Smart Judges

This has been a good week for women in Washington DC.

Yesterday President Obama announced two important federal judicial appointments.  Judge Emily Hewitt, nominated to the U.S Court of Federal Claims, began her career as one of the first group of women ordained to Episcopal priesthood in 1974.  Prior to her judicial career, Judge Hewitt was among the religious leaders who led the effort to open the priesthood to women.  Obama also announced the nomination of Marisa Demeo to the DC Superior Court.  Judge Demeo formerly headed the D.C. office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and was one of the most prominent and powerful civil rights advocates in Washington D.C.

Putting smart people on the federal benches is always a cause for celebration.  Nominating judges with a history of leadership on social justice issues makes this a major celebration.  These are just two of many high quality appointments coming out of the Obama administration.  Congratulations to these nominees!

The condom melee

Ah, the Pope and condoms.  I first publicly criticized the Pope’s views when I was a teenage columnist for a Gannett newspaper, but my editor censored the piece.  The Pope was on a U.S. tour and the paper was worried about reader backlash.  Not much has changed since, except now my daughter is the teenager.  The Pope has ratched up his attack on condoms (claiming they aren’t effective at preventing HIV), and lots of parents and the media are still treating condoms like a four-alarm scandal.

Last week about a dozen students at my daughter’s middle school were inadvertently given condoms during a celebration of “National Women and Girls HIV Awareness Day”.   A 48-hour morality melee ensued.  Some parents of the condom kids were shaken and angry, multiple apologies from school and public health officials were rushed out over two days, news media descended on the school, and teachers gave their students impromptu lessons in how to say “no comment” to aggressive reporters.

Exactly one year ago the CDC released startling findings: one in four adolescent girls has a sexually transmitted infection.  Another study found that by 9th grade, 32% of teens were sexually active.  This year school officials teamed up with public health advocates to conduct an HIV awareness poster contest and a health fair to help prevent these middle school kids from becoming part of this statistical nightmare.

The school didn’t intend to distribute the condoms – some health fair bags from a high school event got mixed up with the middle school bags – but the incident raises the uncomfortable question about what messages and information ought to be shared with this age group.  Statistically, a third of these eighth graders will be sexually active within a year.  When and how should they get access to condoms?

On the afternoon that ABC camped out at the middle school for at least four hours, the principal asked those of us who worked or lived nearby to help shield the students from the cameras as they left school.   Many of the parents and security staff  were furious that ABC news was filming kids.  The sensationalist media had turned the  lesson about disease prevention into a real life display of the taboo nature of dealing with emerging sexuality.   Any middle schooler who thought  they could safely engage the subject of sex with adults at Thursday’s health fair learned by Friday that the subject was wildly explosive.

When the cameraman began filming the students exiting school, a number of adults were on hand to help the kids move down the sidewalk without being filmed. I began taking pictures of the ABC crew.  The ABC reporter screamed at me from across the street, punching his finger in the air, “this borders on harassment!”.  That’s when I got mad.  I couldn’t film him while he filmed my kid?

I calmed down and respectfully called the ABC producer in charge of the story, who apologized for the reporter’s behavior.   I explained that I had been positioned across the street with my palm sized digital camera and he said it wouldn’t have mattered if I were inches away, anyone has the right to film the activities of his crew.

Then the producer and I had a good discussion about the impact of sensationalizing condoms. What lesson, if you were thirteen, would you walk away with as you watched the media treat the mistaken condom handout as a major scandal?  Through the eyes of a middle schooler it’s not so different from the Pope’s rigid position: condoms are risqué and most definitely off limits.  His focus had been on whether ABC was adhering to journalistic standards; he hadn’t been focused on the impact of the coverage on area teens.

I didn’t expect the editor to kill the story – four hours of a stakeout by ABC, complete with dozens of interviews in half a dozen locations, was too much of an investment to throw away.  But the end result was a very, very brief story and modest footage.  I’m convinced that the editor paid attention to the community impact of ABC’s news decisions, as well as to the anger of the community that had been targeted.

Making your voice heard in the media can help soften the sensationalist treatment of adolescent sexual health.  But you don’t have to wait for a media moment to be influential.  If  you’ve got kids in your life and you’d like to be proactive in promoting sexual health, here are some resources you might offer them:
Sexetc.org (for teens)
Teenwire.org (for teens)
A reference book titled “It’s Perfectly Normal” (for kids and young teens)
A reference book titled “It’s So Amazing” (for kids and young teens)

Protesting Corporate Excess

On Thursday people who are fed up with the corporate climate are attending protests in cities nationwide.  There’s a lot I’m supposed to do on Thursday but nothing seems more urgent than sending a loud message to those who continue to contribute to a broken economy and corrupt corporate culture.  I’ll be heading to Wall Street to protest.  Please make your voice heard on Thursday — you can get more information about actions in your city at http://takebacktheeconomy.org/

Check out their video below:

Equal Treatment

Yesterday’s AOL headline about celebrity chef Cat Cora and wife Jennifer Cora expecting babies is yet another display of the media mainstreaming of gay relationships. AOL news treated their relationship in the exact same way it treats heterosexual couples, reporting “Iron Chef and her wife are pregnant”.  Fox used the term “lesbian partner” in its headline and used a sensational tone in its coverage, but they did lead the article with “The Iron Chef and her wife….”

Homophobia still has a firm grip in our culture but I like these small pebbles of progress.  Editing out bias in media coverage is a good barometer that change, at whatever pace, is underway.  Over the years I’ve tended to seek out deliberately gay-friendly refuges, like an Olivia cruise or a week in Provincetown.  Several years ago I was looking for a place to take Winnie to dinner, and on a whim typed “best lesbian chef” into Google.  It’s not the best way to figure out if the food is good, but I was looking for a friendly environment.  To my surprise I found a list of “best lesbian chefs”.   I chose the only chef on the list located in Manhattan, and that’s how we came to fall in love with Anita Lo’s restaurant, Annisa.  Anita Lo has my vote as the best chef in New York and Annisa has become our celebration restaurant.

Winnie and I stopped by Annisa for a drink and appetizer a few weeks ago.  We are never organized enough to get reservations, but sitting at the bar meant that we could chat with Anita when she emerged occasionally from the kitchen.  She was glad to hear we had come from a fundraiser for the Audre Lorde project, and when we told her that Gloria Steinem had hosted the event at her apartment she immediately asked, “what did she serve?”  Winnie told her we’d eaten quiche and Anita started laughing.  “That’s really funny!” she said, shaking her head as she retreated to the kitchen.    Winnie laughed with Anita but I know, deep down, neither of us really knows why that’s funny.

Here’s the AOL headline:

Congratulations go out to Jennifer and Cat Cora on their baby announcement!

Marketing Values (not!)

“The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living”
- window display for Design Within Reach

A high end furniture design store in Manhattan’s Flatiron district stenciled this quote from a famous designer on their display window (see pic below).  I passed by it late on a Saturday evening.  A homeless person was huddled below the sign, creating a mini encampment in the freezing midnight air.  Visible from the sidewalk were bed frames on sale for just over $2,000.

Next to this design store is Fish’s Eddy, a housewares store that was displaying a stenciled plate of a floorplan, complete with “servants quarters”.  The store was papered over to look like it was the victim of the recession, when in fact the faux bankruptcy look was being used to simply promote a sale (see pic below).  This is an establishment that looks at recession and oppression and sees marketing opportunities.  Earlier that same day my daughter and I stumbled upon a favorite restaurant with a tax seizure sign posted on its windows.  The restaurant looked as if it had been abandoned just as the waiters were setting the tables for dinner.  “It’s like everyone was vaporized, like in the movies”, she said, sounding incredulous like the rest of her uneasy recession generation.

The novelist John Galsworthy wrote, “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”  I wonder if the marketing folks at Design Within Reach thought at all about the homeless and the millions of panicked households worried about “survival” when they stenciled the windows.  It must not have occurred to Fish’s Eddy that using the trauma of foreclosure and bankruptcy as a marketing gimmick might be, well, mean.  And the nostalgia plates with the floorplans that include “servants quarters”, especially in our Obama era of “hope and change”, must be targeted at those whose lives and legacies are not marred by class oppression.

