Coal Mining Grit

Public relations people are seldom asked to lie, but finding the truth requires the grit of a coal miner.

In large companies, the truth is nearly always scattered across multiple divisions and jealously guarded. Your company may believe in transparency, but up and down the line, facts are often molded to fit someone’s agenda. That’s where the real “spinning” starts.

Marilyn Laurie taught me as much. One of the biggest PR crises of her career had its roots in a massive downsizing designed to impress Wall Street but with little basis in reality. The CFO sent the PR staff off to find out if it would qualify as the biggest downsizing of all time and was bummed out to discover it would only come in fourth after GM, IBM, and Sears.

Still, he pressed on, insisting the headline of the news release had to scream we were eliminating 40,000 jobs. He couldn’t be talked out of it. We knew it was a dog whistle for Wall Street, but if it was true we had no choice but to acknowledge it. We assumed it was.

At first, the news had the desired reaction — the company stock soared. When we logged off our computers in the PR department we thought we had dodged a bullet. But then Pat Buchanan, running in the New Hampshire presidential primary, reloaded his guns. He tapped into people’s economic anxiety and pilloried the company’s CEO for “laying off 40,000 people” while “his stock went up by $5,000,000.”

When Buchanan unexpectedly won the primary, the media jumped on the bandwagon. Newsweek magazine tarred the company’s CEO tarred as a “corporate killer.” The New York Times called him the “personification of greed.” He never recovered from the bad press and it ultimately brought him down.

It was only in the midst of all this that we discovered the original downsizing estimate didn’t take the company’s natural attrition into account. The downsizing would be less than half the size promised.

It was one of the few times Marilyn Laurie accepted someone else’s version of reality as true, proving even the hardiest miners occasionally miss a rich vein of coal. And teaching us all an important lesson.

PR people need to dig for the truth even deeper than all the outsiders following the company.

Read the full story in Marilyn: A Woman In Charge from PRMuseum Press.