Beware Barney Blarney: Three reasons the race to succeed Barney Frank is unpredictable

Congressman Barney Frank’s decision to retire at the end of his current term has set in motion a spectacle of political punditry that should vastly improve the sale of hip boots at Cabela’s during the course of the next 11 months.

Hundreds of reporters, consultants and political operatives will be eager to tell you how the race to succeed Frank will turn out; after all, politics is a professional sporting industry in Massachusetts.

Here are three reasons why you should keep your own counsel:

Light Rays on Saturdays: Mitt's Hair and a Modern Definition of PR

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was at the center of two big stories this week that demonstrate how political communications has devolved into something resembling professional wrestling.  

With President Obama visiting New Hampshire, Romney bought a tiny bit of local TV to air an ad attacking Obama’s handing of the economy. Romney aides also delivered the commercial to reporters. One little problem – the featured Obama quote was really a paraphrase of something an aide to Senator John McCain said during the 2008 campaign. Romney and his aides shrugged off the deluge of criticism.

Misleading and unethical, the ad had little to do with hurting Obama – it’s no secret the economy is his weak spot. It was primarily designed to earn Romney the “See, I can be a tough guy” merit badge among the GOP influencers who have yet to embrace his candidacy. Democrats may use the ad to bolster their attack on Romney as a cold, valueless, flip-flopping, say-anything-to-win candidate.

The other big Mitt story? One thousand words on his hair on the front page of Friday’s New York Times.  The Times even interviewed the “barrel-chested, bald Italian immigrant” barber, who “agreed to share some of the secrets” of Mitt’s hair. Are you ready to be blown away? No dye. No product. And, sometimes Romney trims it himself.

How many of you are saying: “Wow. I honestly don’t give a flying follicle about this?”

Media Coverage of Occupy Wall Street: Bigger Stories Obscured

The media has nothing to be ashamed of in its coverage of the Occupy movement.  The question now is whether they will start digging into the complex issues that have been obscured by the headline-grabbing civil disobedience.

Sunday’s New York Times "Media & Advertising" section featured not one but two different articles about the difficulties of satisfying everyone when it comes to reporting on the ongoing multi-city, mass sit-in for economic fairness.

Occupy Boston seen from The Fed.

The first story examined criticism at both ends of the political spectrum – and the protestors themselves – of how journalists have portrayed Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy nodes active in cities throughout the country. “Lacking a list of demands or recognized leaders, the Occupy movement has at times perplexed the nation’s media outlets,” the story concluded.

Nearby in the same section, Times reporter David Carr analyzed what might lie ahead for the movement once its tent-city encampments are dismantled.  “In addition to the 5 W’s — who, what, when, where and why — the media are obsessed with a sixth: what’s next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll forward,” Carr wrote.

Those stories followed a November 13 column in which Times Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane surveyed journalism experts for ideas about how to improve the paper’s coverage of “the seemingly formless mass of a movement that pointedly eschews leadership and formal demands.”

Brisbane’s best idea was buried amid a lot of hand-wringing: “In its future coverage, The Times should examine how these issues are changing America, giving rise to movements like Occupy Wall Street and its ideological counterpart, the Tea Party.”

Does Congress Care About Its Reputation Management Problem?

It’s not easy for an elected body to manage its reputation.

The actions of a few can reflect badly on the whole. Keeping members on the same page and moving in the same direction takes smart leadership. Ideological and personality schisms have to be respected and bridged. There are very few decisions that vast majorities agree with, so making a decision makes enemies.  

Even with those excuses in mind, the current Congress has set new standards for failed reputation management. The most recent New York Times/CBS News poll gave Congress single digit favorability – a historic low. A Washington Post chart shows that impressions of our legislative branch have sunk well below those of lawyers, banks, President Nixon during Watergate, and even Communism.

A horrifying column in today’s New York Times demonstrates exactly why.

Former star political reporter Thomas D. Edsall, now a journalism professor at Columbia University, explains that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (aka the “Super Committee”) is failing to reach an agreement not because it can’t, but because failure would produce a more desirable political outcome.

