The Sandman/Lanard Approach to PR Spin -
Putting the pandemic "on the back burner for the majority of Americans"
Pandemic is "on the back burner for the majority of Americans, where it should be," Sandman says, but "it's not on the back burner of governments and companies."
Many in flublogia probably read that, spit out their coffee and said WTF! Yet, the blogs have largely been quiet. How could he say something like that and not be pilloried by us short-tempered activists? If Michael Fumento or Marc Siegel had said this, denunciations would have been loud and nasty. Instead, this little turd of a quote rates barely a sniff.
To understand why, we need some background.
When I first heard of Drs. Sandman and Lanard (a husband and wife consulting team), it was in glowing terms. They were cited as eloquent advocates for effective "risk communication". I confess I had never heard of "risk communication" before, but assumed it to be an outgrowth of bioethics. I imagined Drs. Sandman and Lanard as tweedy academics, carefully analyzing ethical issues involved in disseminating scary information for the benefit of the public.
I could not have been more wrong. Although Dr. Sandman used to be an academic, he isn't anymore. Instead, he is a highly paid, well, actually, extremely highly paid (between $650 and $1,200 per hour) consultant (some would say apologist) for giant corporations and institutions. Dr. Lanard is a psychiatrist who also works as a consultant using the strategies that she and Dr. Sandman developed together. Dr. Sandman isn't shy about acknowledging his reasons for leaving academia (from Muddling My Way into Risk Communication ... and Beyond, by Peter Sandman):
Jody supposed I would find another academic job. But I was already finding consulting by far the most satisfying part of my work, having learned to my great surprise that corporate executives listened more attentively and intelligently than sophomores, and had more of interest to say back. And even part-time consulting was already earning me more than my salary.
Here is a partial list of his corporate clients (from the Center for Media and Democracy and his CV):
* ARCO
* Chemical Manufacturers Association
* Ciba Geigy
* Dow Chemical
* Du Pont
* Exxon
* Monsanto
* Newmont Mining
* Phelps Dodge Corporation
* Shell International Ltd.
* Union Carbide
Drs. Sandman's and Lanard's particular niche in the PR field is to "engage" activists, soothe them, and ultimately get them to accept whatever it is the giant corporation or institution has done or intends to do. Their backgrounds in psychology and psychiatry make them ideally suited to accomplish this. The strategy is not to defend everything their paymasters have done; instead, they will actually offer mild criticism and gentle rebukes of their own clients. This often puts activists off guard. Drs. Sandman and Lanard are seen as neutral intermediaries at worst and perhaps as actually on the side of the activists. The strategy partly depends on getting the activists to forget that the giant corporations/institutions are paying Drs. Sandman and Lanard huge sums of money to get the activists off their back. They seem to be very successful at this.
Dr. Sandman's core strategy was described by the Center for Media and Democracy
Sandman has invented a formula for risk communications that is now widely quoted within the PR industry. "Risk," he says, "equals hazard plus outrage."
For most people, of course, "risk" and "hazard" are virtually synonyms, but Sandman's formula is concerned with corporate risk. It recognizes that beyond liabilities associated with a hazard itself, a company's bottom line and its reputation are affected by the way the public reacts to that risk.
Underpinning this analysis is Sandman's opinion that, on many issues, the public inaccurately perceives the level of risk. Where the public and the "experts" disagree, he thinks the experts are usually right.
So his goal is to neutralize public outrage so that the correct level of risk is perceived, ie, the level of risk determined by the experts who are paid by the company/institution causing the outrage. The same company/institution that is paying him. It works.
One of his clients was the U.S. Department of Energy in the Nevada nuclear waste dump controversy. It is worth looking in a little detail at the Sandman strategy, in action.
From a letter by Judy Treichel and Steve Frishman that appeared in the Center for Media and Democracy:
The State of Nevada has long opposed efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy and the commercial nuclear industry to turn our state into a national dump site for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Sandman's advice to the DOE sounds exactly like the strategy taken a few years ago when the Secretary of Energy announced that there would be a "citizen advisory panel" to discuss the Yucca Mountain project. The real purpose of the panel was to invite opponents of the site such as ourselves to draft standards that would make the Yucca Mountain program acceptable.
We were also invited to workshops in which government, industry and public representatives were supposed to "prioritize your values." Then we were supposed to "trade off" our values in order to reach an acceptable compromise. Our response was to "just say no." We were then told that we were being "unreasonable." In our opinion, however, dumping nuclear waste on an unwilling community is itself an unreasonable action.
[snip]
We urge all public advocates and public interest groups to carefully read and understand how Sandman and his "outrage" neutralization schemes work. Don't be fooled. Outrage can be good. Keep it and use it.
Does this technique sound familiar? It does to me. Guess which large institutions have hired Dr. Sandman as a consultant? The WHO and the CDC. (from his CV ).
It's not for me to guess what motivates Drs. Sandman and Lanard to do what they do. I'm not a mind-reader. But whether you hear them speaking publicly or perhaps more privately, just remember who they work for.
I'll end with the same advice the activists from Nevada gave:
"Don't be fooled. Outrage can be good. Keep it and use it."
Saturday, February 3, 2007