Here are some highlights from this 2024 book by Phil Elwood:
* On weekends, I traveled to universities around the nation to argue about what policies would lead to nuclear war. Rapid – fire reading of news clippings scored points in a round. So did biting insults lodged at your opponent in an attempt to trap them in a rhetorical mishap. You won by manipulating the news and calling it “evidence” to advance your argument. I won a lot.
* The Hill is a real – world version of debate team. Everyone talks fast, and there are winners, losers, and nukes.
* I’m certain I’ll be excommunicated from DC. I’ll have to return to Olympia. My parents will once again watch their son emerge at the Arrivals gate holding his plush toy Opus the Penguin, like a deadbeat Sisyphus. Instead, I’m promoted. Moynihan’s office makes one call, and I’m hired as a legislative correspondent for the senior senator from Michigan, Carl Levin. The happy hours continue. It’s amazing I get anything done with all the booze. Toward the end of my first year, the chief of staff hauls me into his office.
“I strongly suggest you get a college degree,” he says. “George Washington is off the table, clearly. What about Georgetown?”
Given my high school C average, Georgetown should be off the table, too. But it turns out Levin has considerable influence with the university. One letter from the senator and I’m accepted as a transfer student. I realize this is how the world works, or at least how this world does. It is not a meritocracy.
* I’m fascinated by this bloodbath, particularly by the criminals on the witness stand. Who helps them? Who prepped them for this massacre? Whoever it was, they aren’t good enough at their job. Where’s the consistent messaging? Why weren’t they expecting these questions? Why aren’t they repeating the same five lines over and over and over? Why are they just giving easy sound bites to the senator and the media?
I realize I’m probably the only person in the world who has this reaction to the Enron scandal.
* As the anchor nods like a concerned parent, I watch as [Jon] Powers’s words — my words — become legitimate in real time because he’s saying them on cable news. In an instant, ideas I thought up in a windowless office appear to become reality, certified by CNN itself. The audience doesn’t see me building the machine that creates this illusion. They don’t even know I exist. If a PR person appears on TV, it usually means we’ve fucked up.
As CNN broadcasts my message to millions of Americans, I realize my job isn’t to manipulate public opinion. My job is to get gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me. Once you have ink, your story becomes real. A conversation starts that didn’t exist moments before, a conversation nobody would think to have if you hadn’t started it. The public begins to accept something you created out of nothing.
And I have something reporters will always need: access to inside information. Information is the only commodity I control, but in this world it’s valuable currency. The media demand constant fuel. I can feed information to reporters and toggle how much they see. I feel as if I’ve put on a pair of night – vision goggles that reveal the hidden machines powering the world. I begin to see levers I can pull. The adrenaline that spikes feels stronger than any line of cocaine.
* My biggest client was the U.S. Tuna Foundation, which tried to get pregnant women to eat, you guessed it, more tuna. We paid off academics to argue that a certain form of molecular mercury was too large to cross the blood – brain barrier. The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition maintained that women of childbearing age should eat at least twelve ounces of seafood per week. We were caught by none other than the New York Times : “Industry Money Fans Debate on Fish,” read the headline that exposed the whole nasty affair.
* PR firms employ two types of people: bureaucrats and operatives. Bureaucrats are the accountants. The conference call leaders. The digital paper pushers. Operatives infect newsrooms. Call reporters. Do whatever it takes to get ink. I have always been and will always be an operative.
* If you make one friend inside a newsroom, you can get them to introduce you to their colleagues. You can infect that newsroom.
* They know I have something juicy, an exclusive. They build their careers, and I do my job to spin a story for a client. I’m understanding better every day how influence works, and my own influence is growing.
* My industry is worth approximately $129 billion. We will do anything to earn those billions. The best journalists in the world aren’t always breaking stories because of their dogged reporting skills; they’re breaking them because they rely on people like me to feed them exclusive scoops. We use journalists to do our clients’ bidding. And then the public reads their stories and believes them because they are coming from a trusted news source and not a corporate bagman.
Sadly, we have the journalists outnumbered. Three hundred thousand people are employed by the PR industry in the United States, compared to an estimated forty thousand journalists.
