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Health care reform: Blaming bad communications doesn't fix bad attitudes

In the spin following the GOP’s game-changing Senate win in Massachusetts, the White House defended its beleaguered health care legislation with an old standard: What we have here is a failure to communicate.

"We lost some of that sense,” President Obama told ABC News, “…of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.”

That talking point has been played down since then.  Good thing, too.  Because it’s terrible PR.

Think of health care reform as a high-profile but controversial consumer product being introduced into a marketplace of extreme fans and critics (like New Coke or Windows Vista).  Blaming a flat-out rejection on poor communications might seem a safe strategy. You hold yourself accountable but without faulting your intentions.

It’s not that your product’s bad. It’s the stupid packaging.

Except a lot of people will instead think you’re saying, “It’s the packaging, stupid.”

Your competitors will do everything they can to promote that interpretation.  As MSNBC points out, administration opponents are literally institutionalizing the word “arrogance” in reference to what Massachusetts voters were complaining about and how the White House has responded to it.

At the core of almost every public’s fear and loathing are legitimate issues.  You may think your smarts in creating a value-added product trumps all that.  They don’t. 

You can’t win people who think you’re dismissing them.  Even if you suspect they don’t have a clue what you’re really selling.
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Here's the full version of the health care reform bill.

For your informed consent, here are all 1,990 pages of the House health care bill with the seemingly impossible but possibly amazing promise, “To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.” 

Or the shorter, more immediately achievable title, “To give Americans a good reason not to watch St. Louis play Detroit this weekend.”
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The most media-driven White House in history

“The Obama administration has started with 14 professionals working in the office of the press secretary—and an astounding 47 more devoted to other aspects of media and message—which is significantly more than the communications staffs of many Fortune 500 corporations. But the media operation goes deeper than that. It’s more central than in any previous administration, and run more knowledgeably.”

-- Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff in The Power and the Story, on the administration’s seemingly total control of the press.

Rhetoric strains forced bond between government and corporate community

The nation's media reports that the corporate world is peeved about what it considers President Obama's devisive anti-corporate rhetoric. As U.S. News and World Report observes, "Another week, another assault on business-as-usual by President Obama. Or is it, as some critics are starting to wonder, an assault on business, as usual?"

Reports Associated Press:

"Relations between President Barack Obama and U.S. corporate leaders have grown tense in recent weeks, with business groups bristling over his sharp rebukes of lenders and multinational companies in particular.

Executives and trade groups that praised Obama's outreach during his post-election transition period say they have felt less welcome since he took office in January. More troubling, they say, are his populist-tinged, sometimes acid critiques of certain sectors, including large companies that keep some profits overseas to reduce their U.S. tax burden."

A U.S. Chamber spokesman called the President's talking points "an oversimplification of the real world." Another trade lobbyist called it the same old cynical, political class warfare.

The White House is throwing out its own doublespeak, explaining that the business community is just freaked out by how shockingly supportive the President really is. Said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in the U.S. News report:

"President Obama has a very good relationship with the business community. He's working extra hard on creating more jobs and stabilizing the financial crisis.... In many ways, he's perhaps surprised the business community with just how moderate he has been and how much he is willing to work with them."

The posturing between Obama and corporate America has always been convoluted. As a candidate, Obama ran anti-corporate campaign ads criticizing CEO compensation. Yet he still raised enormous sums of money from corporate backers including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, National Amusements and Google.

A few months before the election, a Chief Executive poll found that more than 70 percent of all CEOs thought an Obama presidency would be a "disaster."  Yet Business Week reported that corporate leaders gave President Obama "relatively good grades" after his first 100 days. People were still wary on the details, but as the Business Roundtable's president told the magazine: "We're happy with the general outlines of what he's done; things are starting to take hold."

Today's ambivalence between government and business represents tensions that exist within a shotgun marrage unlike anything in history. Taxpayers are now direct stakeholders in the financial and auto industries, and are rapidly becoming the safety net by which the nation's housing, healthcare, energy and even news media industries will be supported while they are transformed. That makes the President of the United States both Commander in Chief and CEO.

We're at the point now, writes Wall Street Journal columnist Gerland Seib, that "it seems almost anachronistic to talk about a divide between government and business."

Perhaps the publicized angst about Obama being anti-business means the honeymoon that never really was is over.  What certain is that corporate PR is going to be more complicated than when all the talk about public-private partnership was mostly just talk.
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Send comments and links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com

Get on President Obama's email update list

Drop a note to WhiteHouse.Gov and you'll be added to President Obama's email blast list.

