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Reporters Overrun Media With 'Desire to Destroy' Ronald Kessler The media have become overrun with reporters with "political agendas or huge ambitions and an almost sexual desire to destroy a target," according to Eric Dezenhall, the most prominent crisis manager in the country.
Dezenhall, who first began representing companies and celebrities in 1987, said that the media have spun out of control.
"Twenty years ago, a crisis was somebody tampered with your aspirin," said Dezenhall, CEO of Washington-based Dezenhall Resources. "Now it is an agenda that simply won't let up."
Dezenhall, a former press aide to Ronald Reagan, acknowledged that some stories, like Watergate, are legitimate; and that many reporters practice journalism honestly. He said unfair attacks are not entirely new. For example, in 1992, NBC's "Dateline" hired a consultant who rigged General Motors pickup trucks with igniters so the trucks would burst into flames as cameras filmed them during side-impact tests. But now, Dezenhall told NewsMax, the media engage in witch hunts on a wholesale basis, considering their press credentials "a license to kill." Story Continues Below
In representing clients from celebrities to major oil and drug companies, Dezenhall assesses the accusations facing the client and may conduct additional research using attorneys, media specialists, and other experts. He then advises the client on the best approach.
"If guilty, repent," he wrote in his book "Nail 'Em: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses." "If innocent, attack." He advises clients to determine if the story has legs before firing back. If it does, he said, "Targets must fire back right away."
If "60 Minutes" is doing a story on a client, "We first assess what the story is they want to do, not the story they tell us they want to do," Dezenhall said in an interview. "We sit down with the client and go over that story, assuming the client is the villain. The goal is not to educate ‘60 Minutes' but to get one cogent point across that you want the audience to know and also for the CEO to come across as a decent person who is trying. You won't be able to get your story across. It's not going to happen. It's like being mugged. You're not going to get your money back. You just want to get away alive."
Sheila Hershow, a former ABC producer who is executive vice president of Dezenhall Resources, will often negotiate ground rules. Sometimes they are spelled out in written agreements. If she lets a CEO go on the air, the show must agree not to question him about certain areas. If a show reneged on the agreement, she is prepared to end the interview, but that has never been necessary.
"I won't stand to have a CEO berated for two hours until he finally surrenders some comment that might wind up burying him," Dezenhall said. Because his firm deals with sensitive information about clients' problems, Dezenhall imposes strict confidentiality controls on his 30 employees. But two years ago, a burglar broke into his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington and stole hard drives from two computers. The crime has never been solved.
In his spare time, Dezenhall writes well-reviewed novels. One hero, Jonah Eastman, is an image massager who mixes it up with journalists, politicians, and mobsters from South Jersey, where Dezenhall grew up.
"Years ago, we were dealing with very seasoned journalists," Dezenhall, 43, said. "Even if you disagreed with them, you respected them. Now we are dealing with people who simply want to kill. They have watched ‘All the President's Men,' about Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate investigation, a few too many times. They haven't picked up on the nuance that the two reporters had to prove that stuff. Instead of engaging in careful investigative work, they do drive-by shootings."
Dezenhall contrasts what he does with what public relations firms do.
"The PR industry sells false hope," he said. "The notion that if you can spin it differently, you can get people to like you is not true. I have no evidence that spin works. Karl Rove is known as an evil genius spin doctor. Now with Bush's popularity down, what happened to the genius? Nobody realizes the role that the economic or political environment plays. I think Bush's polls are more a commentary on how people are feeling about current events like gasoline prices."
The good news is that because unfair press attacks are so common, people tune them out.
"Twenty years ago, a ‘Dateline' attack was a major crisis," Dezenhall said. "Now there are so many attacks and diffuse sources that they can go in and out of the news rather quickly."
Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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