* I engage in the equivalent of “insider trading” with the media on a regular basis. I don’t just talk to myself during this period. I use a group of a dozen journalists to field – test ideas. During my incubation period, I’ll call one or two of them and float a strategy by them that has not been given to the client. It’s always positioned as “What if, hypothetically, my client decided to do X … Would that be newsworthy?” And I make sure that all these calls are off the record. I’m not sure what a journalism school ethics professor would think of this practice.
* [Peter] Brown is completely comfortable with how the world works and his place in it. He understands the hidden machinery behind it all. He knows how to operate it. And he understands that the most important thing of all is how you look while you’re doing it. How you appear. He once told me, “We can’t just do a good job. We also have to appear to do a good job.”
And that’s public relations. If you can do that, then you can do whatever you want, and there won’t be any consequences. You can represent a dictator, and everyone still comes to your Christmas party.
* “Never let anyone tell you Americans don’t use the metric system. We measure our bullets in millimeters and our drugs in grams.”
* During media training, PR operatives learn that every story has three parts: a villain, a victim, and a vindicator. In this story, Mary was the victim, and when he murdered the drunk, George became the villain. In the PR business, we try to convert a villain into a vindicator or a victim as fast as possible. And that’s exactly what the town did when they found George “not guilty” sans trial. They made him the hero, a vindicator of battered women. The deceased drunk was switched from a murder victim to a wife beater who deserved to die. A villain. Every story needs a villain. Show me a good story without one.
* Gaddafi’s appearance before the UN General Assembly is what, in public relations, we call an inflection point. In Back to the Future Part II , Doc Brown uses a chalkboard to explain how a small event in the past can skew a time line, creating an alternative future. In public relations, we try to create alternative futures for our clients. We do this by capitalizing on an inflection point, a critical moment when the time line can skew toward, we hope, the positive. Gaddafi’s televised speech in front of world leaders has the potential to erase decades of bad press and negative public perception. If you manage the coverage right, you can serve up rehabilitation, goodwill, and a new image, all in a single news cycle. And the public will eat it up with a spoon. If a client is redeemed in the eyes of both Fox News and CNN, it’s as good as washing them in holy water.
Emerge, my client, reborn and rebranded — until the next scandal .
Every client, large and small, faces an inflection point. Some you create. Some are created for you. An inflection point usually comes after your client has shit the bed. Personally, I consider every crisis a golden opportunity. If my client lights their house on fire, you can be damn sure I’ll get the press to blame outdated fire codes. I tell clients, “Don’t be a hero. Always work to find a better villain.”
* I’m sending these reporters to a “terrorist rehabilitation camp” in Tripoli, Libya’s capital. There, they’ll meet Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who have changed their murderous ways, put down their Kalashnikovs and truck bombs, and who now study a reformed text of jihad called The Book of Correctional Studies . This is a propaganda tour for Saif Gaddafi. The general strategy boils down to Look! Gaddafi’s son is re – educating terrorists.
* The first thing I notice in Sarajevo are the bombed – out, shot – up buildings. I feel like I’m heading into an active war zone. A few hours later, while I’m riding a rumbling bus coughing its way down poorly paved streets, a Bosnian Muslim guide tells me that the Bosnians left their city this way intentionally. To let the world know what happened.
* I’ve done it for Gaddafi, and BLJ [Brown Lloyd James] is doing it right now for a host of other foreign baddies. Peter Brown’s creed “Everyone deserves representation” has been pushed to the extreme. In addition to the Gaddafis, BLJ’s clients have included Syrian president Bashar al – Assad; Ali Bongo, president of Gabon, who paid the firm in briefcases full of cash; and the Chinese Communist Party – funded China – United States Exchange Foundation. Though, in one pitch meeting, we did turn down the government of Sri Lanka after one of its senior officials referred to ethnic Tamils as parasites and advocated for their extinction.
I’m only one cog in the machine that powers this system. But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that I’m a very useful cog. In DC, penned up in a posh conference room, I can ignore these pesky moral concerns. Here in Bosnia, where you can feel the blood in the ground, it’s not so easy.
