If this is a triumph, why do I not like it?
Got pointed to this New York Times story via Xeni Jardin, writing in Boingboing. The gist, if you don’t want to read the whole thing, is this:
“Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.
E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.
The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.
Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.”
Now, I suppose that the folks working on behalf of Genentech likely went back to their client with huge smiles on their faces. LOOK, they likely said, at the results our efforts got for you.
Now, I’m not a lobbyist. But I guess as a PR guy, I’m sort of a kissin’ cousin to what lobbyists do. So why does this story get me down?
It seems to me that this sort of relationship between a company and elected officials isn’t good. I’m sure that members of Congress, like MPs here in Canada, are incredibly busy and pulled in a hundred directions by the issues of the day.
But it just seems to me that when these folks can’t be bothered to even ask their staff to rewrite the talking points delivered to them by someone with an obvious interest and bias, there’s something wrong with the system. Even if the only problem with this is that it makes the system look cheap and shoddy, that’s a big enough problem, I think.
Am I a traitor to PR for saying that? I dunno. I want to advocate for clients, to argue their case, to highlight the most positive attributes. But do I want to see that news release printed verbatim in the paper? Not really. And when it happens, it kinda makes me feel bad.
Am I off-base on this?
Ciao,
Bob.
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The unease is warranted. One should expect public discourse by public officials on the public payroll to be focused on the common interest. Not a sponsored advert for private interests.
This is definitely not good.
I suppose from the pharma's PR perspective it is a win because Roche's message got through. So for them, yes this is success.
However, it's frigthening that elected representative (and/or their staff) wouldn't be a bit more selective in their sources for information. It falls into that fear, I have that all politicians deep down are corrupt.
My speciality is really media relations. I am finding a level of laziness out there now, where news releases are appearing whole (bad comma and all) in the strangest places. I wonder if as a whole, we are just getting really really lazy.
Bob,
I share your uneasy feeling about this. I *think* my angst comes more from the fear and suspicion that parroting the talking points is just the tip of the iceberg; that this really demonstrates the extent to which mega-corps are driving the government agenda and priorities (not the just words).
From a PR perspective it's fair game for a company to provide "suggestions", and in fact the more they can tailor them to different audiences, one could argue the higher the value they're providing.
I know I was quite taken aback when, after agreeing to do a quote for a company, they then sent me a "here's a suggestion". After I recovered, and realized how little I understood of that world at that point, I reverse engineered the key messages they seemed to want to get out and re-wrote it into "Moizer Speak", including only the bits that we had legitimate positive experience. The final version was better (they agreed) and was something I was happy to sign off on.
So getting back to the pharma situation, I guess it depends on whether the "parrots" were vetting and aligned with the notes, or just repeating them without thought.
Thanks for highlighting this.
cheers, Andrew