How the Sausage Gets Made
When people ask me about what I do. I explain I collect information, and then I analyze it. It sounds good, but I bet a lot of people have no idea what analyze means. Some recent news gave me a good prelude to talk about what I do when I do analysis.
The aggressions of Harvey Weinstein launched the “Metoo movement”, not an awareness of bad acts, but finally, an accountable moment for people like him. So many of these stories, from Weinstein on, were accompanied by reporting that said vulgarity was an open secret, that everyone knew. Everyone knew Harvey Weinstein was a problem. In recent reporting on Weinstein, it was mentioned that two years before the scandal hit, his brother was pleading with him to address his behavior for the sake of their company. Yet, what has also come out, since the first Weinstein article, and especially in the last couple of days, were the things done, or attempted to be done, to squelch the accountability moment. For instance, we learned of the existence of the mysterious Black Cube Firm. This week, the New York Times reported:
The lawyer Lisa Bloom, a prominent victims’ rights attorney, was working behind the scenes with Mr. Weinstein — at a rate of $895 an hour — to quash the journalists’ investigation and thwart his accusers. In a confidential memo to Mr. Weinstein that Ms. Bloom wrote in December 2016, which is reproduced in “She Said,” she offered to help him damage the reputation of one of his accusers, Rose McGowan, and portrayed her background as a victims’s rights advocate as an asset.
“I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them,” Ms. Bloom wrote, before laying out a multistep playbook for how to intimidate accusers or paint them as liars. One of Ms. Bloom’s suggested tactics for undermining Ms. McGowan: “We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”
In 2017, someone said the PR industry was worth $15 billion and expected to grow to $20 billion in three years. How accurate is that number is less the point. We’re talking big business, public relations. Now, a lot of this money, the bulk, is about corporate reporting, SEC filings and all; then, there’s throwing parties, paying off influencers on social media, hosting press conferences. It’s a big pot of money. But some of it. Some of what people get paid to do is “place articles.” I’ve been involved in placing articles. When I worked for Big Firm, we “placed an article” in a local business paper to publicize our niche practice. When I was involved in the local food movement, I arranged for an interview with a Slow Food leader in a major newspaper. Hell, if I could do it, of course Lisa Bloom could do it. The point is, don’t think things show up in the news by accident. It’s not so crazy that Ms. Bloom offered.
It’s not the first time I’ve noodled on this topic. In a blog post at the start of this year, I talked about how various reporters could carry the same event and come across with different facts. In that post, I gave some tactics I and others use to understand the meaning and context behind a news report. The Harvey Weinstein/Lisa Bloom, I’m gonna make Google tell our story, story, reminds us that we need to be skeptical of all the news we gather in our Google, our Bing, our Newspapers.com and our Lexis/Nexis searches.
A couple of weeks ago, another business researcher asked me, what do I look for online. I gave her the classic, Marlon Brando answer, “what’d you got.” Well, maybe I didn’t quite say it that way. What I did say was that I was gonna suck up anything and everything I could when I did my online searches. Still, because I know there are people like Attorney Lisa Bloom out there, a $15 billion and growing PR business out there, I know that there’s an agenda behind a lot of what I find. Knowing that agenda or knowing, at least, that there could be an agenda, is part of what I do when I “analyze”. It’s not enough to find articles. There’s analysis.