West Australian - 16th June 2001 - (Australia)

The Sultans of Spin

It's the invisible hand behind much of the news, the sophisticated spin machine that can rescue reputations or crucify a competitor. And some of its practitioners will stop at nothing. Jane Cadzow investigates the increasingly cunning world of PR.

It had the ingredients of a classic smear campaign. High-profile target. Simmering resentment. Public relations consultant prepared to get down and dirty.

When the Royal NSW Canine Council decided to act against television personality Don Burke, it sought advice from Ian Nicholas, then joint managing director of Sydney public relations firm Macro Communication. The Canine Council was fed up with Burke: for years, the presenter of Burke's Backyard had been a vocal critic of aspects of pedigreed dog-breeding, accusing some owners of caring more about show trophies than animal welfare. What could be done to take the bite out of his attacks?

A "public relations initiative" that Nicholas prepared for the council urged caution: "Don Burke is renowned for his short temper and ability to be disparaging when provoked. His mercurial temper and large ego need to be considered in any activity designed to temper the attitudes presented on the program. Therefore, direct approaches by letter, fax or in person need to be avoided as these have a history of provoking him and his program into further negative actions."

The document recommended working undercover to tarnish the image of Burke's Backyard. "A major campaign should be launched through the newspaper columnists to discredit the program and its statements, without any attribution to the Canine Council or the people associated with it. Finally, a 'whisper' campaign could be undertaken to further discredit the program among its key target audiences." Emphasising that the job "must be handled with a great sensitivity" Nicholas quoted a consultancy fee of $30,000 a month for three months.

The council rejected the proposal, which Nicholas now says was never intended to be taken seriously. "That was the lunatic option … It wasn't going to happen," he insists, describing the smear campaign as "abhorrent" and "totally wrong".

Last year the Public Relations Institute of Australia censured Nicholas, a former president of its NSW branch, having found that he (not his company; he acted alone) had given unethical advise to the council. But the reprimand was not reported in the institute's newsletter and the whole, strange story sank almost without trace.

An anonymous letter had warned Burke of the plan to undermine his credibility. "Good luck," it said. "No matter what size pain in the arse you are, nobody deserves this." The TV host sued unsuccessfully for access to all relevant documents and still fumes about the bid to muzzle him. "It was an attempt to destroy Burke's Backyard as a television program and to destroy my reputation," he says. "What stunned me about it was that I didn't hear from people like you earlier … I thought it was a fundamental issue of democracy."

Public relations or PR is one of Australia's boom industries turning over an estimated $1 billion annually and growing by more than 20 per cent a year. Already this country has about 7,000 public relations practitioners, all of them determined to get their clients favorable media coverage or suppress potentially damaging publicity and some of them willing to do it by discrediting their clients' critics or competitors.

According to recent research by Clara Zawawi, a former lecturer in public relations at Queensland's Bond University, more than half the stories in Australian newspapers are generated by PR practitioners. In a study for her soon to be submitted PhD thesis, Zawawi analysed the content of three metropolitan broadsheets The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Courier-Mail. She found PR people (excluding politicians' press secretaries) were the source of 60 per cent of stories in the front news sections and 80 per cent in the business news sections. The figures may seem extraordinarily high but they tally with the results of similar research in the US and Britain.

Because PR people operate behind the scenes whether briefing journalists, lobbying politicians for legislation that would favour their clients, or appealing directly to the public through letterbox campaigns their influence is widely underestimated and their methods are rarely scrutinised. When light is shone on the industry, the picture isn't pretty. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: the art of "spin" is presenting facts in such a way that they support whatever line you are espousing. From there, it's only a short step to concealing inconvenient information. And before you know where you are, things get out of hand. Ask Ken Hooper and Ken Davis, two senior PR consultants currently accused of running clandestine campaigns against their clients' business rivals.

Hooper is alleged to have set up bogus community action groups to stop new shopping centres opening near those owned by his employer, Westfield Ltd. "Stop this development now! Protest to Concord Council before it's too late!" screamed flyers dropped in letterboxes by one of the sham associations, the North Strathfield Residents Action Group. Hooper, best known as a political spin doctor who worked for former NSW premier Nick Greiner and Liberal Opposition leader Kerry Chikarowski, has been sued by thwarted property developers for false and misleading conduct.

Ken Davis is being sued by DMG Radio, a competitor of his client, the Austereo network. He has admitted that, in the lead-up to DMG's successful applications for FM licences in Sydney and Melbourne, he used false names to send newspapers and politicians a series of letters critical of the British company.

Davis denies he wrote the letters on behalf of Austereo, which in turn denies any knowledge of the smear campaign. At the time, Davis was employed by Australia's largest public relations firm, Turnbull Porter Novelli. Company chairman Noel Turner says he was shocked to learn of Davis's activities. "There's a myth that PR people go around burying stories and lying about things," says Turnbull, who claims deliberate deception is in fact unusual. "Any PR person who tells a lie to anybody is dumb," he says. "It's wrong but it's also dumb. Because inevitably, these days, you get caught."

Public relations supremo Ian Kortland suggests that getting caught is part of the crime. "People may decide the family pet needs to be put down, but they don't like seeing it strangled in front of the grandchildren," says Kortland, like Ken Hooper a one-time adviser to Nick Greiner. Similarly, no-one wants to be reminded that PR people use techniques like "astroturfing" industry parlance for setting up fake grassroots groups to oppose clients' rivals. "I think that what Hooper has done is let the cat be strangled in front of the grandchildren," says Kortland, who adds that he doesn't condone dishonest tactics.

Public relations industry whistle-blower David Michie believes the dubious behaviour we hear about is not more than the tip of the iceberg. Dodgy practices abound in PR, says Michie adding that he was nonplused by a recent invitation to address a conference in New Zealand on the subject of ethics in public relations. "I thought, 'How can I possible speak for 30 minutes on that? How long does it take to say, "There isn't any"?'" Michie laughs irreverently. Now living in Perth, he worked in PR in London for more than a decade before writing The Invisible Persuaders, an insider's account of how British spin doctors manipulate the media. Forced by libel laws to leave out some of his juiciest material, he has used it instead in two recently published thrillers, Conflict of Interest and Pure Deception, both of which describe a nightmarish world inhabited by charming but venal public relations consultants expert at pulling strings and twisting the truth.

A sportswear manufacturer uses child labour in Indian sweatshops? The highly paid flacks in Conflict of Interest dig deep into their bag of dirty tricks to stop the news getting out. Bribery, blackmail, kidnapping, murder… Michie admits that the picture he paints in the novels is not entirely accurate. "I had to tone things down quite a lot to make it believable," he jokes.

In reality, as even Michie concedes, most PR practitioners are ordinary, law-abiding folk doing work that is more mundane than malevolent. They can even be a force for good. Think of campaigns that persuade us to wear sunscreens, give blood or sign up as organ donors. "Some PR activities are genuinely in the public interest," says Bob Burton, one of the few Australian investigative journalists to focus on the public relations industry. "A lot of campaigns are mostly harmless. But it's the invisibility of it all that's the biggest concern."

David Michie agrees. It seems to him to be one of the great ironies of our consumerist times that we are blissfully ignorant about the content of our newspapers. We're so wary of artificial additives in our food that we insist the label on a can of baked beans list every ingredient, yet "we aren't even conscious that the information we absorb has very often been subjected to unseen manipulation.

To the untrained eye, PR-driven stories look much the same as the rest. As Noel Turnbull says, "public relations people are like football referees. If they've done a good job, no-one notices them." Quietly spoken and elegantly dressed, Turnbull wishes journalists would stop putting about the idea that there is something intrinsically worthy about journalism and inherently unsavoury about public relations. "People employ us to change people's attitudes or behaviours," he shrugs.

Turnbull, a former journalist who now charges $500 an hour for his services, says large firms like Turnbull Porter Novelli rarely undertake a PR campaign for less than $20,000. "And big campaigns often run into seven figures."

More than a dozen Australian universities now offer public relations courses and Turnbull suspects the rush to enrol is due at least partly to the prospect of attractive salaries. The big PR firms pay fresh graduates up to $36,000 a year, he says. "A person with a couple of years under their belt would be on 40 to 50. Then they jump up quite quickly. Six-figure sums are non unusual for quite young people."