* PR pros invest a great deal of time and effort to bring hit pieces to fruition. Most often, clients want to see a hit piece on their primary competitor. Early on in my time working for Peter Brown, I needed to hit one of my clients’ political enemies. My adversary did not exactly follow the letter of the law. Their tax status and a few other legal t ’s and i ’s were not crossed and dotted. I knew this because my client knew this; he had the resources needed to obtain this information. All I needed was the appropriate messenger.
Washington is littered with nonprofit organizations founded with the ideal of changing the world for the better. But ideals don’t keep the lights on. Money does. My client knew this. A significant private donation yielded a press release from a legitimate nonprofit and a letter of inquiry to the Department of Justice. Suddenly, my client’s enemy was less concerned with my client and more concerned with their own growing legal bills.
* Clients ask for hit pieces all the time. Walmart likes to see negative articles about Amazon. So, in 2018, it hired PR pros to create the Free and Fair Markets Initiative (FFMI), which described itself as a “nonprofit watchdog committed to scrutinizing Amazon’s harmful practices and promoting a fair, modern marketplace that works for all Americans.” Don’t be shocked: FFMI was another astroturf organization. PR pros get well paid for creating these shell nonprofits — in this case, $250,000. FFMI put out a stream of content hitting Amazon: Labor issues. Controversial items being sold on Amazon. Scandals in the C – Suite. All highlighted in tweets, press releases, and media statements by the FFMI.
* BLJ is sending Vogue journalist Joan Juliet Buck to Damascus. The magazine is going to feature our client Asma al – Assad in its March 2011 issue, thanks to Peter Brown calling up his old friend Anna Wintour. The theme of the issue is “Power.” We’re using the wife of Syrian president (read: dictator) Bashar al – Assad to try to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Syria. It’s an American tactic: the First Lady is always more popular than the president, and she makes her husband look good by association.
The Vogue story runs under the title “A Rose in the Desert.” When I pick up a copy of the glossy magazine, I’m gobsmacked by the first line of the piece: “Asma al – Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,” the writer gushes. In the first few paragraphs alone, the piece describes Mrs. al – Assad as “breezy” and “fun” and calls Syria “a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark.”
The piece reads like the reporter spent a few days with Gwyneth Paltrow: “Asma al – Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch,” Buck writes. “The household is run on wildly democratic principles. ‘We all vote on what we want, and where,’ she [Asma] says.” (For example, her children voted to make the chandelier over the dining table out of cut – up comic books.) It’s rare that you send a journalist on a propaganda tour and they actually print the propaganda. But you won’t find any complaints from the flaks who set it all up.
The Vogue writer says Mrs. al – Assad likely has a “killer IQ.” Poor choice of words when describing a dictator’s wife. The article is chock – full of questionable journalistic choices. It quotes Bashar al – Assad himself saying he became an eye surgeon because there is “very little blood.” Vogue publishes photos of Assad playing with his children: he is dressed like an American president in jeans and a gray fleece.
* Part of my strategy in dealing with reporters is to express my agenda up front.
* Rule 1. Don’t believe the lie that “any press is good press.”
Rule 2. Don’t repeat the negative.
Tell me the first Richard Nixon quote that pops into your head. “I am not a crook,” right? You remember the line even if you weren’t born yet when Nixon said it. Everyone remembers the line. Those five words are perhaps the single greatest PR blunder in American history. Nixon repeated the negative, the first thing in media training we teach clients to avoid doing. If someone asks how long you’ve been beating your wife, you don’t say, “I’m not a wife beater.” You say, “I’m a good man.” Why deny when you can obfuscate?
Rule 3. Never wrestle with a pig in shit. *
Two things will happen. You’ll be covered in shit. And the pig will like it. Never get down and fight with an opponent who is beneath you.
Rule 4. Don’t kick someone when they are up.
An old saying in Washington. It’s too much work to attack a strong opponent. Know your place. Dotcom kicks whomever he wants: beloved CEOs, the entertainment industry, powerful lobbies like the MPAA.
