Cynthia Moxley,
Moxley Communications

The KCDC Case
Despite criticism, public housing officials say they need public relations

Hiring a PR firm may have its benefits, but it can also come with disadvantages—most notably, the perception that you're trying to put something over on people.

Just ask KCDC and The Ingram Group. When it was revealed that Knoxville's public housing authority had signed a two-year, $5,000-a-month contract with Ingram, and a similar contract with the smaller Hall Communications firm, KCDC critics immediately raised questions. Are the contracts an effort to just burnish KCDC's image or to make real improvements in the authority's services?

The latter, insists Art Cate, KCDC's vice president for finance and administration. He says the authority, which manages properties all over Knox County, has historically kept a low profile. The result is that perceptions of public housing have been dictated by crime coverage.

"KCDC is a complicated agency and public housing is a complicated issue," Cate says. "It's more than just drive-bys and gangs and shootings. There's a better story, a bigger story than that out there. It's a story about people trying to become self-sufficient."

A two-year strategic planning effort led to the decision to hire the two PR firms: Ingram as a general communications and planning consultant, and Hall to specifically deal with the HOPE VI redevelopment project in College Homes.

"Improving communications doesn't just mean getting stories on TV or in the paper or on radio," Ingram employee George Korda says.

"KCDC does a lot more than deal with public housing. We're really learning what they do, whether it's land acquisitions or being involved in development or all sorts of things, and that's not widely understood in this community—its impact on everybody around here, not just those folks that live in public housing."

Among other things, Korda says Ingram has helped KCDC deal with the state housing authority in Nashville and anticipate concerns that might be raised by residents, legislators, or the general public.

Attica Scott is a member of the steering committee KCDC put together to ease the transition into HOPE VI. She's been skeptical of the project and is suspicious of the PR contracts.

"I think it's a waste of money," she says. "I don't see it improving much of anything. As a matter of fact, I think relations have gotten worse. People see it as a strong-arm move by KCDC...People aren't listening. They don't trust the PR firms any more than they trust KCDC."

Cate says the PR consultants have pushed the agency to do a better job of talking to all residents, including those with doubts. He sees the contracts as a small investment in fulfilling KCDC's mission.

"We're a multi-faceted agency with probably a $50 million budget, and a lot of people don't have a clue what we do," he says. "We just started to get into a lot of things that we felt like we needed to hire some experts to help us communicate...People ask, 'Golly, do you need to be spending public money to do [PR]?' And I think we do. It's just too important a task, and we've got to do a better job of getting these issues on the table."

—J.F.M.

Public relations rules corporate America—and corporate Knoxville. But who needs it and why?

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

It was a day or so after the blizzard of 1993, and Knoxville was buried under snow. Antsy residents cooped up in their dark houses were dazed, dazzled, and discombobulated by the mid-March wintry howl that would eventually earn the title "Storm of the Century." As time went by, though, amazement turned to anxiety for the thousands whose lights still weren't on. Seeking a culprit, the power-less masses found a focus for their ire: the electric company.

"The blizzard hit on Saturday, and by Tuesday we knew we were failing in communicating with our customers about what we were doing to get their service restored," says Mintha Roach, KUB's vice-president of corporate services.

Fortunately, the utility's executives had someone to turn to: a former newspaper reporter and editor who had been doing consulting for KUB on internal communications.

"[They] had never put out a press release in the history of KUB," Cynthia Moxley recalls, sitting in the wide-windowed conference room of her 11th-floor office in the Plaza Tower. "And thousands of people were out of power for days, some of them as many as 10 days. At first, KUB thought their only job was to get the power back on, their job wasn't to communicate. About the second or third day, people started turning on them. People would cuss them in the streets, they'd block the crews in the neighborhoods. And talk radio, WIVK, was just getting big, and they blasted KUB from morning to night. And then KUB called me over...And they said, 'Um, Moxley, we've decided to be proactive.'"

She laughs. "And I said, 'If you were going to be proactive, you should have done this three days ago! You're now in crisis communications.'"

Moxley told the blanching utility executives what they didn't want to hear: Tell the truth. If power's going to be out for a week, say it'll be out for a week. Let people know what's going on. Reluctantly, KUB officials listened to their consultant and called their first-ever press conference. It paid off.

"It was amazing, the turn-around in public attitudes," says Moxley, who formed her Moxley Communications company in 1992. "They started bringing our crews coffee, and they started telling them, 'Go over there, fix theirs first, they have it worse than us.' As long as they knew that KUB was aware of the problem and they were doing something about it, they were much more patient and understanding."

The tale is, by any measure, a public relations success story. It's an example of what another leading figure in Knoxville PR, Darrell Akins, calls a "win-win-win": the client wins, the community wins, and the public relations consultant wins too. But the anecdote is most striking for its rarity—for most companies in the 1990s, public relations is a first step, not a last resort.

PR has boomed as a profession in the past two decades, in Knoxville as much as anywhere. Almost every business and organization of any size—from Pilot Corp. to the Knoxville Zoo—has a contract with one of the city's several major agencies. The public relations option of the journalism major at the University of Tennessee now graduates more students than journalism itself. Most of them find jobs easily.

So what do these growing battalions of PR people do, and what does it mean to the rest of us? More than you probably think. For better and worse, public relations has become a dominant force in American business at a time when business is the dominant force in American life. The result is institutions that are both more sensitive to how they present themselves and more powerful in controlling that presentation.

Birth of a Notion

If there's a Henry Ford of large-scale PR in Knoxville, her name is Cathy Ackermann. A small, dark-haired woman with unmistakable drive, she recently opened a satellite office in Dallas to build on several clients she's enrolled there.

"When we were looking at opening that office, and really starting to get into some overhead issues and decisions, we looked in the phone book in Dallas, and there were 396 PR firms in the Dallas metroplex area," she marvels.

In the Knoxville phone book, there are only 16 firms listed under "Public Relations Counselors." But that's 13 more than there were 20 years ago, and Ackermann—whose name appears first in the alphabetic Yellow Pages listing—was one of the pioneers in that growth spurt.

A UT journalism grad in the years before there was a public relations program at the school, she honed her networking skills working for the 1982 World's Fair. "I was able to cram into about three years probably 10 years worth of very valuable experience, working with marketing and advertising and public relations consultants from all over the world," she says. "I was responsible for about 50 percent of the corporate involvement in the World's Fair, in terms of bringing Fortune 500 companies to the fair." (Like her PR peers, Ackermann isn't shy about touting her accomplishments.)

Immediately after the fair, she co-founded Butler-Ackermann Public Relations with former TVA communications specialist Mike Butler. The company eventually morphed into its current form as Ackermann Public Relations and Marketing.

"It was a great time, with Knoxville just being booming, to start a PR firm. And there wasn't one. There were no corporate communications firms in the area," she says.

Starting with five major clients, Ackermann saw her revenues grow 650 percent in five years, landing her on Inc. magazine's list of fastest-growing businesses. Others quickly followed, although Ackermann remains the largest in the city. Rounding out Knoxville's big four firms in terms of local visibility are Akins & Tombras, the Nashville-based Ingram Group, and Moxley Communications (or, as one News-Sentinel reporter has dubbed it in reference to its Club LeConte/Regas power client base, "MoxCom Amalgamated").

The four have different specialties and services—Moxley mostly deals with locally-owned companies, the Ingram Group has a reputation for political work, Akins & Tombras' technological bent reflects Darrell Akins' economic development background—and they're not above taking shots, veiled or otherwise, at each other. "A lot of people think of PR as being cocktail parties and getting invitations that when you open them, pieces of confetti fall out," Akins says, referring to a favorite Moxley motif. "There's nothing wrong with that...but that's really not the emphasis of what we do here."