Twitter Is Becoming A Main Course In The Modern Media Food Chain

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is ordinarily an incredible resource for understanding modern media trends, but its most recent study asked the wrong questions about how mainstream media outlets use Twitter.

Pew’s content analysis found that the top news organizations use Twitter predominantly as a one-way promotional tool for their own content, meaning that the media’s institutional Twitter accounts churn out links that take followers back to news and features stories, videos, photos, etc. This confirms the obvious.

More and more of us get our news, especially breaking news, delivered online.  Busier schedules and more multitasking have fueled a greater reliance on mobile devices – the best vehicle for Twitter. At the same time, with print circulation and broadcast viewership declining amid a growing online buffet of news and information, the largest media outlets are working hard to attract empowered, wireless consumers.

Where Pew fell well short of its normally high standards was with its deduction that “individual reporters were not much more likely than the news institutions to use Twitter as a reporting tool or as a way to share information produced by those outside their own news organization.”

Not only was the data sample too small -- an examination of the Twitter feeds of 13 individual journalists – but the conclusion flies in the face of the reality that PR professionals see every day on their own feeds.

Denial Is A River: What Were Joe Amendola & Jerry Sandusky Thinking?

It's hard to imagine alleged Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky as the victim of anything except perhaps a mental illness. Today, he is clearly the victim of some bad legal and communications advice.

Sandusky and his attorney, Joe Amendola, last night gave an exclusive interview to NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams. Sandusky needed to do something to anchor himself against a rushing river of bad facts and anger, but today he is further downstream.

Sandusky acknowledged showering with young boys and touching their legs. He said he “horsed around." He said he "enjoys" young people but denied being a pedophile. Amendola said he expects several alleged shower victims to deny that his client assaulted them, telling CNN: “Jerry Sandusky is a big, overgrown kid. He’s a jock. The bottom line is jocks do that. They kid around. They horse around."

It's doubtful that many 67-year-old “jocks” will verify that touching young boys on their thighs in the shower as commonplace. Not only do most reasonable men and women find Sandusky’s admissions disturbing, but even the conduct he acknowledged might constitute a criminal misdemeanor.

Sandusky and Amendola had hoped their media appearance would work to give the jury pool another side of the story, portraying the hulking former linebacker somewhat sympathetically and offering hints at a credible explanation for the disgusting accusations against him.

It didn’t work. The decision was an incredible miscalculation. The weight of the allegations is massive. The intensity of the media scrutiny is white hot. There are shoes left to drop, including more alleged victims coming forward to authorities.

Light Rays On Saturdays

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry did the only thing he could do to overcome his worst-yet debate embarrassment. He joined in the fun. 

Perry’s appearance on The David Letterman Show, where he narrated a self-deprecating Top Ten list, was a very smart move. He also received a helping hand from health and science influencers, like the New York Times health columnist Tara Parker Pope, who quickly generated an expert analysis recounting other famous brain freezes and noting that “countless memory lapses like these happen to the rest of us every day.”

“When all goes well, the medial temporal lobe acts like a library’s card catalog system, pointing to the locations in the brain where different parts of the memory are stored and allowing the memory to be recalled. But in Mr. Perry’s case, it appears that something went wrong, and the search turned up the wrong card or looked in the wrong place or was interrupted,” Pope explained in her immensely popular style.

Now if she can just explain why Perry seems to walk and gesture in unusual ways.

The standards for what citizens expect from those who seek to serve as President of the United States have been slowly decomposing for decades now. We’ve come a long way since flawed candidates, like Gary Hart, would either immediately quit in shame or face automatic expulsion over character issues.

Whether or not you like Perry’s politics, he converted a potentially devastating flub into positive, empathetic exposure.  An upcoming $1 million national ad buy, if it’s distinctive, could reinforce his staying power.

How PR Can Help Penn State Now

People would be surprised to know how often PR counselors act as management consultants.

Often, those within a complex organization are too close to a situation or too insulated to see what needs to be done, what could been done, and how internal and external stakeholders might react. The blinders can be even thicker when the organization is in crisis. So, smart executives seek the advice of outside communications professionals -- not just for research, ideas and words, but for common sense and perspective.