* Remember my saying that you can’t very well take out an ad in the New York Times to sell heroin? Well, not unless that ad is penned by psychiatrist Sally Satel, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Satel’s 2004 New York Times piece was titled, “Doctors Behind Bars: Treating Pain Is Now Risky Business.” How is this for shifting the narrative? “Pain treatment itself is an area ripe for misinterpretation. Many patients who seek doctors’ help have already tried nonsteroid anti – inflammatory drugs, conventional opiates like codeine and even surgery, yet they are still in severe pain from cancer, degenerative arthritis, nerve damage or other conditions,” Satel wrote. “Large doses of medicines like hydrocodone (Vicodin), oxycodone (OxyContin), morphine or methadone may be required.” Satel actually plugged Oxy by name, and quoted a Purdue shill claiming that one in ten Americans in pain could benefit from a long – term, high – dose treatment with the drug. All I can say is well done.
* we have no idea how to [go viral]. Engineering a “viral moment” is like choreographing an earthquake. If it happens, it’s a shock. And it usually causes damage. Depending on the disposition of the engagement, attention to the wrong aspect of a narrative can be a self – inflicted wound. A lot of PR firms are extremely interested in creating “social media campaigns” and “influencer outreach” to buttress their earned media work. In my experience, you win the mainstream media, and the dog wags its tail: the social media mob follows. There are instances of the tail wagging the dog and social media driving the conversation, but that is the nightmare scenario. That is mob rule.
* Done right, a piece in the opinion pages of a newspaper can operate as a form of track – two diplomacy, one the American media provide free of charge. In an op – ed, heads of state or high – ranking government officials can communicate with each other when other lines of communication are compromised.
* The Nigerian administration wants to talk (and pay) its way out of a problem without acting. Richard Levick likes to say, “You cannot talk your way out of something you acted your way into.” In hiring us, the Nigerians wanted magicians who would “use their powers’” to will good press into existence. But I am not an alchemist. I cannot turn shit into gold. If terrorists kidnap hundreds of schoolchildren, and you do nothing about it, your PR guy cannot save you. It is as simple as that. If the client does not act, nothing happens. The Nigerians have apparently never learned Newton’s First Law of Motion: “Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.”
* One of the most fantastic examples of self – immolation is Bell Pottinger. In 2016, the British PR firm was putting up big numbers for some high – profile clients and mining the depths of hell for others. Flaks from the firm went to South Africa, a nation with a slightly complicated history of race relations, and tried to sow racial discord prior to an election. Once this came to light, the media were (rightfully) unforgiving. Bell Pottinger went from making over half a billion on a single contract with the U.S. government to shutting its doors over a single negative news cycle. This was not a case of flying too close to the sun; it was a case of believing you were more powerful than the sun.
* To structure an anonymity deal, you need a monopoly on the information a journalist wants. Check. Or you can position yourself as the second source confirming information they already have but cannot print without confirmation. I’ll also be helpful to Tau in this regard, as Psy’s spooks won’t be going on the record. And as shocking as this is, I am a reliable source. I have never given information to a reporter that I knew was false. Providing good information to Tau for years has earned me points with his editor, who also has to sign off on my anonymity.
Journalism would die without anonymous sources. They take risks to leak stories that check the power of the rich and powerful. But the sword has two edges. Anonymous sourcing is used by the powerful to advance their agendas. It is incumbent on the news organization, the reporter, the editors, and their corporate counsel to determine the veracity of the information and the informant’s motives. The majority of this responsibility falls on the reporter. While gathering information, they must understand how it fits into a broader agenda, should one exist. It almost always does.
* PR operatives gamble every time we pitch a story. Sometimes we lose. Just like any good gambler, we try to minimize our losses. To do that, we must know what can go wrong. The editor could blow the headline. The paper could break the embargo date. It could misquote your client. It could accidentally quote you. An off – the – record statement could bleed into the story. Your adversary might have the goods on your client. A regulator or government might step in and skew the story. Other news might eclipse your story. The reporter you are working with might get scooped. Your source could get cold feet. And finally, it might turn out that your client has been lying to you the whole time.