Even before Bono’s (Red) campaign, everyone in the field of “buzz” was buzzing about the importance of values marketing.  The problem is, you’ve got to have a handle on some values worth celebrating if you are going to try and use values for your own marketing gain.  Bono’s got his eyes squarely on the elimination of AIDS in Africa.  The Design Within Reach exec’s must be looking inward at their own profit margin.  CEO Ray Brunner brings in about $1.2 million each year in compensation.  Among his directors is branding consultant Hilary Billings, co-founder of Red Envelope. The magazine Fast Company described Billings as someone who “mastered the art of creating “lifestyle brands” – products and services that forge an emotional connection with customers.”  Billings points to three factors that define a “lifestyle brand”: it makes life easier, it makes your world more stylish, and it is an orchestrated strategy that is fully formed at a brand’s launch.

The problem may be that marketing the luxury lifestyle needs to be redefined.  Or perhaps, thinking more radically, does the luxury lifestyle itself need to be reconsidered?  The idea of a $2,000 bed frame being “within reach” may be more symbolic of pre-recession excess than a reflection of smart brand management.

DWR’s stock price has plummeted from $4.50 last May to about $0.66 today.  The company is considering options like merger or sale.   So it may be that the company is thinking of its own death when it compares survival to furniture design.

Be A Man

“Manhood” is back in.

Yesterday on the McLaughlin Group, journalist Monica Crowley summed up the Republican opposition to Obama’s stimulus package this way: “The Republicans rediscovered their manhood”.  This follows weeks of Illinoic Gov Blagojevich-induced rage about taking his lumps like a man, as expressed by Illinois State Senator Dan Cronin,

“It’s somewhat cowardly that he won’t take questions.  If he had something to say, he should have come down here like a man and faced the music.” The “manhood” sentiment is littered across the media world.  Today columnist Susan Antilla of Bloomberg gives advice to fallen financial giants, “So suck it up, be a man…”

This branding of “man” only begs the question, in opposition to what?  Be a man, not a squirrel?  Of course the opposite of acting like a man (a good thing - brave) would be acting like a woman (the wrong thing - cowardly).  And that can’t be good news for feminism.  California Governor Schwarzenegger doesn’t mask his insult to women – he has repeatedly used the term “girlie men” as a way to define the right kind of male behavior, as in “…if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men”.

The glut of “manhood” references have started resurging with new vigor.  But the backdoor insult to women remains largely unchallenged. Crowley’s generation hands the language down to younger generations of hopeful pundits.  A psychology student at UC Santa Barbara writes today in the school newspaper, “Steve Pappas, could you please grow a pair, be a man and accept that you lost the election?”

If women get gender branding advice, it’s usually about being a “lady”.  Entertainer Steve Harvey has jumped into the “lady” versus “man” advice with his new book, “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man”.  Harvey postulates that men are most comfortable being recognized in the role of provider and protector.

I have a favorite picture of my son at the beach (see below) standing at the water’s edge.  I wonder what he is imagining for himself.  It would be helpful if, when I turn on CNN in our living room, he wasn’t hearing sexist stereotypes about what it means for him to be a  man.

Messing Up At Work

Hmm.  The banks are in trouble, so taxpayers are giving them billions in bailouts.  But the bank executives won’t reign in their wild spending spree. It used to be tolerable that the profits they made on us were spent on massive bonuses and corporate jets and luxury boxes at football stadiums. Those excesses were repugnant but seemed to be part of the bargain we struck, since we agreed to pay all that interest on our credit cards and mortgages.  But last year the banks cried panic and demanded a bailout, meaning that those luxury items and massive bonuses are now being paid for by our taxpayer dollars. Why should we use our tax dollars to subsidize the extravagance of CEO’s who can’t keep their businesses afloat, while millions of workers are losing jobs, healthcare, and housing?

Predictably, the public relations war has escalated with even greater intensity than the economic food fight.

Recently deposed banking executive John Thain, who spent over a million dollars renovating his office last year and slipped in massive executive bonuses just before the Congress turned over taxpayer dollars to help him out, is now in full PR battle mode.  He seems utterly disinterested in playing the role of scapegoat.  Thain, like countless celebrities and moneyed elites before him, hired the best corporate PR talent that money can buy.  Rumor has it that Thain approached Rubenstein first but landed with Sunshine, Sachs & Associates.  Sunshine has helped Thain weave his story, including finger pointing at the man who fired him.  According to Thain, his excesses were known and approved by Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis.

Here’s where Camino PR’s Loretta Kane enters the fray.  Public relations can be used for social justice too, like shining a bright light on corporate excesses and abusive practices.  Yesterday Loretta helped the SEIU publicize their new campaign to oust Lewis from his perch.  These efforts landed the SEIU prominent news attention, including coverage in the New York Times business section:

“…Tuesday, the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest service sector unions, started a “fire Ken Lewis” campaign…”

The Charlotte Observer – the main newspaper where Bank of America’s headquarters’ are located – ran a prominent story that directly pulled from the SEIU press release, ““It’s time to start enforcing some basic standards for corporate behavior,” said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, a frequent critic of the bank, in a statement. “Ken Lewis has failed Bank of America and he has failed taxpayers – and the Bank of America board should remove him.”  The union also called on the bank to add director seats for a taxpayer and a lower-level employee and to stop all executive bonus payments until the government’s investment is repaid.”

The full story is laid out in the SEIU press release .  EVERYONE can help with this campaign – just go to seiu.org and find an event to attend in your area.  The SEIU is taking the issue off the newsprint and into the streets.  These small protests will put continued pressure on Bank of America to stop its corporate excesses and culture of abuse.  It’s our money, our jobs, and our houses.  Please take a few minutes to make your voice heard.

Off to the inauguration

We are off to Washington DC today.  Check out our updates on Twitter (caminopr).  Bishop Gene Robinson is kicking off today’s ceremonies.  Here’s my favorite quote from Gene about the words he is preparing for this afternoon, as reported in the New York Times:

“I am very clear,” he said, “that this will not be a Christian prayer, and I won’t be quoting Scripture or anything like that. The texts that I hold as sacred are not sacred texts for all Americans, and I want all people to feel that this is their prayer.” Bishop Robinson said he might address the prayer to “the God of our many understandings,” language that he said he learned from the 12-step program he attended for his alcohol addiction.

We’ll probably be on the New Jersey turnpike when Gene makes his remarks this afternoon.  Even with the snowstorm and our very crowded minivan and the massive traffic jam headed toward DC, it will feel amazing, hurtling toward a new leadership.

Recession PR

Loretta has cut back on trips to the hairdresser due to our 2009 recession spending plan.  Check out her Facebook page (or the pic at the bottom of this post) to see if her new style looks like Barry Gibb of the 70’s Bee Gee’s fame.  Oddly, I recall being at a disco in Honduras in 1980 and the crowd going wild when the DJ spinned a Bee Gee’s song.  Sorry, that’s the kind of useless tangent that gives blogging a bad reputation.

We might be in a recession, though who knows what the economists will say months from now.  I am routinely hearing of layoffs among friends and acquaintances.  And yet anxious customers are still lining up before Best Buy opens its doors in the hopes of snagging a sold-out wii gaming system.  Is it a depression?  An implosion?  A head game?

In the midst of downsizing, Recession PR is in full swing.  That means fewer marketing dollars and more “earned media”. It’s a critical time to re-do a communications strategy.  One good way to deal with reduced budgets and increased expectations among communications staff is to max out technology.  I just finished refresher training with a database subscription service that tracks all of Camino’s media, our media relationships, and the market value of our results.  I have automated systems that tell me when an issue is emerging, what’s happening with opponents of my issue, and what scheduled events the media is planning to cover related to my clients.  All this technology means that staff can focus on proactive and creative work.

I’m about to interview candidates for a staff position that includes “research” so that all this technology can be meaningful.  Way back when the Bee Gee’s were sexy, research meant mastering things like the Dewey Decimal System.  Now research is all about using Boolean logic. Melvin Dewey was barely a teenager when George Boole died, but his work predated Boole’s impact on information searching.  Dewey created the organization system over 100 years ago for a university library and this basic system became, and remains, the theoretical framework for library organization.  Anti-Semitism and sexism mar Dewey’s place in history, and his legacy is threatened by the fact that an alarming number of public schools can’t afford books anymore.

