Dimetapp

Corporate damage control turns tough

Early on the morning of June 14, 2001, I was about to go live on the Today show to discuss my book on the fen-phen scandal when the host, Maria Shriver, leaned forward and very kindly said, "I'm really sorry about the way we're doing this interview and the questions I have to ask. You understand, don't you?"

The questions were indeed somewhat adversarial, but my appearance had been two weeks in the making and NBC's corporate lawyers had gotten involved. I had spent several days in lengthy conferences with the producer, going over questions she said she'd been told by network attorneys to have Shriver ask me on the air. The producer acknowledged that it wasn't the normal book interview format.

It seems that the pharmaceutical company, Wyeth-Ayerst, had been calling. Wyeth, a major conglomerate, makes Dimetapp and Robitussin, as well as hormone replacement products and other drugs, and was a huge advertiser with NBC. They'd apparently been in negotiations with NBC's counsel over my pending appearance. My book detailed what Wyeth's people had really known about their deadly diet drugs, Pondimin and Redux, using their own internal documents and depositions.

I thought the interview went well. I skimmed over one question and read for millions of viewers a copy of an incredible internal Wyeth e-mail, in which a company supervisor dissed lung-disease victims. I left satisfied, but remained curious about the dynamics behind the scenes.

The answer came this summer in an extraordinarily revealing panel at the annual convention of Investigative Reporters and Editors, in Washington. Turns out I'd been hit with just one of the newly aggressive tactics some corporations and politicians are using to derail negative stories. It's not altogether new, but the level of aggressiveness is part of a trend that is turning investigative reporting into a full-contact sport.

In the conference and in follow-up interviews, the panelists detailed how these tactics work - and ways to fight back. The public relations pros on the panel also showed that such tactics frequently succeed in killing or maiming a story because of three general weaknesses on the media's part: mistakes in reporting or a perception of the reporter as disorganized; intermedia competitive jealousy, which is pathetically easy to manipulate; and the increasing tendency by many editors (particularly for magazines), TV executives (particularly local news general managers), and internal attorneys to "cave" in the face of even vague suggestions of legal threats.

The panel, titled "PR Attacks and Counterattacks," was moderated by Mark Feldstein of George Washington University. With him was a former local TV news colleague, Kent Jarrell, who went over to the dark side - to p.r. and "crisis management" - in 1996, and is now a senior vice president for litigation communications at APCO Worldwide. Jarrell was joined by Don Goldberg, a survivor of the Clinton White House, who toils for the government relations firm Navigant Consulting. The working stiff was Sam Roe, a Pulitzer finalist from the Chicago Tribune.

"I want to cause you legal pain," Jarrell told the IRE members. Sharing secrets, he explained to me later that a frequent strategy is to "get the story about my client away from the reporter, away from the producer, and up with the general counsel" - a kind of legal leapfrog. Thus, the smart crisis managers will often refuse to deal with the reporter, sometimes alleging bias from the first contact and interview; they won't wait long to draft letters from the corporation's high-priced outside law firm.

"I want to take control of your story away from you," Jarrell says. This stalls the story, and it frequently puts the fear of God into the media organization - "Do we need this hassle? Is this story worth it?" The lawyers nitpick, and even solid reporting can become suspect internally.

Jarrell and Goldberg also detailed other interesting tactics. For example, how they try to control the timing and the placement of their clients' bad news. During Clinton's second term, Goldberg, then a special assistant to the president, was stuck with the impeachment scandal, and he knew that anything damaging to the president that Republican senators heard would be leaked immediately. His proactive position with bad news was to do "document dumps" on Friday afternoon, hiding major embarrassments in plain sight. Reporters, overwhelmed by hundreds of pages of unindexed material, would be able to highlight only a few "bullet points" in a story. And because our competitive culture is so predictable, it was a good bet that no one would follow up after the weekend, once it was no longer "news." The White House counted on dysfunctional competition to protect its mistakes.

Goldberg and Jarrell both say it's easy to get a major story played down by capitalizing on such competition. Jarrell, for example, says he likes to use the London Financial Times to get a story out - it drives The Wall Street Journal nuts and creates a dilemma for the Journal about how to follow it up. The Journal has either to find a fresh angle or ignore its competitor's scoop entirely.

Then there's The Associated Press, which they said can be particularly useful just before a weekend. Goldberg says that when employees from a division of one major company he represented after leaving the White House were facing an indictment, he told an AP reporter that the company, whose employees were being indicted by the Clinton justice Department, was a major donor to the Republican party. "I needed the reporter to buy the possibility that the indictment was politically motivated," he explained. The story broke late Thursday with a lead incorporating the company's political contributions to the GOP, setting up the perception that Clinton's folks were simply being spiteful. "After that, it didn't matter what the rest of the story said," says Goldberg. And, of course, The Washington Post and The New York Times were "never, ever" going to run an AP story on their front page, says Feldstein. The indictment, he says, ran in major papers nationally, but on the inside, on a Saturday, with minimal exposure the next week.

Sam Roe is not thrilled about this new level of aggressiveness. After his award-winning 1999 series in the Toledo Blade on a scandal in Ohio nuclear plants, he was on the receiving end of a 185-page critique written by a marquee law firm, Kirkland & Ellis. Roe's six-part series accused government and industry officials of putting production ahead of worker safety in the manufacture of beryllium, a metal used in making nuclear bombs, among other things. The central target of the six-part series, Brush Wellman Inc., sent that p.r. missive to the office of the Pulitzer Prize board and other journalism monitors, including CJR (May/June 2002). "My heart skipped a beat" Roe says, and of course, the attack tied up editors and lawyers. "It has a chilling effect."

But there is a way to fight back, Roe says: To counter the counterattack, show the relevance of such high-power tactics to the story. Roe says that some statements lawyers made in their attack letter actually helped the Blade in follow-up pieces. The paper detailed allegations that the big law firm of Jones Day, through some of its tactics against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulators, was essentially helping the beryllium industry continue to harm the public. "Make their p.r. campaign and legal maneuvers part of the story," Roe says. "Use it. Expose it." Jarrell agreed that it can be effective.

Next defense: "Annotate your notes," says Jarrell - that means incorporating the whole quote in the notebook. When your lawyer says, "Why did you use this part of the quote? The subject says you took it out of context," you're ready to show the attorney the whole interview.

When he worked for Dateline NBC, Feldstein told the panel, he used to put his interview leftovers and footnotes in a binder. If you come in to defend a story that you want to air, and the target's lawyer is trying to slow it down, you need to show that your work is organized and complete. "If your lawyer thinks you're sloppy, it won't matter how good the reporting," says Feldstein; your lawyer will worry, and water it down.

Ultimately, "if you've got your facts right, there's not much I can do to stop you," says Jarrell. "I can just hold you up for a while."

But if your editor folds?

That's when you go someplace else, says Jarrell.

There are an awful lot of weak media leaders out there these days, he says, adding, " We know who they are."

Alicia Mundy is a senior editor at Cableworld and the author of Dispensing With the Truth, about the fen-phen diet-drug scandal.

Copyright Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism Sep/Oct 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved