Tony Blair’s charity donation: wiping the slate clean or cynical PR ploy?

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — America's two wealthiest individuals, with a combined net worth of $90 billion, according to Forbes — persuaded 38 other billionaires to sign The Giving Pledge, and give away half their wealth to charity.

The media couldn’t fault the plan. Why? Because it’s promoting a giving culture, is not dependent on promoting anything in particular or any individual in particular.

Contrast this with the media reaction to the announcement last week by former UK PM, Tony Blair, whose legacy to history will be entering the UK into the Iraq and Afghan wars, that he will hand over the £4.6m advance and any profits (it’s actually unclear how all this is worked out which didn’t help the media reaction) from his autobiography (due out in two weeks) to the Royal British Legion to open a state-of-the-art sports centre for wounded servicemen.

The media was almost vitriolic of its condemnation: the The Daily Mail used the headline: ‘Blood Money’ Blair gives £5m book cash to troops’, while the Murdoch newspapers The London Times and the Australian ran with the heading: ‘Blair tries to turn page with a £5m donation’

Why? Because no matter how Tony Blair and his team dressed it up, it smacked of self promotion.

The Blair donation announcement last week took the publishing world by storm. Doom merchants had predicted that Mr Blair’s autobiography, entitled Tony Blair: A Journey (something biblical about this), would be a disaster.

At a stroke, the book that had languished in Amazon’s pre-order list, with just a few hundred copies sold, soared to seventh in the best-seller list two weeks before publication. Mr Blair, whatever his motivation, had effectively bought himself a best-seller.

Take a PR lesson from IBM: I was on an IBM press trip to look at banking solutions. Our coach, packed with international media, passed in front of La Scala opera house in Milan. The banners outside told a story:  that year’s entire opera season was being sponsored by IBM. We were impressed. But consider this: if IBM had promoted this to us as a ‘Good Thing’, ‘aren’t we Good People’, we’d to-a-man have sniffed: just promoting themselves.

Lesson: handle charity donations with care. Altruistic gestures need to be seen as just that, Mr Blair – altruistic.

The BP Oil Spill PR battle was won by the Greens, the anti-oil lobby, the anti-capitalist lobby and President Obama fighting for his popularity. Can BP get its street cred back? By throwing Hayward out with the oil, I think it just might.

“The warm, white sand stretches for miles as clean and flat as a freshly laundered bed sheet. The turquoise sea is so clear that I can see silvery fish playing around my toes as I take a cooling paddle. If there is any more pristine resort in which to spend a summer holiday than Pensacola Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I would like to find it.
“And yet, at a time of year when usually there is barely room to unfold a deckchair, the shore is eerily deserted. ....”

So writes David Jones in the UK's Daily Mail , August 6th just four days ago.

Why no tourists? Well no-one has come to Pensacola because it was supposed to be knee-deep in oil and awash with dead dolphins and oil-covered pelicans. We all saw the pictures and read it in the media...it must be true!

Grunwald takes a brave stand
All praise to goes to an article by respected Time magazine environmental writer Michael Grunwald on July 29 entitled ‘The BP Spill: Has the Damage been Exaggerated?’, who dared to voice the near-heretical proposition: that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 had been massively hyped.

President Obama, who renamed the Deepwater Horizon spillage the BP oil spill, called it "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced". Green Groups and the media weighed in. The big enemy oil and capitalism were the culprits.

Headlines were easy: "Catastrophe along the Gulf Coast”... "Disaster in the Gulf" "environmental catastrophe". Michael Grunwald points out that only “the obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.”

“Well,” continues Grunwald bravely, “Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history...but it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. He goes on to back up his comments with a catalogue of facts about the minimal effects on the wildlife, coastal waters and fishing – which, if you’re interested, you should read his article.

The green groups, the anti-capitalism, the anti-oil lobby, and President Obama desperate to restore his popularity, won the PR battle. These PR groups have a lot to answer for given the ongoing damage to tourism and industry, despite the dispersal of the oil.