I’ve rarely sent a researcher to the library; today the Internet rules, and for that I need to hire people who get the logic of Boolean.  I need mathematically inclined research staff more than I need organization-inclined staff.  Instead of a hierarchical system,  Boolean  uses a mathematical approach to narrow the search.  Words like AND, OR, NOT, NEAR are the soul of Boolean logic.  For example, my daily apartment search looks something like: apartment AND Manhattan AND 2 bedrooms NOT walkup.

History remembers Boole kindly as a brilliant mathematician, and a modest man inspired by literature and philosophy.  Words and logic together were his poetry.  He said:

“No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.”

Below is Loretta’s recession PR hairstyle, compared to the coifed Barry Gibbs at the height of his career.  You be the judge — look alike?

PR and Frost Nixon

After shopping with three kids in a snowstorm today, I was having a hard time finding a cab.  An off duty cab driver stopped and asked where I was headed, then waved us in.  I was helping the first kid across the icy curb when a man sprinted in front of me and jumped into the cab.  The man screamed at me that he had been first. I wasn’t up for a fight; I silently backed up my kids onto the sidewalk.  But the cabbie didn’t agree, he refused to take the man and waved us back in.

The driver was in a full rant about the man for ten blocks.  He was an elderly driver speaking in a heavy accent.  “I tell this man I am not going his way.  But he thinks I take him anyway? This man is on crack!”  He went on about cab etiquette and then declared, “The man’s face, his face look like — Mr. Bush!”

There it was, the ultimate insult.

It’s vogue in these final Bush moments to compare his exit to Nixon.  Bush’s approval rating fell to 24% in December, a few points lower than Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate.  At a recent dinner party on the upper east side of New York, the mention of how Bush exits the White House (triumphant or head bowed) elicited universal disgust.  No one believed that Bush would ever be held accountable for any number of the reasons his approval rating has plummeted.   Even if Bush or Cheney run into legal troubles, people argued, they will be swiftly pardoned.  Like Nixon.

This urge for an acknowledgement and apology was central to the plot in the Frost/Nixon movie.  Even with its historical distortions this movie is feel-good for its thesis that public relations can be used for the greater good.  The suspense of the movie is whether the media pros can hold Nixon accountable in a way that the legal and political system could not.

On the wrong side of history in this movie is Diane Sawyer, who worked in the Nixon administration and stuck by Nixon following impeachment to help him write memoirs.  I don’t know why she chose that path.  Did she believe in Nixon?  Did she view it as a worthwhile career stepping-stone?  Or both?

I wonder the same thing about White House spokesperson Dana Perino, who has survived the tough job of spinning the media for Bush during his descent into ratings quagmire.  Jon Stewart grilled her last spring on her insight into crisis public relations.  She described the Elliot Spitzer prostitution scandal as greater than any crisis situation she’s had to deal with.  Which of course would include thorny subjects like weapons of mass destruction and waterboarding and illegal detention at Guantanamo.

She appeared again last week on the Daily Show and described Bush as “always fun to be around, he’s extremely funny.”  She also said, about the Bush administration legacy, “we’re pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished.” (Jon Stewart, after a long pause, said simply, “why?”). I wondered, does she think she’s on the right side of history? Or potentially like Diane Sawyer, could her allegiance be a career maneuver?

Attorney General nominee Eric Holder is making negative headlines for his crisis work in the private sector.  He earned a reported $2.5 million per year managing tough crisis cases, like helping Chiquita manage accusations that it had collaborated with thugs.  Crisis management by its definition is thorny and secretive.  Whether someone did honorable work in these cases is sometimes complicated, often hard to discern.   If public relations is a tool for social change instead of simply a paycheck, it’s the side of history we land on that matters.

Crisis work, at its best, is about helping justice triumph over power.  Ron Howard made it come true in Frost Nixon with creative license.  Maybe, in the next week while we wait for the inauguration, it’s a good time to escape reality and go to the movies.

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