PR Exec Joins Camino!

Monica Contreras (and her two beautiful Daschunds) have joined the Camino PR family!  Monica is one of the nation’s leading communications executives in the areas of social marketing, research-based communications, emerging market development, and corporate/media/non profit promotional strategies.  She is widely recognized as a young emerging superstar in the global public relations profession.

Monica truly loves her dogs.  She successfully pitched Otto, the youngest one, to become the cover model of a lifestyle magazine (see below).   Monica has a huge heart, sharp communications insight, and a fierce determination to make the world a better place.   She is located in CPR’s New York office.  Camino PR is grateful and energized to have Monica’s talents.

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?

The Rubric Resume

Here is the best quote from the nearly 600 résumé’s I’ve received for a part-time position at Camino PR: “I have never been particularly interested in working with a PR firm…”

I posted the job on Craig’slist late Friday, and by Saturday my inbox was bursting. We already had a few candidates who responded to our website listing, like a Doula whose positive ch’i leaps off her resume like perfumed stationary. I plan to invite the Doula to interview. There was also a wonderful activist who had taught capoera to homeless children in Africa. But we thought we ought to create a broader candidate pool, particularly of communications professionals. I toyed with the idea of paying for a listing in PR Week, but decided instead to use recession recruitment tools: Craigslist, and the NYU job board.

A small firm simply can’t look at 600 résumé’s. On Saturday afternoon, after I quoted aloud from the first 80 emails while browsing résumé’s at the kitchen counter, Winnie threatened to come in and do the job herself. I’m not sure if she meant that she would sift through applicants or if she would actually be our project assistant. She would be fantastic at organizing our office. She is the kind of chef (and I mean chef, not just cook) who simultaneously finishes preparing an organic and healthy dinner and has all of the dishes clean before I’ve even set the table. In my defense, it is often difficult to find the matches so I can light the candles. I have never once seen her not make the bed the second she leaves it, and more than once she has even made the bed while I am still lounging in it (“So when you get up its already done,” she says). I am a thousand percent certain that we would never have lost the plug to the monitor or knocked the fax machine off its wobbly shelf if Winnie were in charge.

One thing I am quite certain of is that my occasional office junk food junkets would end the minute Winnie joined our staff, so I kept pouring through applicant emails. Soon I found myself looking for tedious reasons to like or dislike an applicant. If their email address name sounded silly, I worried. If they seemed to have a long commute, I wondered if they would last long. I loved the applicants who had checked out my website, I got angry at those who obviously did not.

My son interrupted my résumé surfing with a homework question related to the “rubric” for his book report assignment. It occurred to me then that the rubric résumé approach was the best way to engage the issue, both from the perspective of the job seeker and the employer. For those of you who have been out of middle school a long time, a “rubric” is a chart that details the requirements of the project and grades each category of the rubric. I took a look at the job advertisement, and chose four things that were critical, ranked in priority. Then I made four piles: one, people with no match; two, people matching the top criteria, three, people matching the second criteria, etc. I also created a wildcard pile for people like the Doula – someone that I had a gut reaction to even if their skill set didn’t match up perfectly.

I still had the time consuming task, however, of actually opening each email and glancing at the résumé. Here’s what I learned, from a job seeker perspective:

Number one (and this is huge): Make the subject line count. Almost every subject line was the same, “Project Assistant Position”. Email number 455 wrote “Amazing Project Assistant Position”. I looked at his application out of order. He turns out to be a communications pro, and someone I will definitely call about an interview.

Number two: Tell me what you will do for me based on what I’ve asked for. Don’t lead with what I will do for you.

Number three: Write well. Use full sentences and old-fashioned good grammar.

Number four: Sell me on your candidacy in the first paragraph of your cover letter AND in the first paragraph of your email. Simply writing “Attached is my resume” is a huge wasted opportunity to stand out. If I don’t believe in you by the fourth sentence, I’m not reading further.

Number five: Both attach your resume and copy it in the email. That saves me time.

Number six: Do some research – at minimum, check out the employer’s website.

Here’s what I learned, from an employer perspective:

I should have paid the money for a targeted ad – perhaps a combination of PR Week and Non Profit Times. The price tag seemed high for a small firm, but my time is billable by the hour, and Craigslist turned out to be a very pricey way for me to get the job done. I assume that using PR Week would have limited the candidate pool to those who are serious enough about communications work that they are engaging trade magazines. I might have eliminated the hundreds of people recently laid off from the financial sector.

It is tough to get a job in this marketplace. I have Ivy League graduates, distinguished authors, and seasoned researchers interested in this entry-level position. The hard truth is that everyone needs to figure out how to market him or herself. Public relations isn’t just for celebrities or snack food vendors. Just ask applicant number 455, whose head bobbed above the hundreds of hopeful emails. These days interactive or other forms of advanced resumes, clever outreach, and storytelling are vital for highly successful job searches and school applications.

The back of the plane

There was a full sized rat lying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my son’s school this morning. The rat looked like it had gorged in the nearby trash cans and had fallen into a drunken stupor overnight. Jeez, I thought, now when my kids are adults they are going to say, about their inner city childhood, “we had to step over dead rats on the way to school.”

The rat was lying outside of the fenced-in concrete schoolyard where the sixth graders socialize at lunchtime. The first time my co-worker saw the playground he said it looked remarkably like a prison yard. It is a small concrete gathering with two basketball hoops arranged along one wall, so that a full-court game must be played in a u-shape. On rainy days the kids crowd underneath the scaffolding opposite the basketball wall.

This is one of Manhattans’ best academic public middle schools. My son worked hard to get admitted, which includes high test scores, a teacher’s recommendation, and an interview. It’s not like he had many Mexican-origin classmates in his elementary school. But now that he is wading through middle school he has tired of teaching his name to everyone. It is “Tomas”, not “Thomas”. Pronounced like “toe” plus “moss”. His humanities teacher assigned an essay about names, and he wrote that he planned to change his name to “Tom” or “Tommy” because he hated being called “Thomas”.

I heard a presentation a few days ago in New Mexico about the health impact of identity. The main thesis was about the larger health implications of major societal discriminations, like racism and homophobia. But the researcher also talked about microstresses – the everyday indignities that are sometimes clear and often fuzzy but that collectively can become more debilitating than major stressful life events. The small ways that we communicate status in our society aren’t so much invisible as much as they are managed to the point where they sink to the subconscious. It happens to all of us, most days, even the days we choose to ignore it. It is rampant in the world of advertising and entertainment, and it seeps into press releases and other public relations efforts more easily than we’d like to imagine.

The airline industry leads the corporate world in their effort to reinforce status. On my flight to New Mexico I sat alone in my row; in fact, no one else was sitting within fifteen rows of me. But in the back of the plane everyone was smushed in three to a row. Once the doors closed the sardine passengers begin to spread out, causing the flight attendant to flap her arms and grab the microphone. “Stop changing seats!” she announced urgently. She was standing in the aisle next to my row. “Stop! Stop! You people in the back,” she said punching her finger at them, “you did not pay for the seating with the extra leg room.” She swept her hand across the fifteen empty rows plus mine. “These people did. It’s not fair for you to sit in these other rows. Unless you’re willing to upgrade your ticket, you need to stay-in-your-seat.” She said the last words in a slow staccato, like she was talking to a mob that was on the verge of storming the embassy.

I looked back at the angry mob. They were my people but I could feel them seething at me, as if I had sentenced them to being corralled in to the back of the plane. Technically I didn’t pay for my legroom either, even though I might argue that I deserved it for literally running from Terminal B to the very end of Terminal C in Chicago where I barely missed my connection. The gate agent upgraded me on my alternate flight. I don’t even use the treadmill; I only use the elliptical machine, because running is jarring. I had earned my legroom.

A few minutes later the flight attendant reappeared holding a tray of drinks. “First class doesn’t want these beverages!” She was very excited. “Go ahead and choose one, why not?” she said, as though she was offering me leftover pearl necklaces instead of rejected tomato juice. I asked her if I could give permission for the sardine passengers to spread out into my fifteen rows. If the only thing standing in their way was the insult to the passengers who had paid the extra fee, I was willing to waive my right to be insulted. “That won’t be possible!” she snapped and then stiffly returned to first class with the second hand juice.

The truth for my son to discover is that even if his new friends call him “Tommy”, he will always walk through this world as “Tomas”. He will step over rats if it means that at the end of the sidewalk is the best education his city offers. He will play on a U-shaped basketball court if that is how he can stay fit. He will learn how to measure the worth of his daily indignities. As he grows up he will decide what role he plays in societies indignities, whether he finds himself on playgrounds or in airports.

At the New Mexico conference we saw laid bare how words, and their context, matters to the health of our society. Perhaps suffering in the back of the plane isn’t a human rights issue. But recognizing the status that words convey is the soul of good communications.

Trouble the Water

Please go see the documentary titled, “Trouble the Water”, a film which tells the story of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of its survivors. We attended a New York City premiere on Friday, where Producer Danny Glover made an appearance and described breaking into tears when he first saw the footage. A relatively small distributor has released the film, currently being shown only in New York and Los Angeles, but with enough consumer demand let’s hope it goes national. If you don’t live near these two cities, maybe you can make noise in your own hometown about the desire to see the film.

This is a human drama but for those of us who specialize in crisis communications, it’s also the painful display of our industry’s failings. For those who think of crisis PR people being mainly about celebrity divorce and airplanes stuck on the tarmac for eleven hours, reliving Katrina in this film sheds a sobering light on the true consequence of politicizing the high stakes work of risk communications.

The film spends only a few seconds on Michael Brown who headed up FEMA’s disaster response to Katrina and was later driven out of this position for his role in the deadly bungling of the crisis. One of President Bush’s legacies will be his statement in the midst of the crisis, “Brownie, you’re doing a a heck of a job.” If the Tylenol scare of 1982 is symbolic of good crisis PR, “Brownie’s” role in FEMA is its antithesis. I hadn’t kept up with Brownie after he left the government payroll, but “Trouble the Water” informed me that he is now a crisis communications consultant.

Even as I remained riveted by the human drama of the movie a small part of my brain got stuck on this fleeting revelation. Who is paying Brownie for advice about crisis communications? As it turns out he moved somewhat seamlessly from the team that was supposed to manage crisis to those who profit from crisis. His clients have been the military and military contractors like Lockheed. He has helped firms like “Cotton Companies”, which specializes in cleaning up after disasters. They claim to have “cut our teeth on water damage from hurricanes and floods of the Gulf Coast and they don’t get any bigger than that.”

When asked about his post-government life, Brown says, “I probably, at any one time, have a half-dozen clients involved in different things having to do with homeland security or government in general.”

It helps to have powerful friends. Joe Allbaugh appointed Brown to his FEMA position, despite Brown’s thin resume. Allbaugh managed Bush’s campaign for Texas governor and vetted Dick Cheney for Vice President. In the immediate aftermath of the Bush-Gore election Allbaugh was dispatched to Florida to head the Republican fight to get Bush into the White House. After leaving government Allbaugh made money by helping firms profit from “business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq.”

There are heroes in “Trouble the Water”. They are also engaged in cleaning up after disaster, only for something closer to minimum wage. They stood on stage with Glover on Friday and beamed at their standing ovation. You can watch this movie as a parallel study in crisis management: the bureaucratic priorities and vision of government (Bush, Nagel, and so on) and the waterlogged maneuvers of the disenfranchised. The two stories are often parallel but it is where they intersect that the revelation of our “two America’s” crystallizes.

John Edwards, a character I am loath to quote these days, popularized the phrase “two America’s” with a particular focus on the Hurricane Katrina experience. Mitt Romney, rumored to be on McCain’s short list for VP candidates, said, “every time I hear someone like John Edwards get on TV and say there are two Americans, I just wanna throw something at the TV.”

You must see this movie, even if you already know and experience every day the disjuncture between our countries veneer and its social infrastructure. For risk communications specialists it is perhaps the most significant awareness we can bring to the seriousness of catastrophe.

For the heroes in the movie there is life after Katrina – literally. They stood on stage with their new baby, her hair dotted with ribbons and smiling whenever the audience clapped.
There is a lucrative life for Brown after Katrina. He lives in a spacious home in Aurora Colorado. He says bitterly, “There is life after government…even after you have been run through the wringer, even after you have been thrown under the bus by the leader of the free world.”

Glover spoke about the movie not just inspiring the people of Louisiana but also as a revelation that massages the hope of disenfranchised everywhere, from Harlem to East Oakland. The same population who were rich before the movie remain rich; the same population who were poor remain poor. But there is something spiritual about the crisis management of the film’s central characters that bends the American dream away from the excesses of profiteers like Brown and Allbaugh and toward the grace of those who build, and re-build, community.

Art for Free

Every morning I put my name in the lottery of people who would like tickets to the free performance of HAIR in Central Park, and every afternoon I am rejected. I line up each morning in the “virtual line”, because I cannot imagine joining those who arrive in Central Park at 6 AM and wait until 1 PM to get their two tickets. Even if I could pay the $165 per ticket that it would cost to avoid both lines I suspect I will only love the performance if I am experiencing it as public art – as it is intended, for free.

I am despondent, I know I won’t be picked and I am curiously insulted every afternoon when I am rejected. My good friend came to dinner Sunday night and revealed that she’d been on the same daily emotional HAIR roller coaster. Scores of New Yorkers have stopped feeling hopeful and encouraged by free theatre, and instead have a daily dose of humility. We try to think of some way to beat the system (should we log on at midnight and be the first ones in the virtual line? Does a more artistic email moniker matter?). I know corporate sponsors get free tickets but I suspect they distribute them in the executive corners of their high-rises. Freddie Mac donated more than $50,000 and one can only hope they are giving their free tickets to public servants as a thank you for their inevitable bail out.

The treacherous lining up is a part of the mission of the Central Park endeavor, which seeks to “develop an American theatre that is accessible and relevant to all people”. I too am a supporter of the arts because I believe that if we fostered more creativity we would be better at all sorts of things, like making sure that Hurricane Katrina victims could be housed again years after the storm.

Last year I tried my hand at arts patronage when I volunteered to write a grant so that my daughter’s middle school could expand their arts program. I knew my proposal would prevail in the hotly contested process because I had typed it, prompting several people to blurt out “wow!” even before they had read any of the proposed ideas.

My star status as a parent volunteer was short-lived, however, when the person who had planned to actually do the proposed work was forced, by personal circumstance, to bow out. I thought, how hard could it be to plan a few art programs? So I assured the principal that I’d just do the work myself.

My first task was to take a group of middle school kids and their parents to meet the curator of a gallery. We gathered at a very trendy gallery in the meatpacking district. You could see the parents beaming – not at the art – but because they finally had a structured way to spend some quality time with otherwise moody pre-teens. The kids mostly tried not to make eye contact with each other so that later in school they could all pretend it had never happened.

The curator became increasingly delighted at exposing the underbelly of the gallery world to the public school crowd. He decided on the spot to take us to the secret back room where only the most well heeled patrons are invited. It is in these hidden gallery rooms where six and seven figure art hangs for sale. There in the middle of the room, suspended from the ceiling with a meat hook, was a massive sculpture made with wax flowers. The kids suddenly became intrigued and made a large circle around the figure.

At first glance it looked somewhat like a honeycomb hanging from the ceiling. But after studying the sculpture from all sides, it looked more like a giant flowered pita pocket, with flowers dripping out of its pocket and strewn carelessly on the floor below. A child finally said, “What is it?” The parents in the room shifted their weight and, like the kids previously, tried not to make eye contact with other adults. It really looked just like a giant vagina.

The people who gave me the funding to escort the middle school group to the very upscale vagina sculpture are trying to motivate an arts movement. Same as the people who inform me, every afternoon, that I do not have tickets to the free theatre in Central Park.

The curator exposed the opposite of what an arts movement aspires to create: he unveiled a hidden labyrinth of art that is for and about the elite. In the arts the movement has always been simultaneously about the practical need to create patronage and freeing society from the confines of patronage. That is why tonight someone like the CEO from Target will be sitting beside the person who has spent his or her day camped in line on a lawn in Central Park, watching a brilliant production of HAIR. Equalizing the power of the two – the CEO and the line sitter – is the struggle of movement leaders.

My Tata was a public arts pioneer. On many Sundays he would walk his gaggle of grandchildren to Armory Park, where he met up with his elderly friends to play a mariachi-style concert for anyone who happened to be sitting on the park benches. My Tata played the trumpet. I remember that Armory Park was viciously hot with too few trees and a large concrete square where my brothers and sisters and I sometimes played shuffleboard with the retirees. When my Tata died and the cemetery service ended and the mourners began to drift away from the gravesite, his Armory Park musician friends gathered next to the lowered casket and began their concert, only in a slower, deliberate tempo that paid tribute to the missing notes of a trumpet.

I would have liked to be chosen to see theatre in Central Park this summer. Though maybe all that I am seeking is that calm abandon that art inspires when some right part of the brain gets stimulated. Maybe all I really need is art unleashed from its complicated roots. Something, perhaps, like sitting on the park bench and hoping for a group of elderly trumpet players to gather in friendship and harmony.

Balancing the Checkbook

“With all human activities there are errors that are made and, uh, this is no different.”
- Mark Gilmore from the Congressional Budget Office on $19 billion in unaccounted for spending on Iraq contractors.

A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released Tuesday shows that about $100 billion is being spent on contractors in the Iraq war. To be fair, the report never used the term “Iraq war”, that’s my description. Instead they reported on the “current military, reconstruction, and diplomatic efforts” related to the “Iraq Theatre.”

But when Mark Gilmore from the CBO appeared on C-SPAN yesterday it wasn’t the price tag or the historic numbers of U.S private vendors during a war that most irked viewers. What rattled many viewers was the revelation – underscored by C-SPAN Washington Journal host Greta Brawner – that the CBO could not account for nearly $20 billion in spending.

It’s not exactly breaking news. In May the BBC and others reported that $8 billion worth of payments to Iraq-war related contractors “failed to comply with US laws aimed at preventing fraud”. The May news coverage even pointed as evidence to a $5.6 million check paid by the U.S. to an Iraqi contractor with zero records to show what had been purchased.

Oddly, the CBO seemed unprepared for questions about the mysterious money. They hadn’t included mention of the mysterious money in their press alerts, and the Associated Press declined to mention that part of the story (the BBC picked it up). Gilmore offered a variety of answers, ranging from its not his job to pointing at difficulties in simultaneously managing fiscal control and dealing with the violence in Iraq. Though, isn’t violence what the Pentagon would have planned for in wartime? Here’s the C-SPAN exchange:

Brawner: “Why is there $20 billion where we don’t know where it’s going and who its going to?”

Gilmore: “Well, actually, we don’t know, that would be more of an auditing function and something that the Government Accountability Office among others, for example the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, they would be looking into that kind of issue I would assume, um, it’s hard to collect some of these data, not to excuse this or offer excuses for the Department of Defense but sometimes its hard to collect the data on exactly what’s being done, um, and, the databases are only as good as the people who are supplying the information, so with all human activities there are errors that are made and, uh, this is no different.”

