The undeniable facts are that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. After the hurricane 80% of the geographical area of the city was flooded as a result of hurricane protection levees and flood walls failing and being overtopped. After the catastrophe, the media ran many news accounts critical of the Corps’ design and construction of the hurricane protection levees and flood walls. Eventually even members of the Corps admitted failings regarding the facilities.
Subsequently, the Corps hired the public relations firm, Outreach Process Partners (OPP) to assist them with media relations. An Associated Press story suggests the Corps’ contract with OPP has a value of $5.2 million.
As part of the PR firm’s own business development efforts, it published a description of its work for the Corps. In this description, the PR firm claimed that it “fosters strategic relationships with media outlets that result in more accurate and balanced stories.”
OPP then claimed that “OPP’s media support has been a fundamental part of the transition from typically negative news coverage to more neutral and positive news coverage. They then included a graphic showing how many negative news stories about the Corps had appeared before their efforts and how few appeared after they began helping the Corps.
Sandy Rosenthal and Levees.org publicly criticized the PR contract as wasteful spending. Rosenthal and Levees.org have frequently criticized the Corps since Hurricane Katrina.
The Corps has responded that OPP was not hired to engage in news spin and OPP quickly changed their web site to remove the claims of changing the news coverage from negative to positive.
The controversy has been covered by various media outlets including the Huffington Post’s article entitled, Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans: Buying Advice or Spin? Other news accounts include articles from CBS News and the Associated Press.
Whenever someone is speaking to me about public policy and they claim to be “giving me the straight information” without “news spin” and they use words like “fair,” “accurate,” or ”balanced” to describe their news accounts, I generally conclude that the speaker is trying to spin me like a top. Some other phrases that put me on guard are “telling it like it is” and ”common sense” accounts of things. In my opinion, all of these are code words for someone about to try to persuade the listener to see the world as they do. The training and formulation that goes into these efforts is what public relations firms do.
I guess the Corps figured if they were going to try to persuade the public to see events as they saw them that they needed $5.2 million worth of training and advice on how to do that. Admittedly, law firms including my own and their private clients seek training and advice from public relations firms all of the time. Of course, they are not generally spending taxpayer dollars. Apparently, however, the Corps is not prohibited from hiring a public relations firm to help it and in this case the Corps did hire such a firm to much apparent success according to OPP’s news story graphic (at least until now).
Thank you, Erich for blogging on this, what we feel, is an important distinction. That this is taxpayer money and an awful lot of it.
While being interviewed by CBS, the reporter told me Levees.org had “asked some good questions and raised some valid points,” and that was why this story received the attention of CBS National News.