2008. Read the original PDF.