In response to viewer questions he offers up other explanations, including “not our expertise,” and “the legal status of contractors is ambiguous,” and “…it’s not necessarily fair to say its not accounted for….we cannot say exactly what the $20 billion was spent for,” and “yes indeed there are a number of problems that have been noted…” and “the Department of Defense [doesn’t] have sufficient manpower to perform oversight of its financial transactions,” and finally, “Iraq [is] even more difficult because of the insurgency that is going on there and the violence which thankfully is recently declined.”

This is a man without a message. Callers on all three lines – Republican, Democrat, and Independent – ranged from frustrated to hostile. They started out concerned about money management and ended up focused on his apparent lack of concern for the issue.

Finally a caller said, “You made the statement earlier that we are all human and we make mistakes. Granted. But [we] have a judicial system and prisons that take care of people that make certain types of mistakes. My question to you again is how would you characterize this type of financial mgmt were it regard to your personal finances, and what would you expect to happen to those money managers of your personal finances?”

Quite aside from the seriousness of the subject matter, from a public relations perspective this interview is a classic example of bungled communications. A bureaucrat treated the subject with dispassionate fact sharing and the public needed to experience authentic regard for their concern. After all, when faced with a mysterious $20 billion expenditure, the core concern really can’t be whether Mark Gilmore expresses personal alarm. But for many of the viewers, Gilmore wasn’t just speaking on behalf of a non-partisan auditing wing of the government; he was speaking on behalf of the government. And they wanted their government to be outraged.

The questions continued to get personal until finally one caller demanded to know how much Gilmore was being paid to report to the public that he had no idea how our money was being spent. Gilmore declined to answer. But his performance tracks the tone of the report. Even the letter of introduction in the CBO report reveals a dispassionate attitude about the enormous emotional impact of bloated government spending in the midst of an economic meltdown. The report cover memo acknowledges the 14 people who researched, analyzed and wrote the findings and also informs Congress members that Maureen pasted the map on the cover, Lenny made copies, Linda mailed the copies, and Simone saved the document as a PDF.

Pixie Scandal

“Everyone should understand this in this way,” Mr. Chen said. “This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture, especially during the entrance of our national flag. This is an extremely important, extremely serious matter.”

What pressure on the shoulders of a 7 year old, to have your crooked teeth cause such national concern.

As the world now knows, it was an extremely serious matter that Chinese officials did not find Yang Peiyi to be cute.  She was deemed good enough to be heard but not seen, thereby prompting officials to use Peiyi’s recorded voice and Lin Miaoke’s lip synch performance during the opening ceremony.  Peiyi is described in media accounts worldwide as the girl with “crooked baby teeth” and a “chubby face”. The Associate Press begins its story by treating Peiyi’s deemed lack of cuteness as fact: “one little girl had the looks.  The other had the voice.”

Miaoke, on the other hand, is ready for America’s Next Top Model.  She is described as a “smiling angel” with a “pixie smile.”

Worldwide outrage has ensued in support of both girls. Hill & Knowlton is the PR firm that works with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympics.  In fact Hill & Knowlton’s CEO, Paul Taaffee, carried the torch in Beijing last week, wearing shoes donated by Adidas.   The firm is one of the largest in the world and gives counsel to Walmart, Enron, and the Church of Scientology.  Their long history includes helping the tobacco industry counteract scientific findings about the link between cigarettes and cancer.

It’s not clear if Hill & Knowlton is helping Chinese officials wade through the pixie scandal, or if all parties are simply waiting for the competition to drown out the story.  To date the only voice counteracting the judgment of the Chinese officials is Peiyi’s father who said, “In my opinion, she’s not ugly.  She looks cute.”

The bigger issue is the underlying bias that drove officials to reject Peiyi.  Blogger Ran Yunfei described the ceremony as “nationalist clothing over authoritarian underwear”.  As the medal ceremonies crowd this story off the front page, it may be the bloggers that give Hill & Knowlton reason to face the dissonance between the message of authorities (“This is in the national interest”) and the gut reaction of viewers worldwide when they see Peiyi’s precious photo.