CorpWatch:
Spinning Media for Government
by Chris Raphael, Special to CorpWatch
February 10th, 2005
A television pundit gets secret payments to promote a new United
States government education policy. Columnists are paid to provide
support for a White House marriage stance. Actresses play news
reporters to promote drug laws. A system of ranking reporters who
criticize official policy. These, and possibly many other public
relations stunts, are some examples of publicity contracts paid for
by the U.S. government, which has spent more than a quarter billion
dollars on public relations in the past four years.
For example Armstrong Williams, a conservative African-American
broadcaster, was paid $240,000 to produce advertisements on the No
Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and plug the law in his syndicated
television broadcasts. (see Leaving Children Behind)
The deal was brokered by Ketchum public relations, a subsidiary of
media giant Omnicom, and approved by the U.S. Department of Education
(DoE). In addition to the Williams contract, Ketchum was also paid
$700,000 to rate media coverage of NCLB and produce video news
releases on the law.
When the news of the Williams deal became public, Democratic members
of Congress took a look at government contracts with PR firms, and
the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform produced some quick but
startling numbers. In a January report, the committee found that
federal agencies spent more than $250 million on contracts with PR
agencies between 2001 and 2004 - nearly twice as much as the $128
million that Clinton spent between 1997 and 2001.
"There used to be a time when our government would let the facts
speak for themselves," lamented Richard Durbin, a Democratic senator
from Illinois, during one Congressional debate. "It apparently is the
position of the Bush administration that the facts in and of
themselves are not articulate."
Two more questionable examples have cropped up since the Williams
flap. Conservative columnists Maggie Gallagher, whose writing is
distributed by Universal Press Syndicate (which also publishes the
Dear Abby column and comic strips like Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes
and Garfield) and Mike McManus (whose work appears in over 50
newspapers like the Birmingham News in Alabama) were exposed as
having been on the payroll of the Department of Health and Human
Services.
Both columnists agreed to work on behalf of the Bush Administration
efforts to promote marriage.
While President George Bush officially denounced the practice of
government agencies paying commentators, it is yet to be seen whether
the scandal will lead to any lasting ethical change on the part of
some in the PR industry, where the need to identify political and
ideological allies is routine practice, or on the part of the
government, which has been historically concerned with the need to
flash "positive" messages - and propaganda -- into what they perceive
as a negative and hostile media landscape. Ketchum and the DoE, for
instance, initially defended the Williams arrangement.
Ranking Reporters
According to the House report, companies owned by New York-based
Omnicom have a virtual monopoly -- 89 percent -- of government PR
contracts awarded between 2001 and 2004. The company, whose
headquarters are on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising
industry, reeled in $8.6 billion in revenue in 2003 from clients like
Kodak, Dow Chemical and Heinz ketchup.
Ketchum held $97 million, one-third of the total, followed by the
Matthews Media Group ($52 million), Fleishman-Hillard ($41 million)
and Porter Novelli ($33 million).
While it is not known how many of these contracts involve practices
such as the Williams deal, the government seems to take the scandal
seriously. The list of agencies looking into PR contracts, in one way
or the other, includes the Government Accountability Office, the
Inspector General, the Federal Communications Commission, Congress
and the Pentagon.
Ketchum, which has earned numerous Silver Anvils (the industry's
highest honor) from the Public Relations Society of America as well
as a 2002 "Agency of the Year" award from PR Week, the popular
industry magazine, initially responded to the incident via a January
13 PR Week editorial by Ray Kotcher, chief executive officer of
Ketchum. In the editorial, Kotcher put a positive spin on the
scandal, calling it a "transformational event." He referred to
Williams behavior as "an oversight" and implied that the scandal was
politically motivated.
"It is no coincidence that this activity occurred in Washington,"
Kotcher wrote, "where political divisiveness is at an all-time high."
He also suggested the rise of punditry had something to do with the
whole affair:
"Williams' unusual role as both a pundit and information source -
through his ad-production firm - would seem to blur the lines that
once so clearly defined journalism and news organizations," Kothcer
wrote. "I'm not sure even the media itself can agree anymore on how
to strictly define and distinguish journalists and news
organizations."
