Oh, Public Relations! (Part 1)

Public relations people and journalists are natural enemies. Their jobs are just so fundamentally different. PR people hide things, spin things and journalists unearth things, tell the truth (when they're actually doing their jobs, that is.)
I've dealt with this discrepancy while working on numerous articles for my internship. My favorite instance of dealing with PR flak was when writing an article about some new tobacco legislation. So obviously, the first thing I do is call the largest tobacco company in the world, Philip Morris. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: So can you tell me how you think this new bill will affect the tobacco industry?
PR lady: Did you read our website?
Me: Yes, but I wanted to speak to an actual person. Can you tell me how you think this new bill will affect the tobacco industry?
PR lady: (huffy) You should read our website. I'm not going to say anything that isn't on our website.

So, I move on, call R.J. Reynolds, the second largest tobacco company. Spokesperson David Howard was lovely and charming and oh-so-happy to talk to me. Then he fed me lines that might as well have been straight of the movie Thank You for Smoking!:

"We go to great lengths to ensure that we are operating in a principled manner. Kids should not smoke. Period. We want to communicate -- and do communicate -- with adults who have made the choice to smoke."

I could barely keep from laughing out loud. I love it when PR flak tries to sweet talk me! It's always done in the manner of a guy throwing out pick-up lines. (Speaking of, I have a rather interesting experience with a PR guy attempting to charm me in a bar, but that's another entry for another blog entirely. )

So, I'll recount one more short incident for you before getting on to what Hilary Clinton has to do with this.

Another time I was working on an article about Josh Wolf, an imprisoned journalist (in fact, the longest imprisoned journalist in US history) and I was asking why Nancy Pelosi spoke out of behalf of the journalists on trial in the BALCO (baseball steroids related. they were ordered to give up their sources by the court.) case, and not for Josh Wolf, who was from our district. I asked one of her press spokespeople -- Andrew Stoddard--- over and over why she wouldn't speak out on Wolf's behalf, but he ignored my question and just kept repeating:
“She [Pelosi] supports a federal shield law that will help with these situations.”

So what do Hilary and Bill Clinton have to do with this? (see Slate.com article) Basically, a GQ reporter was going to do an article about some rivalry among people working on Hilary's campaign. However, they were also going to later do an article on Bill Clinton for their Man of the Year issue. When they found out about the Hilary story, one of Bill Clinton's aides threatened to restrict GQ's access to Bill for the Man of the Year issue. Rather than standing up to Clinton aides and running the Hilary article , GQ pulled the Hilary article at the behest of Clinton's people. The journalist who was supposed to do the story told the Washington Post:

"GQ told me it was a great story and a hell of a reporting job, but they didn't want to jeopardize their Clinton-in-Africa piece. GQ told me the Clintons were unhappy and threatened to revoke access to Bill Clinton if the Hillary story ran."

This is what journalism has come to, huh? I'll be running with this thought some more in Part 2 when I discuss media manipulation and the Iraq War.