Perspective Doctors of spin for pastors of the
flock
By ARTHUR JONES
When a priest becomes a bishop, he
is automatically a D.D. (Doctor of Divinity). Soon, however, the second-ranking
member of a diocese may well be the D.S. -- the Doctor of Spin.
(As an aside, 81of the 300 or so U.S. bishops have earned
doctorates; most from The Catholic University of America; next, from Rome-based
universities; a handful with doctorates from secular establishments, Columbia,
Vienna (Austria), George Washington University, University of Southern
California and Rutgers, etc.)
Spin doctors, however, are operators rather than academics.
These quicksilver-tongued, crisis-managing, public opinion swayers
are now part of the payroll in dioceses from West to East, from Los Angeles to
Long Island, on call in dioceses from Florida (Tampa) to Massachusetts
(Boston), in service to Philadelphia and Santa Rosa, Calif.
Superflack to Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony is Los
Angeles Michael S. Sitrick (billing rates about $350 an hour according to
previously aired contracts). Unlike most of his peers, he has penned a book
(with Allan Mayer) about his work.
Sitricks Spin: How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your
Advantage, opens with a 1995 radio confrontation between a U.S. aircraft
carrier and a Canadian lighthouse off Newfoundlands coast. Others in the
field researched Sitricks story and say it never happened.
Undisturbed, Sitrick subscribes to the Reagan White House
philosophy that image is sometimes as useful as substance. Not as
important, but as useful.
Public relations is an amazing field meant to amaze. Sitrick
mentions in passing Ivy Lee, the public relations man called in by John D.
Rockefeller after Rockefellers militia opened fire on the tents housing
striking workers and their families. And killed more than a dozen of them.
Lee, who later had Rockefeller giving dimes to little boys in the
street, was actually known as Poison Ivy Lee. Sitrick could have
added the name of Albert D. Lasker (see Taken at the Flood), the man who
wrote the book on the 1920s selling of the president.
An editor pal of mine when I was a Forbes writer in New
York City described public relations as the art of the used car salesman
refined for the boardroom. But the board buys the chat instead of the
car.
Public relations people have few illusions about their own public
image, and none about the image of others. They refer to themselves as
practitioners, though Sitrick ratchets that up a couple of notches:
What we do, he says, is not all that different from
practicing law.
Poison Ivy Lee explained public relations as if it had
to do more with spreading good news than countering bad news. When the
Norsemen discovered America, said Lee, they had no compass. Yet the
compass had been invented thousands of years before. When Marie Curie
discovered radium, her achievement was spread throughout the world as rapidly
as cables and wires could carry it. Madame Curies work could have been of
no value to the world if her discovery had been known to her alone.
A far more candid P.R. man was Benjamin Sonnenberg, at his prime
in Manhattan of the 1940s, an artist among flacks. Sonnenberg, asked why he
went into public relations, replied: Because I like to eat melon out of
season. In other words, for the money.
When Sonnenberg bought his Gramercy Park home, he had shelves made
for his first editions. Some shelves werent deep enough. He ordered an
inch cut off the front of the books so all the spines neatly bordered the edge.
In P.R, appearances are everything.
Why does this matter to NCR readers? On the sex abuse
mishandling, some California parishioners asked in a letter to their regional
bishop, How did we get to this point? They later insisted, No
amount of public relations spin or legal posturing will fix
this. (On the Internet, one wit wrote that some dioceses dont need
P.R. men, they need exorcists.)
But the question is valid: If a doctor -- even of divinity -- is
one who must first do no harm, and if a bishop is a pastor to the
flock, how indeed did we get to the point that bishops need spin doctors to
deliver their message to the world?
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address
is ajones96@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, June 21,
2002
|