The Public Relations Game

By Alec Klein
October 24, 2008

PR people. They evoke all manner of visceral reactions from reporters—anger, belligerence, distrust, avoidance, benign sighs of ennui—but infrequently, respect. Still, I dare to say: We need to take into account PR people; they are not all created equal. Some are bad. Others are good. But in the world of business reporting, public relations officials are de rigueur, a fact of life and part of the vast machinery of industry that we cover. And in the case of investigative business reporting, PR people are often even more of an overt presence, whether it’s to serve as corporate gatekeepers to grant (or block) access to persons or events, to rivet our attention to (or divert it from) the financial matter at hand, or to simply help us, whether they intend to or not.

Which brings me to my first major investigation, more than 15 years ago, when I discovered that the elected city council had handed out secret bonuses, using taxpayer money, to the city manager. The practice was so secret that when I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for information about one of these bonuses, the city responded by saying there was none—that is, until I independently verified the bonus through confidential sources. Later, as I continued to investigate, a public relations official told me that I didn’t have the whole story. If I thought those secret bonuses were egregious, this PR official said, I had another thing coming. This PR official said the previous city manager had received even more money in secret bonuses over a longer period; indeed, I was then able to obtain documents that proved it. The PR official’s point was to downplay the amount of secret bonuses taken by the current administration and underscore how much worse it had been under the previous administration. But the disclosure had the unintended effect of showing that the city council had made it a longstanding practice to hand out secret bonuses, involving more taxpayer money than I had initially uncovered. Suddenly, I had a deeper story. When my investigation was published, citizens were so outraged that they moved to oust the mayor until she formally apologized and promised reform.

Things don’t always work out that way with PR people. On more than one occasion, a PR official has led me astray. Such was the case about seven years ago when I received a tip that media giant Time Warner, then called AOL Time Warner, was considering buying AT&T’s cable systems. When I asked a PR official at AOL for comment, he told me that I was way off base, that there was no such deal being contemplated. Taken aback, I relayed what he said to my editors, who decided that we ought to hold the story for at least a day while I looked further into it. But the next morning, when I picked up a copy of a rival newspaper, I saw the same account: that AOL was considering buying AT&T’s cable assets. Stunned, I called up the PR official at AOL. Why did he tell me that there was no such deal in the offing when there was? “You didn’t ask the right question,” he said.

It’s that kind of diversionary tactic that engenders much of the ill will reporters develop for PR officials. One former colleague was so notoriously rude to PR people that the reporter often barely gave them the time of day if they tried to convince him to write about their companies. This was documented one day when this reporter received a call from someone who said he was a PR official with a pitch. The reporter summarily dismissed him. The conversation, as it turned out, was not with a PR official but with a fellow reporter posing as a PR official. The call was taped and played back for people in the newsroom as a joke. People laughed, but it wasn’t funny. PR people have a job to do, too.

But, PR people do often fall down on the job.  This happens when they refuse to make officials available for interviews and/or when they refuse to cooperate even if they know a reporter is going ahead with the story. This behavior is not rare. In fact, I’m facing it with the story I’m currently working on, which involves a major publicly-held company. What PR people fail to recognize is that if they don’t make their officials available for comment, they are not getting their perspective in the article, which is a disservice to their company or organization, not to mention to readers and the public at large. What’s more, when PR people essentially stonewall a reporter, all they are doing is forcing the reporter to find other ways to learn what is going on. This, by the way, happened when I was covering AOL. The same PR official who led me astray on that AOL cable deal decided that he would not cooperate with me in my coverage of the company. Shut out, I developed sources and continued to write about the company. Along the way, I gathered hundreds of confidential documents that showed how AOL inflated its advertising revenue to pull off the biggest merger in U.S. history, resulting in multiple government investigations and forcing the company to restate two years of financial results. Executives were forced out, including that PR official, other people went to jail and the division of the company that was the focus of my investigation was disbanded.

Alec Klein is a bestselling author, award-winning investigative business reporter formerly of The Washington Post and now professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism