McClellan and the Ethics of Spin

[groovedaddy]

John Stodder has written the most interesting commentary I've seen from within the public relations industry about former Bush administration press secretary Scott McClellan's new book. It's interesting in part because Stodder is an interesting figure. For those who remember this sort of thing, he was one of two executives at the Fleishman-Hillard PR firm (the other was Douglas Dowie) who were convicted in May 2006 of multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud in a scheme to overbill the city of Los Angeles for public relations consulting services.

Notwithstanding the verdict, Stodder continues to maintain his innocence and remains free while he appeals the conviction. Apparently this has left him with some time to contemplate ethical matters, and he disapproves of what he sees in McClellan, whose "disloyalty strikes me as most amoral." Moreover, Stodder worries that McClellan's criticism of his former boss "is undermining whatever remaining credibility the PR industry can claim for itself."

Stodder's lengthy commentary goes after every turn of phrase that he can manage to criticize in McClellan's book. For example, he devotes several paragraphs to complaining about McClellan's use of the term "news cycle," which he derides as a "buzzword" and "a particularly irrelevant metaphor" in today's age of 24-hour news. This, of course, is mostly a digression from the real substance in McClellans's critique of White House propaganda, but Stodder manages to see it as evidence that "McClellan's view of the political media climate ... is strangely out of date." (This careful parsing of language comes from someone who professes outrage at the way his own words were supposedly misinterpreted in court. For example, the prosecution presented an email from Dowie to Stodder, asking if they could "pad" a bill by $30,000. Stodder wrote back that this was "more than the system could bear" but that they could "slip through another $15k without incurring too much more scrutiny." Stodder and Dowie would now have us believe that the prosecution misconstrued these words to suggest that they were padding bills and trying to avoid scrutiny.)

Stodder concludes that McClellan's worst offense is the example he is setting for other people in the PR profession.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/7416

[sam sarrha]

1. SOOO TIRED OF THE WORD SPIN.. a lie is a lie is a lie, by anyother word , its spin, just propaganda

j