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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
Michael Sitrick, the publicist behind the decision to put the interview on the Web, is no stranger to advance jobs or spin control. His past clients have included Food Lion (the supermarket chain that ABC's "Primetime Live" infiltrated in 1992 and filmed handling meat in a deceptive and disgusting manner) and "Frasier" star Kelsey Grammer (whose history of drug, drink and law problems has provided endless fodder for the tabloids).
His varied successes have made him the go-to man on career rehab questions; when celebrities (Marv Albert, O.J. Simpson) and even cities (Los Angeles) suffer in the appearances department, journalists call Sitrick and ask him what he would do. A former journalist himself (he was a stringer for some newspapers before going over to what many in the Fourth Estate consider the Dark Side), he savors his reputation as a spinmeister and even wrote a book touting his wisdom on the subject ("Spin: How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your Advantage," written with partner Allan Mayer, a former Newsweek editor).
"Journalists are herd animals, and so it doesn't take a lot to whip them up into a full-tilt stampede," he wrote in his manifesto. "[A] contrarian reporter [one who follows something other than the conventional wisdom on a story] is the 'lead steer.' To be sure, not just anyone in the press corps can play the role. It's got to be a journalist who enjoys the respect of his or her peers -- or at least works for a news organization that does.
"That's because the lead steer's real audience is not so much the folks at home as it is his or her colleagues in the press room. The idea is not to change public attitudes in one fell swoop (that not really being possible) but to influence future coverage."
Some reporters, naturally, are wary of talking to Sitrick about his clients for the same reason companies (often those going into Chapter 11) and celebrities flock to him: He has the ability to control the ball, and sometimes even change the rules. The genius of Food Lion's 1997 suit against ABC, on which Sitrick played an advisory role, is that ABC became the perceived villain. The charges of mishandling food weren't challenged; rather, the supermarket chain charged the network with fraud and trespass. Those reporters didn't want jobs, they just wanted footage of employees doing nasty things with chicken parts. The fact that the jury (in Greensboro, N.C.) decided in favor of the company (awarding Food Lion $5.5 million in punitive damages) was a triumph of spin. And a chilling indicator of the public's distrust of the media. (The decision was ultimately reversed in a federal appeals court.)
As the TV newsweeklies have proliferated, with some programs appearing two and three times a week, the amount of sensationalistic reporting -- hidden cameras, "gotcha" interviews -- has also grown. Sitrick and Company (named Crisis Management Firm of the Year by Inside PR magazine in 1997) does not believe in screaming denunciations of accusations, or feigned incredulity. (Think of Nate Thurm, Martin Short's parody of a "60 Minutes" victim, looking at the camera and asking the audience: "Is it me or is it him?" Not very convincing.) He and his staff (experienced journalists and lawyers among them) are the equivalent of Clinton's pre-election "war room," though more Stephanopolous than Carville. "Public relations is a business of subtleties," Sitrick said in an interview. "Sometimes it's tone of voice. Sometimes it's the way you approach it. And it's basically credibility -- we'll never lie to a reporter. And we won't allow our clients to lie, because all we have is our credibility."
Indeed, Metabolife's Ellis comes off as painfully honest in the unedited "20/20" interview. But Sitrick isn't advocating pure, unadulterated access, either. He wants his clients to share control of the dialogue with the press, whether the press likes it or not. Kathie Lee Gifford (represented by PR titan Howard Rubinstein) is no stranger to controversy. She's reportedly said she won't sit for magazine interviews anymore, claiming that reporters have distorted what she has said. She'll only do live TV, according to her handlers, because she can control how she comes across. But for talk-show host and CEO alike, there is no easy way to dodge tough questions of a personal (marital problems?) or public (sweatshop questions?) nature without coming off looking like kind of a toad.
And Sitrick knows from toads. In 1996 he handled the El Torito restaurant chain in Southern California. One of its customers claimed he chomped into a taco and bit off the head of a frog. "El Torito was panicked when they called us up," Sitrick recalled later. "I said, 'What do you know about this guy?' They did a database search and found that he had been convicted of credit-card fraud, and he had filed for personal bankruptcy. We had the frog tested at a university and they found there weren't teeth marks in it, and the head was still part of it.
"The first thing we did is, we found out if it could possibly be true. We grilled the people at the company the way a reporter would if they had access. Then we looked at the guy's background. Then we had the frog inspected by an expert. If the guy had really been good, he would have really put the frog in his mouth and bit down on it, but he didn't do that. By disproving it, and showing why it couldn't have happened -- and then the media found his ex-girlfriend, who said he had always been planning to get a lot of money by planting a frog in a restaurant -- the thing went away like that."
Metabolife's problems are a bit more serious than one dead frog. And it's too soon to tell if putting the "20/20" interview on the Web won the company any friends. A visit to the "20/20" chat room found opinion running in its favor. (Though it's hard to say who's logging on; the "20/20" interview was held in a high school auditorium packed with Metabolife employees who cheered as if at a pep rally.) But it's the sort of move we should come to expect from publicity-savvy companies armed with the same tools of communication -- and often bigger budgets -- as the networks and news organizations.
And it is more than their right (or their client's right) to defend themselves. The over-
Though I'd still be careful biting into that taco.
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