Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  5

  Packaging the Beast

  “All is not right in the kingdom,” King Corporate sighed as he sat upon his royal throne in the Great Hall of Commerce. . . . “I need someone who will make the town criers stop gossiping and saying those awful things. We need to improve the Queen’s image and get the townspeople to sing her praises. I need someone who will prove that the moat water is harmless and that these old people are getting sick because they are old.”

  —“A Fable,” from the website of the Karwoski & Courage PR firm1

  You are widely seen as being a bad actor. . . . How do you move from being a bad actor to being seen as a good actor, as a good guy?” Peter Sandman asked, pacing as he addressed the audience of 400 public relations and mine managers from Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.

  Billed as the star attraction for the Minerals Council of Australia’s 1998 Annual Environmental Workshop, Sandman was posing a question that the Australian mining industry had been asking itself with increasing urgency. The industry had spent millions of dollars on failed PR and advertising campaigns to improve its reputation. Now Sandman, an affable “risk communication” consultant, was delivering his recipe for success.

  Sandman began by ticking off the reasons for the industry’s falling public image: debate over the role that the Rio Tinto mine played in sparking civil war on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea; the dumping of mine tailings in a Papua New Guinea river; the collapse of a tailings dam at another mine; and the push by one company to build a uranium mine in a national park against the wishes of the traditional Aboriginal owners. “There is a growing sense that you screw up a lot, and as a net result it becomes harder to get permission to mine,” Sandman said. The solution, he advised, lay in finding an appropriate “persona” for the industry.

  One option, he said, was to present the industry as a “romantic hero . . . which basically says, ‘Well, the critics are wrong. I am not a bad actor. I’m terrific. The mining and minerals industry is what made the world the wonderful place that it is.” He noted, however, that this approach had already failed when it was used as a basis for the mining industry’s TV advertisements.

  The next option, he suggested, would be to portray industry as a “misunderstood victim. . . . You feel you are David and [environmentalists] are Goliath.” But this approach was equally unlikely to succeed. “No one thinks you are David,” he said. “You look like Goliath, especially in Australia. ‘Misunderstood victim’ doesn’t play very well.”

  A third option would be to present the industry as a “team player.” However, Sandman told the miners, “You can’t get from ‘bad actor’ to ‘team player’ without pausing at some other image. As a characteristic of human nature, I don’t think people can go from thinking you are bad guys to thinking you are good guys, without pausing somewhere in the middle.”

  One intermediate position, he suggested, is the role of “reformed sinner,” which “works quite well if you can sell it. . . . ‘Reformed sinner,’ by the way, is what John Brown [of British Petroleum] has successfully done for his organization. It is arguably what Shell has done with respect to Brent Spar. Those are two huge oil companies that have done a very good job of saying to themselves, ‘Everyone thinks we are bad guys. . . . We can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realized we were bad guys and we are going to be better.’ . . . It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys after you have spent awhile in purgatory.”

  For the Australian mining industry, however, Sandman thought that even “reformed sinner” would be a “tough sell,” because “the public is rather skeptical when companies say they have reformed.”

  Fortunately, there was one more “middle” role that the industry could adopt on its path to salvation. “There is a fifth image that I think works by far the best,” he said, “and that is the ‘caged beast.’ What is the persona of this ‘caged beast’? Useful, perhaps even indispensable, but dangerous. This is the image I would recommend to you. If you want to come back from ‘bad actor’ to ‘team player,’ the easiest path back is to make a case that you would continue to be a bad actor if you could, but you can’t, because the cage works.”

  Why should the industry portray itself so negatively? Because, Sandman explained, the “caged beast” was a marketable image that at least would convey the idea that the industry was no longer harmful. “You are behaving much better, not because you want to, not because you have become the Mother Teresa of the mining companies, but because nongovernmental organizations have been successful, regulators have been successful, your neighbors have been successful, the entire society has been successful in persuading you at least that you will make more dollars if you reform.

  “You have two basic postures,” Sandman advised. “Either you are free to rape and pillage as you want to, but fortunately you don’t have the taste for it. Or you have a taste for it and you might continue to rape and pillage if you could, but fortunately you can’t get away with it anymore,” he said. “I believe the second is true, and I am certain the second is salable. I can’t imagine why you keep claiming the first except that it nurtures your self-esteem, it reduces your outrage. Once again, whose outrage do you want to mitigate? The critics’ or yours? Do you want to get even or get rich?”