He argues that it is possible to make lots of money in PR and keep your integrity. But "you've got to be constantly saying to yourself, 'What am I doing? Is there some line I ought not cross?'" And you have to be prepared to say no to prospective clients: "There is one view that a public relations person is like a barrister, a hack for hire, and that you work for whoever comes along. I've never agreed with that.

"There are some clients that this company would not work for and there are some I would not work for personally." Tobacco companies, for instance. Uranium miners. The gun lobby. The Catholic Church.

The pro-whaling lobby? "There are some things," he says evenly, "that you just don't do."

Whalers? "We did some work for them," says Mike Smith, genial chairman of the Australian branch of the huge public relations conglomerate Weber Shandwick Worldwide. To meet Smith is to understand why he is good at his job. A former editor of The Age, he's such a pleasant, plausible bloke that I find myself nodding sympathetically as he explains his decision to work for the Japan Whaling Association, an orginisation that his earned international condemnation for its flouting of a global moratorium on whale hunting. The way Smith tells it, he just wanted to give the whalers a fair go.

He says they came to him asking for help before last year's International Whaling Commission meeting in Adelaide. "The Japanese were sick of turning up at these conferences around the world and being hijacked by the anti-whalers, who are very good at PR themselves," he says. "For years the Japanese have just turned up and copped it." This time, they wanted to put across their side of the story.

So Weber Shandwick agreed to run a campaign putting a positive spin on whale-slaughtering Japanese-style. A leaflet distributed to Adelaide households claimed that eating whale meat was as important to the Japanese as eating meat pies was to Australians. At the meeting, PR consultants had quiet chats with journalists covering the proceedings, ensuring the reporters had heard the whalers' arguments. They also organised the painting of a pro-whaling banner which was held aloft by a kimono-clad cheer squad. According to Bob Burton, the seven-month campaign cost the whaling association nearly $300,000. Still, the conference ended happily for the Japanese with the defeat of an Australasian proposal for a South Pacific whale sanctuary.
It wasn't Mike Smith's first experience of promoting an unpopular cause. When the Federal Government moved to tighten gun control after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, his company acted briefly for the Sporting Shooters Association, which opposed the ban on semi-automatic and automatic weapons. "That was a hard call," he admits, "and he only reasons we did it was because we saw an opportunity to get some consensus between the shooters and the Government. We knew that when people discovered we were working for them, we'd cop some flak."

Smith's appetite for controversy is the reason he's keen on "crisis management", the name used in the trade for the arm of public relations that deals with corporate disasters. When a food manufacturer realises batches of its product are toxic, a factory is caught pumping dangerous chemicals into waterways or an airline's fleet is grounded because over maintenance. PR consultants swing into action to minimise harm to the company's image. "I think you can win it or lose it in the first couple of hours," says Smith, who usually advises the chief executive to cal an immediate press conference and to "be as upfront and open as possible. Even, if you've made a mistake, admit it. The public can be very forgiving unless they see you're hiding something."

Critics of crisis management say they would rather corporations spent millions of dollars fixing the physical consequences of their mistakes and preventing their recurrence than paying the money to public relations firms to make things look better. As Dr Sharon Beder points out in her book Global Spin, many companies turn to PR firms to clean up their reputation rather than change their environmentally damaging practices. After all, "it is easier and less costly to change the way people think about reality than it is to change reality."

Head of science and technology studies at Wollongong University, Beder says hundreds of articles in public relations magazines and books cite the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez as the worst sort of catastrophe not because the tanker spewed oil across the pristine wilderness of Alaska's Prince William Sound, but because Exxon's PR was handled so clumsily in the aftermath of the accident that the oil company's image was tarnished for years to come. "In the world of PR, problems arise from the failure to communicate strategically, not from wrongful activity," Beder notes ruefully.

Though Smith likes handling salmonella outbreaks and poison spills, his favourite work is so-called "litigation PR", in which he acts for people with legal problems usually businessmen charged with white-collar crime. "Often they have to wait years for their day in court," he says. "A lot of these white-collar crime prosecutions don't stand up there isn't a conviction but a lot of damage can be done to a businessman's reputation in the meantime."