As reporters hounded the firm, Ketchum released a later statement
saying it had made a "lapse in judgment" -- but didn't make the
statement available on its website, as Jay Rosen, a journalism
professor at New York University noted. In his blog, PressThink,
Rosen wrote that Ketchum's site "shows no awareness at all that it is
the 'live' public face of a company in the news and under pressure
from peers. This would be mildly comical in the case of a chemical
company. It is more amusing, and ironic in the instance of a public
relations agency fighting for its reputation É"
In another curious development, a site on http://www.ketchum.com that
touts the virtues of influencing public opinion leaders - through a
special tool Ketchum calls "Influencer Relationship Management" - is
no longer working.
Snapshots of the site on Wayback Machine (see http://www.archive.org
and type in http://www.ketchum.com/IRM in the search bar) describe
how the system works by "influencing the influencers." The premise of
Ketchum's system, described in a press release and in snapshots of
the site on Wayback Machine, is that there are a select group of
people - such as elite media and analysts -- who mold public opinion.
Through an "IRM portal," clients can view the opinions of these
influencers on an "attitude" scale. A snapshot of an "IRM portal"
even seems to promise pictures of who these "influencers" are.
The DoE did not return calls seeking comment on whether they had
access to the IRM portal, but Ketchum's work for the DoE did entail
identifying the reporters who routinely covered the NCLB Act, and
ranking their stories.
According to documents obtained by People for the American Way, a
Washington, D.C. nonprofit, Ketchum produced benchmark media analyses
for the DoE showing how different newspapers and reporters in
different states covered the NCLB Act. Stories were rated on a scale
of 0 to 100 (with 100 being an "ideal media mention"), though some
stories - "to allow for negative press," as Ketchum put it -- earned
marks less than zero.
Positive marks were given to stories that, among other things,
mentioned that NCLB would "hold schools accountable for student's
success," would "close the achievement gap," or generally mentioned
that the Bush administration or the Republican party was "committed
to education." Negative marks were given to stories which mentioned
that 100 percent compliance with NCLB would be unrealistic, that the
program is not properly funded, or that the Bush administration was
interfering with state education duties.
The media analyses went on to rate the stories of reporters who
covered NCLB most often. Low-ranked stories included few positive
messages or else quoted NCLB critics, such as the National Education
Association or the American Federation of Teachers. An op-ed by
former Education Secretary Rod Paige earned the highest marks. The
lowest marks? In one instance, Kenneth Remsen, a school principal who
wrote a column for Vermont's Burlington Free Press, received a mark
of -70 for containing "12 negative messages" in an article Ketchum
described as "creative conceit."
This type of ranking isn't new. Former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary
found herself in a major flap in 1995, when it was revealed the
Department of Energy hired a public relations firm to rank newspapers
and reporters on department coverage. Today, it appears to have
become standard practice within many PR firms.
"They [government agencies] can develop any kind of assessment they
want," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of Reporters Committee
for Freedom of the Press. She doesn't see the practice of ranking of
reporters or news coverage as problematic -- unless it leads
government agencies to deny reporters access. She noted the case of
Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, who has directed his staff and 19
state agencies to stop speaking with two reporters from the Baltimore
Sun.
Kevin Elliott, manager of PR giant Hill & Knowlton's San Francisco
office, said ratings of media coverage are often produced because,
from a public relations perspective, "it's important to know which
reporters to reach out to on a story."
"A reason an organization might want to rank reporters is to track
things like bias, accuracyÉto see if the reporter understood the
issue and had all the information," said Mark Weiner, chief executive
officer of Delahaye Medialink Worldwide, a media marketing and
research firm. Technologies such as news database Lexis-Nexis, he
added, have made the news-crunching task easier to perform.
The DoE did not return calls or an e-mail seeking comment, but told
the Associated Press that the rankings did not influence how the
department treated reporters. The Government Accountability Office is
reportedly looking into how the ratings were used.
Reporter Greg Toppo of USA Today, which originally broke the
Armstrong Williams story with a Freedom of Information Act request,
said he had "no idea" what the DoE "was trying to accomplish." In one
analysis Ketchum produced, Toppo was given a score of 2 points for
six articles that he produced between April and June of 2003 on NCLB.
George Archibald of The Washington Times received a score of -2
points - "and he's been generally supportive of NCLB, so the rankings
don't make much sense," Toppo said.
"I was told that reporters who scored low would be targeted for some
type of 're-education' on NCLB, but no one ever contacted me," Toppo
said.
He also noted that the rankings didn't lead to any kind of denial of
access from the DoE -- but access, he said, "was pretty poor to begin
with."
