Traverse City Record-Eagle

Life

December 30, 2007

Kathy Gibbons: Eye-opening look at PR in Acme tactics

BY KATHY GIBBONS

Call me naive. Or maybe just out of date.

It has been 30 years since I earned a degree in journalism. For the last 15 years, I've worked at the Record-Eagle.

But before coming here, I had journalism and public relations jobs. A writer's skills lend themselves to both -- whether writing press releases, brochures and newsletters, or articles and columns.

A lot of journalism professionals think trading in a news job for public relations is selling out. And true, some PR people rate the designation of "flack," which to me connotes the idea of someone who says what they're paid to whether they believe it or agree.

But directing PR in a hospital, then a community college, I felt there was value in my job. Sure, what my department did contributed to the overall image -- and marketing -- of each institution. But we helped get the word out so that the community would know about, and ideally take advantage of, our services. Busy staff running programs relied on us to develop brochures, press releases, ads, commercials -- whatever they needed.

I also saw my role as trying to make life easier for the journalists who covered us. Instead of getting in the way of the story, I tried to facilitate it by quickly responding and linking them with sources. In my current job, the PR people who are honest and helpful like that get my respect. As for those who don't, well, they don't.

But I never imagined the role of public relations was to conduct major subterfuge -- even sabotage -- on behalf of a client. I thought PR was there to help tell, and yes, maybe even shape, the story. I didn't think it was to create the story and manipulate the outcome by pulling strings in ways never intended to see the light of day.

So it was more than eye-opening to read how the Seyferth, Spaulding, Tennyson public relations firm in Grand Rapids was paid $30,000 by Meijer to secretly manage the recall of Acme Township board members over zoning disputes relating to Meijer's plans to build a store there. If the citizens wanted that and hired the firm, above board, to work on their own behalf, fine. But that is not what happened.

According to a story in last Sunday's paper, the firm's "public relations" services for Meijer included ghost writing recall language, campaign literature and newspaper opinion pieces, and devising election strategy, using local residents as front people.

If that's PR, think of all of the scandals where public figures have been vilified over the years, some even ending up in jail, when it seems based on this that all they were doing was PR.

Meanwhile, I think of honest PR professionals who would never be a party to such tactics. Should they have to share the same classification as a firm that would? Maybe PR firms should be licensed for specialties, with a separate category for thuggery.

Or, again, maybe I'm just naive.

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