Flak me, baby, flak me!

This article from the Columbia Journalism Review sent my black PR heart all a-flutter. In a nutshell, the CJR reports that the public’s access to truthful and unbiased health-related news is being compromised as more and more news organizations across the United States use hospital-produced stories as part of their regular programming. As a practitioner of sorts I am always looking for new and creative ways to flog my client’s agenda to various media outlets and I am always excited to hear about successful PR efforts.

Of course this kind of quasi-journalism isn’t new in the Philippines where relationships with the right media people can land you (or more accurately, your client) a good spot in the news. Personally, I’ve always had a love-hate feeling towards public relations. As a reader, I hate it when editors get sloppy and let in too many PR stories in their pages. But on the other hand, I can’t deny that I feel a sense of fulfillment (albeit short-lived) whenever I see my client in the papers. A story means that your days of writing, scheming and groveling have paid off—for now. And in spite of myself, I can’t help but feel gleeful admiration whenever I see a good PR story take prominent place in the news. Bully for you fellow flaks!

Selling stories to the media isn’t really as shocking as it sounds. That, in essence, is what flaks do. What’s apparently disturbing about the CJR story is that it involves institutions whose supposed mandate is to care for sick people. But stripped of this lofty directive a hospital is really just a service-oriented business. And as such, it needs to take care of its bottomline. If selling feel-good but self-aggrandizing stories to an unsuspecting public is what will keep the “customers” coming then so be it. In the end, the onus falls on the media.

For all of the effort that goes into award-winning campaign strategies, brilliantly-crafted messages and well-written stories, PR is really all about getting your client out there. Sometimes it entails using disingenuous methods to get your stories across. It’s not pretty but it’s how flaks are measured in the end. And yes, even as I write this I suspect my soul is slowly turning hot and crispy in one of Hell’s many circles. But as Daffy Duck so eloquently lisped, “Well, it’sth a living.”

The Epidemic
By Trudy Lieberman

When 19 thousand viewers tuned in to the 7 a.m. news on KTBC-TV, the local Fox channel in Austin,Texas, in mid-January, they heard the anchor, Joe Bickett, introduce a story about a new electronic rehabilitation system for injured kids. “Sharon Dennis has more on that,” Bickett said. Dennis then described how a lively fifteen-year-old named Merrill, who had sprained her ankle, was getting better thanks to the computer-guided rehab program that Cleveland Clinic researchers are calling “the world’s first virtual-only gym.”

The professional-looking story had that gee-whiz feel so typical of TV health news, explaining how the technology was making it easier for patients to get back to normal. It ended with “Sharon Dennis reporting.”

Viewers could be forgiven if they thought they were seeing real news reported by one of the station’s reporters. But Sharon Dennis does not work for KTBC. The story had been fed to the station by the Cleveland Clinic, the health care behemoth. Dennis, who earned her broadcasting bona fides at ABC News and at KOMO-TV in Seattle, works in Cleveland as the executive producer of the Cleveland Clinic News Service, in a windowless office on the fourth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel on the clinic’s sprawling 140-acre campus. There the clinic has constructed broadcast facilities for Dennis and her four-person staff, complete with three cameras, a background set, and an ON AIR sign purchased at Target. Every day, Dennis sends out prepackaged stories to, among others, Fox News Edge, a service for Fox affiliates that in turn distributes the pieces to 140 Fox stations. What Texas viewers heard that January morning was a script written at the Intercontinental Hotel.

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