  Environmentalism in Moderation

  Sandman’s candid advice may seem unusual, but some of the largest companies in the world view him as a risk communications expert and pay big bucks—between $650 and $1,200 per hour—for his analysis. His clients have included the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, the U.S. Department of Energy in connection with the proposed high-level nuclear waste dump in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on radon testing in houses and home testing for lead. What kind of clients would he turn away? “I wouldn’t work to develop risk communication strategies to keep tobacco sales high,” he says. “I have never been asked to work for the handgun industry, but if asked I suspect I’d say no. Now that I think about it, I might even work for the tobacco industry if they were prepared to come clean. There are a few specific companies that I believe have behaved so dishonorably—killing Karen Silkwood comes to mind—that I doubt I would work for them unless they were prepared to come clean.”2

  In style and even in substance, Sandman defies many PR industry stereotypes. Formerly a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, he works from a small office in Newton, Massachusetts. In an industry dominated by big companies, he adamantly refuses to let his one-person company get any bigger. He is a prolific writer, describes himself as a “moderate” environmentalist, and works on retainer to the Environmental Defense Fund. He is scathingly critical of manipulative PR techniques and, unlike many PR people, talks candidly about his strategies and tactics. Ask a straight question, and more often than not you’ll get a frank answer.

  Scratch the surface, however, and you can find attitudes that are remarkably similar to the rationalizations of conventional spin doctors. Take, for example, the case of Shell’s collaboration with the military dictatorship in Nigeria, where military repression aimed at the indigenous Ogoni people has helped facilitate Shell’s extraction of natural gas from Ogoni lands. When playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa became a leader for the Ogoni people, he was arrested by the country’s military dictatorship. Following a trial before a military tribunal, Saro-Wiwa and seven other Ogoni activists were executed by hanging in 1995.

  Sandman sighs when asked if Shell deserved the international condemnation it received followed the killings. “Oh boy, is that hard,” he says. “I think the outrage was absolutely legitimate. I also think that Shell had nothing it could have done.” While acknowledging the Ogoni grievances as “largely justified,” Sandman characterizes Saro-Wiwa as the “Tom Paine” of the Ogoni and describes their campaign as an a
rmed rebellion. “Though Saro-Wiwa was not armed . . . he was their pamphleteer,” he says. “Some of the people with whom he was executed were soldiers in this rebellion.”

  Setting aside the question of whether people like Thomas Paine deserve to be killed, the facts themselves in Sandman’s rationalization are strongly disputed by Andy Rowell, a Britain-based freelance writer who has monitored Shell’s activities since 1992. “Sandman’s views are typical of a corporate spin doctor relying on information from a client. They bear no relation to the truth about the events which actually occurred in Nigeria,” says Rowell, who is the author of numerous articles on the subject as well as the book Green Backlash. “Sandman’s story is not what happened, but what Shell wants us to believe happened,” Rowell says. “It is a virtual reality, which has been worked out in PR offices in Europe. . . . The Ogoni struggle was a non-violent struggle for ecological and social justice. It was not an armed rebellion. All they were demanding was an end to the double standards of the oil industry that had devastated their environment, and a greater share of the oil wealth that was drilled from under their land. The Ogoni suffered a brutal backlash. Over 2,000 were killed, 30,000 made homeless, and countless others were raped and tortured by the Nigerian military, which received logistical and financial support from Shell.”3

  Shell is Nigeria’s largest foreign investor, earning an estimated $312 million a year in profits from its oil operations there. Its high-pressure pipelines crisscross the Niger Delta where the Ogoni live, emitting air and noise pollution as well as bright flames of light, sometimes as close as 100 meters from Ogoni houses. Massive oil spills and unlined waste pits from company operations have also contributed to the devastation of the region.

  Sandman’s claim that Shell was powerless to prevent the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa also repeats the official company line. “Some campaigning groups say we should intervene in the political process,” Shell stated around the time of the execution. “But even if we could, we should never do so. Politics is the business of governments and politicians. The world where companies use their economic influence to prop up or bring down governments would be a frightening and bleak one indeed.”4

  Rowell and other observers familiar with Shell’s massive presence in Nigeria say that reality belies the talk about nonintervention. When local Ogoni communities began organizing in 1990, Shell in fact sent a letter asking the Nigerian government to “urgently provide us with security protection.” The government sent in its notorious Mobile Police Force, whose actions included the massacre of 80 people in the village of Umuechem in 1991. In 1993, the growing opposition to Shell culminated in a 300,000-person mass rally, and Shell was forced to suspend its operations in the Niger Delta. That same year, General Sani Abacha took control of the country and began a vigorous persecution of the protesters, killing more than 2,000 people. Internal memos from Nigerian security forces document Shell’s support of the Nigerian military, including payments to soldiers engaged in what one memo described as “ruthless military operations . . . undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence.” Military tactics included “wasting operations” (killings) coupled with “psychological tactics” and the “restriction of unauthorized visitors, especially those from Europe to the Ogoni.”5

  “Shell is involved in Nigerian politics up to their neck,” said Ken Saro-Wiwa’s younger brother, Dr. Owens Wiwa. “If they had threatened to withdraw from Nigeria unless Ken was released, he would have been alive today.” Wiwa recounted his own personal meetings with Brian Anderson, the head of Shell in Nigeria, on three separate occasions during the months leading up to the executions. “Each time I asked him to help get my brother and others out,” Wiwa said. “He said he would be able to get Ken and the others freed if we stopped the protest campaign abroad. I was very shocked. Even if I had wanted to, I didn’t have the power to control the international environmental protests.”6

  Calculating Outrage

  As the Nigeria example suggests, Sandman tends to accommodate himself to his clients’ views, but this does not mean that he merely tells them what they want to hear. As a specialist in what he calls “outrage management,” he tells companies that they have to change their behavior, at least on the surface, if they want to win public acceptance.