In fact, all four firms—and probably many of their smaller competitors—insist they're not just PR agencies, at least not in the old-fashioned sense. Where public relations once meant mostly churning out press releases, the field today encompasses all manner of communications, some of it very specialized: internal newsletters, annual corporate reports, initial public stock offerings, legislative lobbying, focus groups, market research.

"Tom Ingram always tells a pretty funny story, that when he founded the company in 1983 he really wanted to hang a shingle out that said 'Problem Solver,'" says James Pratt, a principal member of the Ingram Group's Knoxville staff. (The company has retained its name even though Ingram, who now runs the Chamber Partnership, sold his stake in it in 1990.)

"That was sort of a novel idea for the time in the PR industry," Pratt continues. "But that's really what we do."

Of course, a big part of solving problems is knowing who to call. PR firms peddle their connections the way other businesses sell widgets. Ackermann's first set of clients came directly out of her World's Fair work. Moxley worked at the daily Knoxville Journal for a decade, making friends within both media and government. Akins worked in state government under Lamar Alexander and ran the Greater Knoxville Chamber of Commerce. And even leaving aside Tom Ingram, the Ingram Group is rife with former media/politicos—Pratt worked for both Sen. Jim Sasser and the Nashville Tennessean, and his colleague George Korda worked in state government before becoming Mayor Victor Ashe's first spokesman.

Sometimes those contacts can interfere with each other, however. The Ingram Group provoked some questions in 1995, when it was lobbying in Nashville for both the city of Knoxville and the state billboard industry. City Councilwoman Carlene Malone, a longtime government watchdogger, got concerned when the city wasn't notified about pending billboard legislation that would have affected local roadsides. Concern turned to anger when she found out the Ingram Group was actively backing the legislation for its billboard clients.

"To me, it was just a blatant conflict of interest," Malone says. "For several years, they had missed key legislation having to do with signs."

Ingram Group president Lewis Lavine recalls it somewhat differently. "I think there was a potential for a conflict," he says. "As it turned out, there was not a conflict.... I think the [billboard] industry and the city ended up comfortable with what happened that year."

Nevertheless, the Ingram Group decided not to offer its lobbying services to the city the following year. Lavine says the group has increasingly moved away from public sector work to focus on corporate clients. "It's tough to do both," he says.

Truth and Consequences

So who needs it? Pretty much everybody, it seems. Partial client lists from the big Knoxville firms include Clayton Homes, First Tennessee Bank, Rural/Metro, Cariten Healthcare, Rohm & Haas, SunTrust Bank, Alcoa, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Knoxville Motor Co., KCDC, and the Tennessee State Museum. Even the News-Sentinel is a Moxley client. (Moxley says she helps the paper with government relations and employee publications.)

Many of these companies had little or no public relations activity two decades ago. Now a lot of them have PR people on staff, plus a contract with an outside firm for emergencies or special events. What's changed, PR people say, is the awareness of media and everything it means.

"Because of the explosion of the importance of the media...it's so much more difficult to get your message through the clutter," Akins says. "It's just a lot harder to get heard. And I think also it's the realization that advertising is not always the best way to get your needs out."

Nonadvertising messages can be more specific, more targeted, and also more credible than traditional ads. Readers or viewers give more credence to an article or TV report than a clearly identified commercial. But if that makes public relations attractive for companies, it also makes it vulnerable to charges of manipulation. In a lot of ways, public relations itself has bad public relations; phrases like "spin control," "photo op," and even "PR" are rarely uttered without a cynical sneer. It's a perception PR professionals both acknowledge and resent.

"Don't ever let anybody tell you public relations is about going out here and making things appear to be what they are not," Hank Dye is saying to a class of well-groomed, attentive UT undergraduates. "What your job is is to understand the truth, understand the reality, and then that's what you're going to present."

Dye—who in 1980 co-founded the Nashville firm Dye Van Mol & Lawrence, one of the state's most powerful PR agencies—spoke to the public relations students on a recent Tuesday evening. A big man in a red tie and a white shirt with blue pinstripes, he says he has lived by those words all his professional life. "It's like any relationship," the 1963 UT alum says. "It's a matter of respect, it's a matter of credibility. The whole integrity issue is very, very critical."