The White House is using official letter-looking emails -- like this one about health care reform -- "as a way to directly communicate about important issues and opportunities." 

The email letters include links to other White House web sites designed to educate and build support for various administration initiatives.

You can get on the official Obama email updates list by clicking here.
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America's pundit problem

In the aftermath of Wall Street's collapse, experts are pointing to the negative impact of experts.

An Emery University study, for example, asked students to consider making several personal finance decisions.  When those students were given advice from a recognized expert, the decision-making and calculating parts of their brains simply simply shut down.

What makes this really scary is how experts are so often wrong.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recalls how professor Philip Tetlok spent 20 years tracking 82,000 predictions from 284 experts.  Tetlok found that the pundits were only slightly more correct than random guesses.  It didn't matter if they were doctors, politicians, economists or financial advisers.

"Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame - and it was an inverse relationship," Kristof writes.   "The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones.  That had to do with a fault in the media.  Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites.  People who shouted - like, yes, Jim Cramer!"

Will past mistakes mean fewer experts?  Hardly.

Pundits are to mass media what baseballs are to the major league.  They're cheaper than staff researchers or reporters.  They compete for exposure by being available and quotable.

Most importantly, subject-matter authorities are rarely held accountable by the industry that relies on them for content.  Sometimes they're even celebrated for being so wrong.  A few years ago, the Rocky Mountain News profiled a "controversial" aviation consultant who had become an international media darling by giving "colorful" sound bites insisting that Denver International Airport would go bankrupt.  DIA hasn't lost money since it opened in 1995.

The public brain-freeze over pundits is what makes John Stewart's skewering of Mad Money's Jim Cramer so telling.  Mainstream media is full of experts laying blame for the financial crisis.  But it took a comedy show host to publicly chastise one of Wall Street's biggest media celebrities for his part in it.

Indeed, there are partisan watchdogs like the conservative Business & Media Institute and the liberal Media Matters, which recently launched a new website targeting financial news and opinion.  But these groups are politically biased in their criticisms and don't reach nearly an audience like The Daily Show with John Stewart.

But they're among the closest things we have to Consumer Reports Guide to Pundits.  And right now we need all the critical reviews we can get.

At least, that's my expert opinion.
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Photo courtesy Associated Press

Change we can stop talking about now

Change. Change We Can Believe In. The Change We Need.

The word "change" anchored Obama's campaign. Change was the theme, the message, the promise and the deliverable.

Yet the term that defined a candidacy might be less desirable in the lexicon of a president.

In his inauguration speech, President Obama used the word "change" only twice, and both in the same sentence:

"For the world has changed, and we must change with it."

By comparison, Senator Obama said "change" 13 times in his Democratic convention acceptance speech.
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Is bailing out the local newspaper no different than funding the zoo?

Longtime Denver journalist Bill Menezes takes some exception to my disagreement with the idea of having a new statewide sales tax to save the Rocky Mountain News and other failing Colorado newspapers. Writes Bill:

"I generally agree with Steve that it's a bad idea to use taxpayer money to rescue an institution whose local management pretty much has refused to take any public responsibility for its own failure. Having said that, I consider the "government oversight" argument against it to be a red herring. The government already is involved with the operation of the Rocky and the Post via the business structure it administers as the JOA and clearly it has no involvement in the newsroom product.

Further, I'd like anyone who is worried that there would be government interference in the editorial operations of a publicly subsidized newspaper to provide examples of any other local, subsidized institutions where this has occurred at such a granular level. Does the stadium taxing district attempt to tell Pat Bowlen who he can hire as coach? Does local government dictate what the Denver Zoo feeds the gorillas? Does it set the playlist for the CSO or wield veto power over plays that may be scheduled at DCPA venues? I'd be concerned about a lot of things relevant to a newspaper rescue tax, but government involvement in the editorial product isn't one of them."

Given that this is -- I hope -- a rhetorical argument, I appreciate Bill's point about subsidized zoos and stadiums. But I don't think it rationalizes using taxpayer money to "save" a single commercial media outlet under the guise that it has an exclusive relationship to the well-being of an informed citizenry. It doesn't.

Many of the people arguing this bailout idea are the same folks who point to "new media" as the channel by which millions and millions of Americans brought about the most historic political transformation in U.S. history. As much as I hope the Rocky stays in business, this still would have happened if Denver had been a one-newspaper town.