  Sandman’s theories have been programmed into Outrage, a software package designed to assist companies in predicting and managing the anger of “stakeholders” affected by corporate actions. The Outrage software sells for $3,000 a copy or $48,000 for a worldwide license. A demonstration version is also available, which provides a revealing look at the limits of Sandman’s approach to corporate enlightenment. The demo offers a hypothetical sample “situation definition” that lays out the following scenario: “Our factory in the South Side neighborhood has long had visible air emissions, sometimes very thick. The poor, minority residents, with whom we have very little relationship, recently began organizing to do something about the problem, maybe even shut us down.” The demo then leads users through the steps needed to track and categorize people as allies, neutrals, or opponents. Among the sample “opponents,” it lists names including “S.S. Latino Assn.,” “Mrs. Charles,” “City Air Quality Board,” “Sierra Club,” “Greenpeace,” “South Side Elementary School,” and “nearest neighbors.”

  “For obvious reasons, we are also interested in how much power each important stakeholder can bring to bear,” the demo explains. It invites users to use a fairly crude but effective formula that maps the overlap between “passion” and “power” among stakeholders. Depending on how they rank in these two areas, the company can choose one of four strategies: “deflect, defer, dismiss, or defeat.” Stakeholders with power but no passion should be “deflected.” Distract them, change the subject, or just wait them out until their attention wanders elsewhere. People with passion but no power, on the other hand, can be “defeated.” Sure they care, but can they do anything about it? And people with neither passion nor power are easier still. Just “dismiss” them. The one occasion when real reform is necessary, Sandman says, is when dealing with people who have both high passion and high power. Those people are “a force to reckon with,” and the company will eventually have to “defer” to their demands—“one way or another, to one extent or another.”

  In most cases, Sandman believes that the public inaccurately perceives the level of hazard and risk associated with a company’s activities. Where the public and the experts disagree, he thinks the experts are usually right. “The most usual situation,” he says, is that “the company isn’t doing a lot of damage, but is acting like a jerk: unresponsive, contemptuous, even dishonest. The company thinks that because it isn’t doing a lot of damage, it is entitled to act like a jerk. The public thinks that because the company is acting like a jerk, it must be doing a lot of damage.”

  This analysis suggests that rather than focusing on real hazards or harm to the public, companies should focus their public relations attention on perceptions of process. Does the public think the company is “responsive” or “unresponsive”? Is it “honest” or “lying”? Do decisions that affect the community seem “voluntary” or “coerced”? Is the company seen as doing something “natural” or “industrial”? “Familiar” vs. “exotic”? “Fair” vs. “unfair”? Answer these questions, Sandman says, and you are well on your way to managing public outrage. In order to stop seeming like jerks, companies should adopt a posture of apologetic humility in their public communications. “Acknowledge your prior misbehavior,” he advises—within certain limits. “I don’t chiefly mean things you have done that nobody knows you have done and when we find out you will go to jail,” he adds. “If there are any of these, I urge you to seek legal counsel before you seek communication counsel. I’m talking about negative things on the public record. . . . Should you keep talking about them or is it enough that you have revealed them once? The argument I want to make is that you should keep talking about them incessantly. You should wallow in them.
”

  The reasoning behind this strategy of public humility is encapsulated in a formula that Sandman has invented and which is now widely quoted within the public relations industry. Humility helps reduce public outrage, he explains, and public outrage can be as big a threat to corporate profits as any actual hazard. “Risk,” he says, “equals hazard plus outrage.”

  This deceptively simple formula has become a staple in PR industry discussions of risk communications. It has been adopted as gospel by leading practitioners such as James Lindheim at Burson-Marsteller and Thomas Buckmaster, chairman and general manager of the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton. By understanding that risk equals hazard plus outrage, Buckmaster says, risk communicators can overcome the fear and hostility of “grassroots members, stakeholders and the public at large.” The “irrational” factor of outrage, he says, “makes it impossible to teach anyone anything—when they are afraid. . . . Once people are outraged, they don’t listen to hazard statistics . . . don’t use numerical risk comparisons.” In fact, he says, “managing the outrage is more important than managing the risk.”7