Smith's job is to show the world that the accused are actually upstanding citizens, or at least have their good points. So when Melbourne property developer Bruno Grollo was charged with tax fraud, "we started doing some profile-building for him. Got him to talk to the media about the good deeds he was doing in the community &endash; giving a lot of money to charity." Grollo, who was cleared of the charges last year, turned out to be a natural media performed. "Ended up getting too much publicity," chuckles Smith. "I think at one stage during his trial he was warned by the judge to lay off the PR."

Another of the company's clients was Carlos Cabal, the fugitive banker who has been described as Mexico's answer to Christopher Skase ("Have a look at the Web site we did for him," urges Smith).

When disgraced Coles Myer boss Brian Quinn was released from prison in 1999, he read a press statement written by Smith's firm. Weber Shandwick also acted for David Nicholas, an heir to the Aspro fortune, who is serving a 15-year jail sentence for his part in a $12.5 million heroin deal. After Nicholas's conviction, the company issued a press release in which Nicholas maintained he was simply "in the wrong place at the wrong time", had no knowledge of the drugs found in his Range Rover and was appalled by the "clandestine and outrageous behaviour of the Australian Federal Police".

If drug traffickers can use PR firms, what about arms dealers? Do you draw the line at dictators? In her biography of Robert Gray, founder of a Washington public relations firm, Susan Trento quotes a company executive who justified Gray & Company's work for murderous Haitian "president-for-life" Baby Doc Duvalier on ground that "the government of Haiti … has the right to try to tell its side of whatever the story is to the media".

At the London office of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations firms, executive Steve Ellis told David Michie that if Iraq's Sadddam Hussein came to him, he would take him on as a client because "as professional communicators, we should at least help him get his message across". Wollongong University's Sharon Beder points out that Burson-Marsteller represented Romania during the Ceausescu regime and the military junta of Argentina in the late 1970s. (In Australia, the company's clients include cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris.)

According to a 1992 report by America's Centre for Public Integrity, US public relations firms were then being paid more than $US30 million a year by repressive governments keen to improve their images. In Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, authors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton note that international PR giant Hill & Knowlton topped the list, "with $14 million in receipts from countries with documented records of abuse, torture and imprisonment, including Kuwait, Indonesia, Israel, China, Egypt and Peru".
Whether or not everyone is entitled to PR, what's clear is that everyone wants it. Corporations, political parties, government agencies, unions, employer groups, universities, schools, hospitals, arts bodies, theatres, sports clubs all have public relations practitioners on staff and most use outside consultants as well. As Michie says in The Invisible Persuaders, "individuals, companies and organisations of all kinds have become acutely aware of the need to raise their profile in the news media if they are to exist in the minds of their target audiences. Whether driven by the need to influence share prices, voting patterns or shopping habits … the news media are clearly the place to be."

Besides, Bruno Grollo isn't the only one to enjoy the spotlight. For many people, not just the actors and politicians who have always lusted after it, publicity has become an end in itself. When your opinions or achievements are reported in the newspaper, you know they were worth saying or doing. When you see yourself on television, you know you're alive. What's more, being famous gets you respect.

"Power today has little to do with how much property a person owns or commands," says US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. "It is instead determined by how many minutes of prime-time television or pages of news-media attention he can access or occupy."

American writer Cynthia Heimel concludes wryly that, these days, "unless you are a celebrity, you don't exist at all … If the media aren't flashbulbing your every gesture, it didn't happen. Private epiphanies, soul-wrenching despairs, so what, who cares? You are a tree falling alone in the forest."

But if you're Nicole Kidman, everyone cares about your marriage, your divorce, your children, your miscarriage, your clothes, your houses and, oh yes, your movies. Graeme Turner, director of Queensland University's Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and co-author of Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, points to the saturation media coverage of Kidman's August 1999 Australian tour to promote her film Eyes Wide Shut. The actor was the subject of so many newspaper and television features and appeared simultaneously on so many magazine covers &endash; at least 10, from Time and Vogue to New Idea that the displays on newsstands started to embarrass her. "Even I'm sick of seeing me," she lamented.