UT professor Candace White, who teaches the class, knows the rap against PR. "'Oh, you're teaching people how to lie.' I get that all the time," she says.

But it's not true, White says. Students constantly hear mantras like Dye's, and they're reinforced in the workplace.

"We do a lot of what I call crisis communications work," Ackermann says, "where companies have an accident in the plant or have a huge union problem or they've done something that they shouldn't have done. And our guidance is very predictable—we believe in telling the truth, we believe in responding quickly to media inquiries. And if it's bad news, say it's bad news."

Moxley finds it especially ironic that so much criticism of public relations comes from journalism—a field she left in part because of its own ethical shakiness. She wrote a story in 1990 for the Knoxville Journal that raised questions about an out-of-town company's commitment to Knoxville after it bought Miller's Department Store. The company threatened to pull its advertising from the newspaper, and the Journal's editor killed the story. Moxley was furious.

"And I thought, OK, if I'm going to work for the advertisers, I'm just going to work for the advertisers," she says. "It seems a lot more honest to me."

It's a good anecdote, one that illustrates the weaknesses of even the free press. Still, many people's perception of public relations is based on corporate spokespeople insisting oil spills aren't as bad as they look and cigarettes don't cause cancer. That's where personal discretion comes into play, PR practitioners say.

"We turn down clients quite a bit," Moxley says. "I won't represent Champion paper. We turned down the rodeo. The rodeo wanted to hire us, and the whole staff just said, 'We love animals, we don't want to represent the rodeo.' We said no."

All the local firms tell similar stories.

"I had one just recently," Akins says. "Basically, this person was in trouble with the law and had a lot of money, and things were about to come out in the press. He was willing to pay me a whole lot of money to go out and spin his situation more favorably...My reputation is more important to me than all the money this guy put on the table, and I said no."

Of course, some of the clients local firms do represent have plenty of detractors, especially in environmental circles. Moxley works with developer Kerry Sprouse, who's spearheading the controversial Turkey Creek project in West Knox County. And Akins' clients include Eastman Chemical in Kingsport, identified by environmentalists as a leading polluter of East Tennessee air and water. In its 1996 book What Have We Done?, the local Foundation for Global Sustainability calls Eastman Chemical and Champion "two of the nation's most notorious corporate polluters." The book continues, "Both, despite genuine improvements (undertaken with much resistance) and extensive image-polishing (undertaken with a will), continue to damage water, land, and people."

"I only feel comfortable working with people I really believe in," Akins says. "If I didn't believe in Eastman Chemical company, and that it was a good company, that it was investing billions of dollars in improving the environment, I couldn't work for them. If they were really up there polluting and doing a lot of things they get accused of by some people, I couldn't work for them."

Selling Toxic Sludge?

John Stauber isn't impressed by PR protestations of innocence. The founder of the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wis., has spent the past four years looking under the public relations profession's rocks, and he's troubled by what he's found. In 1995, he co-authored a book with the memorable title, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry. The book, now in its fourth printing, has sold 25,000 copies.

"We're not opposed to PR per se," says Stauber, a long-time activist who became disturbed by corporate clout in environmental and political issues. "Public relations is really just an outgrowth of discussion and debate and argument within a democracy. But what we're very concerned and critical about is the way high-priced, very expensive PR can be employed by big business and government to completely overwhelm the democratic process."

His book cites several tactics he considers insidious: the creation of phony "grassroots" campaigns orchestrated by public relations firms on behalf of clients who stand to gain or lose from pieces of legislation; "greenwashing," using staged events and programs to improve the environmental image of a major polluter; "cross-pollination," which is when PR firms do free or cheap work for respected nonprofit groups and in turn get the nonprofits to lobby for something on behalf of a corporate client.