Triangle of Silence
Omnicom, which holds 1,500 subsidiary agencies in public relations,
advertising and other media industries, was also silent. A
spokesperson in their New York office would only say that Ketchum was
bound by Omnicom's code of conduct, and referred all other calls to
Ketchum, which did not return numerous calls and e-mails from
CorpWatch. Ketchum has also referred other reporters to the DoE. But
the DoE - which has defended the Williams arrangement while
simultaneously pledging to get to the bottom of it - also did not
return calls for comment.
Jack O'Dwyer, whose PR news website http://www.odwyerpr.com has been
reporting on the Williams scandal, said he and his site have been
playing the role of a default PR firm for Ketchum and Omnicom. He
says has been handling media calls for the company - "supplying basic
information, documents, and background including the history of PR
and the major trends of the past few decades." The companies might
think twice about letting O'Dwyer handle their PR: He isn't putting a
positive spin on things, harrying both Ketchum and Omnicom in
editorials such as "Heads Should Roll."
PR Industry Denounces Ketchum
While the responses from Ketchum and Omnicom to the scandal were
muted, the outcry from some in the PR industry itself was
unequivocally clear. Richard Edelman, chief executive officer of
Edelman Worldwide, the largest independent public relations firm,
called the Williams incident "profoundly depressing." He noted in his
blog that advertising pays for space -- but PR "is supposed to earn
it."
"We are being asked to believe that the problem is convergence,"
Edelman continued, "that the blurring of the lines between
advertising and PR is a function of technology and immediate access
to information." He disagreed with this rational, adding, "the
response from several key members of the PR establishment is frankly
very disappointing."
Elliot Sloane, chief executive officer of Sloane & Company public
relations, wrote that he withdrew his firm's membership in the
Council of Public Relations Firms after he said the agency laid the
blame at Williams' feet. Sloane called the response "tepid" and
"apologetic," although the Council has since said the kind of
arrangement Ketchum had with Williams was "unacceptable."
The Williams scandal comes at a bad time for the PR industry, which
is under pressure from Wall Street to meet monthly financial goals
and needs to "produce results almost immediately," according to
Judith Phair, president of the Public Relations Society of America.
At the same time, the industry is dealing with two major over-billing
trials involving government agencies. In Los Angeles, John Stodder, a
former Fleishman-Hillard senior vice president, has been indicted by
a federal grand jury for allegedly helping to submit false bills that
defrauded $250,000 from the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power,
which held a $3 million annual contract with Fleishman-Hillard.
Stodder has pled not guilty to numerous counts of wire fraud.
Elsewhere, in New York, a trial is underway in which two Ogilvy &
Mather employees - Shona Seifert and Thomas Early -- have been
accused of helping over-bill PR work to disguise a $3 million
shortfall in labor costs on an account for the Office of National
Drug Control Policy. The government settled a civil case against the
firm in 2002 for $1.8 million.
-------
Sidebar:
Ketchum video news releases
Ketchum's video news releases (VNRs) on the Medicare Prescription
Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) were found to
be "covert propaganda" in a 2004 report by the Government
Accountability Office (GAO). Ketchum hired a sub-contractor to
produce VNRs for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS)
in the Health and Human Services Department.
VNRs provide video footage, graphics and audio edited together into a
package directly to television stations in a manner that allows them
to easily pick any of the component elements and create their own
story.
The VNRs even featured a "reporter" - Karen Ryan - who was actually a
public relations professional, and the releases contained "a
favorable report on the effects [of the law] on Medicare
beneficiaries." Some broadcast stations ran the story unedited.
The GAO determined that although the videos were clearly labeled, the
news story inside was produced in such a way that television viewers
could not distinguish the "source" of the news. "The entire story
package was developed with appropriated funds but [is made to] appear
to be an independent news story," the GAO wrote.
The GAO previously found that video news releases produced for the
Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) were also propaganda.
While both agencies have discontinued their use of the VNRs, the
Health and Human Services Department continues to use them, said Bill
Pierce, an HHS spokesperson.
"We can't be responsible for journalistic ethics," he said. Pierce
added that HHS was keeping the GAO findings in mind, though the GAO
report didn't have a "dramatic" effect on the way the department used
video releases.
"It's kind of a dead letter," said ONDCP spokesperson Tom Riley of
the January GAO report which referred to the agency's VNRs as
propaganda. "We stopped doing VNRs last year, haven't done any since
then, and have no plans to use them in the future."
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