It's the job of showbusiness PR practitioners, known as publicists, to ensure that articles are timed to boost ticket sales to their clients' latest movies or concert tours. Having a say in when a story is published might be a condition of granting an interview, as might a magazine editor's undertaking to put the celebrity on the cover. "That happens all the time," says Turner.

Whether PR people are promoting Hollywood stars or breast cancer awareness or Tom Clancy's newest blockbuster novel, the stories produced as a result of their efforts are essentially advertisements dressed up to look like news. And whereas we tend to be sceptical of claims made in paid advertisements, we're more trusting about information conveyed to us by journalists. How are we to know that the story extolling the health-giving properties of canola oil is a recycled press release from the Canola Growers' Association? As Bob Burton says, "public relations relies on its invisibility for its power".

In New York's 1929 Easter Parade, a contingent of glamorous young debutantes walked down Fifth Avenue openly smoking cigarettes. The "torches of livery march" smashed the female smoking taboo overnight. Suddenly, even the nicest girls could light up with impunity. Only after the march was it revealed that its organiser, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, had been paid by the American Tobacco Company.

Bernays, who is often called the father of PR, maintained that "the freedom to persuade and suggest" was the essence of democracy. Public relations textbooks still portray PR as playing a vita role in the free flow of information in a democratic society. But as Bob Burton shows all too clearly in Secrets and Lies, an exposÈ which contributed to the downfall of New Zealand's last conservative government, some public relations companies work to stifle public debate and will go to almost any lengths to silence their critics.

Co-authored with New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, the book tells how a government owned forestry company, Timberlands, hired PR company Shandwick New Zealand to overcome public opposition to its rainforest logging. As hundreds of Shandwick documents leaked to Burton and Hager show, a central part of the taxpayer-funded PR strategy was to discredit environmentalists campaigning against the logging, stigmatising them as extremists who spread misinformation. Shandwick infiltrated green groups and used heavy-handed legal threats to try to shut down criticism of the logging. The PR company even drafted a letter for Timberlands to send to pupils and teachers at two Wellington schools who had attended a conservation rally, warning that they would be sued if they attended another one. (The final version of the letter was softened to remove the legal threat.)

The mid-1999 release of Secrets and Lies prompted indignant denials of wrongdoing by Shandwick New Zealand and a rash of newspaper stories with headlines like "Who really runs New Zealand, politicians or PR men?" In a election three months later, voters dumped the National Party government and Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, who had been implicated in the scandal.

Burton has no doubt that the weapons used in the Timberlands campaign are a standard part of the PR artillery. It's just that they are usually hidden from public view. "You could change the names and locations and it would give you a fair insight into many public relations campaigns around the world," he says.

Clara Zawawi attributes the growing power of public relations to the fact that, while newspapers and magazines are getting thicker, staff and resources in newsrooms are dwindling. Journalists scrabbling to fill more and more pages are increasingly reliant on press releases and phone calls form PR people because they don't have time to dig up stories for themselves.

Her study showing that most stories in newspapers are initiated by public relations practitioners might be cause for concern, she says, if there were evidence that journalists weren't checking the facts in press releases. But "my research demonstrates that, particularly on the metropolitan dailies, the level of integrity is enormous". It seems to Zawawi, who recently left academia to head a Queensland public relations firm that "the situation is really quite healthy".

Others are far less sanguine. Sharon Beder points out that public relations firms manufacture "news" with the single aim of shaping our opinions &endash; and enriching their clients. Fact-checking by reporters is fine, but it's the author of the press release who sets the agenda. Is this the way we want it?

"There are public relations professionals who do good work, but not many," says former spin doctor Eric Sparling in the American journal PR Watch. "Make no mistake, the vast majority of public relations professionals don't work for a cancer foundation or the homeless. Most are engaged in work that is, at best, amoral. Some are actively engaged in promoting causes they know are detrimental to consumers, the environment and democracy.

"They are mercenaries. Their clients have a lot of money and they want more. You are their target."

By Jane Cadzow

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