None of this would be as bad if the media were good at reporting on such maneuvering, Stauber says—but they're not. Instead, he thinks sophisticated PR—including prepared articles and video news releases (VNRs)—has made news reporting more lax. "If you're a lazy reporter, you can be a great reporter, because you get your story ideas and articles and, if you're in TV, your news supplied," he says.

Dave Winstrom is president of the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and also news director for WVLT Channel 8. He says his station gets up to a dozen VNRs a week, promotional films designed to look just like TV reports. Although he allows their usage in some contexts, mostly consumer news segments, Winstrom says he screens out obvious commercial pitches. Still, in a medium hungry for content, he says some stations probably run VNRs unedited, just the way the PR firms wrote them.

"I think there needs to be more discretion," he says. "I have a huge problem with giving someone a minute or a minute-30 just to promote whatever they are [selling]."

Local PR firms say they're there to help the media, not corrupt it. "I don't think any of the TV stations would overlook a hard, breaking, serious news story that affects their viewers to do a real fluffy story," Moxley says. "But I think there'll be a mix in every newscast. And if we've got something we think they might be interested in, we tell them. I don't think that makes journalism worse."

Wearing Different Hats

Stauber's also bothered by the incestuous nature of public relations. The field draws heavily on people with media and government experience—the same groups it then tries to influence.

Kevin McCauley, editor of the New York-based industry journal O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, says the path from political office to PR post is well-trodden. "Public relations is a profession of connections, basically," he says. "So who better to hire than someone who's been in government, if your clients are looking for that kind of connection? Any time a guy's out of office, the first thing he does is get hired by a PR firm."

McCauley says he recently got a call from a reporter writing a story about a controversial road project in Chicago. The PR firm working for the developers had hired three former members of the highway commission that had jurisdiction over the project.

In general, PR people say such activities aren't a conflict, as long as everyone involved discloses their past experience. But local firms draw lines in different places. The Ingram Group has taken heat because several of its members—most notably Korda and Susan Williams—are political commentators on local TV at the same time they're working for people with political interests.

"When you see hired PR people passing themselves off on the local television stations as political analysts, and they are hired to represent clients that they are discussing and they don't disclose it, that is a conflict of interest," Moxley says. "And you should be suspicious. And the TV stations should be ashamed."

Korda, who does political commentary for both Channel 6 and WNOX 990 talk radio, bristles at the criticism.

"On Political Roundtable [on Channel 6], it's an opinion show," Korda says. "And sometimes issues brush up against clients we've worked with or issues we're dealing with. And what you do is you disclose right then, 'I'm working with them. So viewers and listeners, you need to understand. But here is my opinion on that.'...I don't know if everybody does that, but I don't want to leave myself open to being criticized that you're using this position for your benefit or the benefit of your client."

Korda says his clients rarely ask him to say something for them on the political shows, and he always refuses.

One thing critics and proponents of PR agree on is that the field will continue to grow. As media outlets proliferate and demand for information booms, the ability to package and present a message will be increasingly valuable.

McCauley, editor of the O'Dwyer reports, says the nation's top 50 PR firms had a 12-percent increase in fee income last year, generating total revenues of $1.8 billion. "It's boomtime for PR," he says.

Stauber says that means there should also be a boom in public skepticism. He's encouraged by the response to Toxic Sludge is Good for You. "Everyone who's read this book and given us any kind of feedback has found at least one thing that enraged them," he says. "No one likes to find out they've been lied to or snookered or misled. We need to doubt more than ever what we read and hear and are told."

White sees the ascendance of public relations as mostly a plus, a recognition by powerful institutions that they need to communicate well with the people they serve. But she acknowledges the potential power of PR in a media-saturated nation.

"It's still up to the journalist to decide what to use, but there are a lot of public relations people providing content," she says. "And I'd say in the source-reporter relationship, right now PR people are probably tipping the balance on the source side...I don't know what the answer is. It's good for organizations, because it's certainly easy to get a point of view across. But I think most PR folks, especially the good ones, know they've got one chance to lose the credibility war. And I don't think they're going to risk the credibility of the organization for one news story."