I don't think you can minimize the government oversight issue, either. Bailing out a daily newspaper isn't the same thing as building a football stadium or arts complex.

Imagine how more convoluted the separation of church-and-state would be when you've got a commercial enterprise newspaper that must inject the interests of taxpayers along with the already competing interests of advertising profits and journalism ethics.  Taxpayers and their advocates will put every word of every day's paper in context to how they believe they agreed to bankroll a newsroom full of subsidized employees who decide what news to cover and how.

To say government won't interfere denies who government works for. You can't say on one hand that taxpayers must buy out a newspaper so they're informed, and then say on the other hand that they won't exercise authority when they become so.

My two cents.
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Stop the presses. Should taxpayers bail out their local newspaper, too?

Former Denver spokesman and Frontier Airlines communications director Andrew Hudson is arguing for a statewide sales tax to save the Rocky Mountain News and other Colorado newspapers.

The 150-year-old Rocky was put up for sale in December by its owner, E. W. Scripps Company in a prelude to shutting it down, leaving the struggling Denver Post as the city's only major daily.

Writes Andrew on his Denver PR Jobs website:

"A newspaper is a critical part of our state's economic engine. The loss of the Rocky Mountain News as a source of information could be quantified as an economic loss to this community in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only does the newspaper help to promote our state to the world, its reach and power provides readers and businesses with critical information that drives transactional and investment decisions.

A newspaper creates an important level of transparency that helps to keep government and elected leaders accountable and honest. However, without any type of objective scrutiny of government spending, abuse of power, elected officials' positions on issues, and investigations into overall government conduct, it puts the average citizen and a community at large at a serious disadvantage. Citizens rely on this level of scrutiny.

For example, a recent Rocky Mountain News article by reporter Kevin Flynn exposed the City of Denver for failing to determine if the red-light camera enforcement was actually reducing red-light running by motorists. While red-light cameras are quite a lucrative exercise for the City, we have no idea if it is actually solving a public safety problem as promised. Will critical articles such as this be read by a community on a blog? Will bloggers attend boring zoning committee meetings or City Council meetings? Will they attend press conferences?"

My friend Andrew makes some heartfelt points. There are many cultural and civic reasons to support the survival of a major daily newspaper, especially one with the Rocky's heritage.

But they don't justify his proposal for a taxpayer bailout, or for having a government-appointed commission oversee a newspaper that is supposed hold government accountable.

The potential closing of the Rocky Mountain News represents the market-driven loss of a delivery product, not the wholesale elimination of news and journalism. It's a very long stretch to conclude that we're all one newspaper failure away from an information anarchy of lazy amateur bloggers.

Who's to say that the remaining Denver newspaper might not do a better job at serving the community? Or some other?

More importantly, why would business and government watchdog reporting be any less likely, complete or impactful just because the majority of media consumers choose to read, listen to or watch such information through an online news site as opposed to via a print edition? Or news weeklies, magazines, television, radio, social media, RSS feeds, email alerts, podcasts and every integrated combination of technologies we haven't even thought of yet?

There are plenty of reasons to believe that the unlimited space and connectedness of always-on, Internet-driven media ultimately make our institutions more transparent, not less.

A "newspaper bailout tax" is unlikely, of course. You'd have a better chance convincing taxpayers to buy the Denver Broncos than the city's newspaper. But it's interesting to read the many reactions posted to Andrew's proposal for a couple of reasons.

One, because it underscores the emotion and complexity of the transformation to a new media economy.

And two, because this entire conversation wouldn't be happening without the same Internet responsible for killing the newspaper that some people think we are obligated to save.
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• Scatterbox:  Help save the Rocky Mountain News
• The Canadian Journalism Project  |  Keep the presses rolling: Crisis spurs discussion
  

Trend-spotters say the darndest things

The conviction of politico Tony Rezko and criminal charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have again made "Chicago-machine style politics" synonymous with corruption.

Which makes you wonder what prompted the  PRSA Tactics newspaper to include this happy 2009 prediction from "trendspotter" Marian Salzman:

"Barack Obama's hometown of Chicago has become the focus of intense global interest.  Its combination of heartland values and big-city, multiethnicity vibrancy could make it the epicenter of a more resourceful and responsible era."

Since 1971, some one thousand thousand Illinois politicians and business people have been convicted of public corruption.  This includes 30 Chicago aldermen, three Illinois governors, several city clerks and treasurers, suburban mayors, appointed government officials, judges, lawyers, insurance executives and trucking company owners.
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