It remains to be seen if BP can re-build its brand.

The PR opportunity
I have written about BP’s management of the disaster which hasn’t been that bad – BP took it on the chin, led from the top, but Tony Hayward turned out to be a bit of a poisoned chalice with the now infamous Hayward gaffes.

But the gaffes in themselves played into BP’s hands: by identifying the disaster with the man Hayward, you get rid of the man, you get rid of a lot of the damage and have the opportunity to start to rebrand.

Lucky for BP that the oil went at the same time –or maybe BP timed Hayward’s departure meticulously to coincide with the oil dispersal - because they alone knew the extent of the plugging of the leak and the success of the clean up operation.

The perfect PR strategy was to get rid of the CEO whose name has been synonymous with the oil disaster, as the disaster was about to disappear.

The approach has form: the Townsend Thoresen ferry boat, the Herald of Free Enterprise, went down in icy waters killing 193 people - that year the Townsend Thoresen ferryline rebranded to P&O European Ferries; Union Carbide Corporation was responsible for the world’s worst industrial catastrophe at Bhopal in India - the Bhopal plant was sold to McLeod Russel (India) Ltd and UCC is now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company; the Exxon Shipping company responsible for that ‘other’ huge oil spillage, is now the Exxon Mobil Corporation and the infamous oil tanker the Exxon Valdez is now renamed the Dong Fang Ocean.

As BP posts losses of $16.9bn (£10.9bn) for April to June, after setting aside $32.2bn for costs linked to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the oil is gone and Hayward with it. Let’s see if BP and its new American CEO Robert Dudley can survive the waiting takeover bids and resuscitate its brand. It certainly has the opportunity.

My old left wing Editor used to read the right wing Daily Telegraph religiously every day so he could get more and more angry about the reporting.

All newspapers have a political tendency, some greater than others, but in the US, TV news channels do too.

The debate is hotting up in the UK. Recent moves by Rupert Murdoch to acquire the 61 per cent of Sky TV he does not already own have raised the question: Does Rupert Murdoch want to turn Sky News into Fox News?

Stephen Glover sums it up nicely last week in the Independent. At the moment Sky News is pretty even-handed, constrained as it is by Britain's television impartiality laws – although many right wingers would say that the BBC has a partiality for the left.

Most pundits have assumed that Murdoch’s chief motivation is financial: Sky is expected to make enormous profits over the next few years, and Murdoch would like to be the sole beneficiary.

But there is another theory: that he wants to make even more money by turning Sky News – a loss leader with a small audience – into a more profitable British Fox. This is what Polly Toynbee suggested in the Guardian last week.

There is some evidence. Last August, Murdoch’s son James delivered a lecture at the Edinburgh Festival in which he attacked the power of the regulator Ofcom and impartiality laws. In January, John Ryley, head of Sky News, said that the impartiality laws should be scrapped.

It is rumoured that the Media Mogul and David Cameron had made a Faustian pact, and the Murdoch-owned Sun Newspaper did indeed desert New Labour and embrace  the Tories last autumn.

Regardless of the removal of impartiality laws, gaining control of Fox News would certainly give Murdoch the licence to move Sky News into a channel with ‘attitude’, as Stephen Glover describes it. 

It amuses me that left wing Polly Toynbee, writing in the left of centre Guardian, is horrified that TV might go the same way.

When President Obama declared war on Fox News last year for its right wing bias, it was the more level headed Campbell-Brown of CNN who explained why right wing Fox News had the right to exist just as left wing MSNBC: “Some of us, like my colleagues here at CNN, are still trying to do journalism. I believe that journalists do have a crucial role to play in challenging our leaders no matter what their political persuasion, and in holding them accountable.

“Opinionated cable news hosts have a valid but very different role. They either cheerlead or criticise and in doing so they connect with those who agree with them. They validate the opinions of those on the left and on the right. They provoke one another, fight with one another, and yes, they entertain us. In a polarised country, that gets big ratings.

“I’m not critical of what my friends at Fox News and MSNBC do. But it is apples and oranges when compared to what we at CNN do. And we should all just acknowledge that.”

I’ve always assumed we read newspapers to confirm our prejudices rather than gather the truth. If newspapers, why not television?

General McChrystal: there is no such thing as ‘off the record’

Dianne Abbot: ‘no comment’ means your story’s true

First: the General – you’re never ‘off the record’

Whether McChrystal or his aides were right to say what it is alleged they did, or right to accept the ‘live-in’ interview with Rolling Stone magazine, or whether Obama was right to fire the General, is beside the point that I am going to make: the General should have known the first rule of PR engagement – never say anything to a journalist you are not prepared to see in print. You’re always 'on the record'.

General McChrystal found that engaging with the media can be more life threatening than engaging with the Taliban.

Some might say, McChrystal thought he was ‘off the record’ for some of the time. So let’s define ‘off the record’ for a journalist: ‘off the record’ briefings ironically enable someone or somebody to put ‘on the record’ (ie into the public domain or into the mindset of journalists), something they wish to be known but without attribution to any individual or entity; in other words, to all intents and purposes, they’re ‘on the record’.

General McChrystal was never ‘off the record’ with the reporter Michael Hastings, author of the Rolling Stone piece, a journalist with form: he’s a former correspondent for Newsweek and freelancer for The Washington Post.

By publishing “THE RUNAWAY GENERAL” article with sharply disparaging comments by General McChrystal and his aides about the president and other White House officials, Rolling Stone magazine plunged Obama’s administration into crisis mode, provided the hammer blow for General McChrystal, got Afhganistan onto the front pages of the US media where dying oil-covered birds were winning headlines over a thousand+  dead soldiers, but above all, did wonders for Rolling Stone magazine - now known across the globe as an outspoken magazine and not a pop group, with assertive editorial about Wall Street, BP and now McChrystal.

FYI: The 1.5-million circulation Rolling Stone magazine is primarily known for such recent cover subjects as Jay-Z, Mick Jagger, Black Eyed Peas and Eric Clapton. The average reader is 30 years old and the cover of the current issue is not devoted to "The Runaway General" story inside, but to Lady Gaga, wielding a pair of automatic weapons attached to her bra. So still room to develop as a competitor to Newsweek.

Second: Dianne Abbott – 'no (racist) comment'?

Let me define ‘No Comment’ for the lovely Dianne Abbott, one of the wanabees for the leadership of the British Labour Party.

‘No comment’ means to a journalist: this is true, but you can’t attach my name to it. I’d deny it otherwise, wouldn’t I?

Dianne Abbott proved the point last week. Under fire from Andrew Neil on the BBC’s The Week, Ms Abbott was floundering when the real killer question struck: Andrew Neil asked her whether she thought that West Indian mothers were better than mothers of other ethnicities (speed to 1.40secs in on the video where Andrew Neil tackles her on her comment that ‘West Indian mothers will go to the wall for their children’,  implying, as Andrew Neil suggested, that they’re better mums.)

Tackled repeatedly for the straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, all she would say was that she had nothing to say, and had said all she was going to say on the subject. In other words, ‘no comment’.  In other words, ‘yes’.

I don’t think on this performance she’ll make it to the next round in the Labour Party leadership elections.

Footnote: You  never have a journalist as a friend when it comes to filing scoop copy

Rolling Stone founder, Jann Wenner, ended an interview in 2008 with Barack Obama - whose campaign he financially supported - by saying: "Good luck. We are following you daily with great hope and admiration." But that didn’t stop him plunging Obama’s administration into crisis mode.

Dianne Abbott had sat on the sofa with Andrew Neil since the show began in 2008, chatting, joshing and evaluating politicians lives and policies with him, but that didn’t stop the attack dog Neil going for the jugular in the first of his interviews with the prospective leaders of the Labour Party.