As the trustees at Penn State prepare to meet today, let's hope hiring great PR counselors is on the agenda.

Penn State’s ability to do the right thing at this moment is suspect and will be for the foreseeable future. It lost its credibility on that score when it failed to act against Jerry Sandusky for more than a decade. It even failed to act seven months ago when a Pennsylvania sports columnist predicted what has now engulfed the University.

Penn State’s need for PR is not just a matter of credibility; it’s a demand of logistics.

Rupert Murdoch & News Corp: Reputation Irony

For a short time in July, it looked as if media mogul Rupert Murdoch would go the way of Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Moammar Gadhafi of Libya — another dictatorial strong man forced into a shameful exit by a popular uprising.

In my days as a reporter for the Boston Herald, a Murdoch-owned tabloid, that’s the good-versus-evil slant that I might have put on the story — the jowly, leering tyrant stooped like a vulture over the body of a saintly, murdered 13-year-old girl eagerly trading her blood for profits, an outraged nation mobilizing to demand truth and justice as the sordid details of the scandal spilled forth.

After all, stark contrast sells. Given numerous flavor choices, people are least likely to buy the most vanilla of them. Months removed from its summertime peak, the News of the World drama holds leadership lessons for our profession regarding crisis and reputation management. You can read my take on the News Corp. saga in the latest issue of The Public Relations Strategist magazine.

The Lazy Lob: Buttery Communication Goodness

Many intelligent people do not read the Wall Street Journal because they despise its owner (Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.), disagree with the paper’s editorial perspective, and/or get bored with hardcore business news. Politics aside, they should rethink their position. The news content in “Marketplace” and “Greater New York” offers excellent reporting, writing and analysis. The lifestyle and trend pieces in “Personal Journal” and “Review” are offbeat and intriguing. Joe Queenan’s column today (“Some Expert Advice: Get A Clue”) is just one example. Plus, reading the WSJ is a good way to monitor the conservative intelligentsia.

Today’s New York Times features an interesting story about efforts to thaw the icy relationship between former President Bill Clinton and President Obama (“With New Book, Bill Clinton Makes New Bid to Bolster Obama.”) Clinton is intensely frustrated with the current administration’s obvious failure to effectively communicate the vision, principles and successes of its policies. So he wrote their narrative himself. (“Narrative” is a snotty word for “story.”) Ya gotta love Big Bill. If it wasn’t for a constitutional amendment, he could run for President right now and beat all comers, including the incumbent in his own party. Listen to him Mr. President.

Yesterday’s Bending Light post mentioned Andrea Estes, a colleague during my time as an editor and reporter at the Boston Herald. She was vastly underappreciated there, despite excellent sources and clean writing. When the Boston Globe hired Andrea, she restarted her career back at the bottom of the caste system, covering suburban events. She is now one of the most respected (read: feared) journalists in the city. Take a look at this Google search. Her name has been on every big scandal story for the past five years. The best thing about Andrea?  She is invisible. You won’t find her picture. She has no social media footprint. She is not a public speaker. But you’d be a fool to ignore her call or e-mail.  

Herman Cain's Hard Lesson in Issues Management

After I had covered the Gennifer Flowers news conference in New York in January 1992, the Boston Herald sent me and Andrea Estes to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a week to see what we could else we could dig up on then-presidential candidate, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

I came back with a story about Clinton’s honorary membership in what appeared to be a whites-only country club. The Clinton campaign did not seem surprised when I called them for comment, and brushed off Clinton’s role as nothing more than “playing privileges.”

The story ran on page one of the Herald and the Associated Press picked it up. Within two weeks, it had found its way into The New York Times. (There was no worldwide Internet in those days. The only things that spread virally were illnesses, gossip and bad jokes.)

By then, however, Clinton’s famous "War Room" had acted. The candidate apologized succinctly and his campaign defused the issue by rallying prominent African-American friends and supporters.

Nineteen years later, watching presidential candidate Herman Cain flounder under the weight of sexual harassment allegations, you begin to wonder how many scandals it will take for anyone to heed the basic rules of engagement in issues management and crisis communications.