The bottom corner of the Opinions page has become a kind of time-out corner where corporate miscreants try to earn their way back into the fold.
One of the greatest challenges an institution can face is an unanticipated need to counteract news about bad corporate behavior. There is now a whole field of “crisis communications,” with branches in academia as well as the public relations field. These firms specialize in putting out fires that can flare up when news about their clients is not good. The problem may be bad batches of automobile tires (Firestone and Ford in 2000), sudden acceleration in cars (Toyota in 2004 and Audi in 1987), disastrous oil spills (Exxon in 1989 and BP in 2006), drug safety (Tylenol in 1982), and even the treatment of show animals (SeaWorld in 2013).
For each of these companies the need to reassure the public that they remain good corporate citizens means spending millions of dollars on image-repair advertising. These efforts range from glossy pro-environment booklets sent to schools (Exxon) to quarter-page ads in the New York Times’ Op-Ed page (almost everyone).
The ads in the Times are an especially reliable indicator that a company is going through a public relations nightmare. It’s not that the paper has a huge national following. It doesn’t, at least by the standards of other media like broadcast television. What the Times provides is a way to reach opinion-leaders and important investors. The bottom corner of the opinions page has become a kind of time-out corner where corporate miscreants can earn their way back into the fold.
These days that quarter-page advertising space has been routinely filled with ads assuring readers that SeaWorld is a good custodian of the large ocean mammals it features in shows at some of its eleven locations. Their problems started with a single documentary picked up by CNN and Magnolia pictures. Blackfish, a 2013 feature directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite focuses on a single killer whale at SeaWorld Orlando. The animal is linked to the deaths of two trainers, as well as a third man found dead in the whale tank after the park had closed for the day. The film does not simply connect the deaths to the Orca. It makes the case that the captivity of these large sea mammals is inherently inhumane, slowly driving them to erratic behaviors not seen in the wild.
The release of Blackfish coincided with a noticeable rise in public distrust of shows built around animal acts. There has also been a growing consciousness of the precepts of the animal rights movement, which in the United States has moved from the margins to the mainstream. SeaWorld Entertainment has been a lightning rod in this change, becoming one of the most visible targets of Americans newly sensitized to the requirements of capturing and maintaining animals for daily performances.
Crisis advertising isn’t really about the short-term goal of selling more tickets. The rhetoric is more defensive: partly to reassure general readers who could drift toward open opposition, but also to keep the stock price of the company from going south in a gradual sell-off. According to the Wall Street Journal, as of February of this year attendance and revenues at the company’s parks had both fallen, with a fourth-quarter loss at the end of 2014 of about $25 million.
And so the ads. A recent message in the Times “time-out corner” carried the headline MAKING BETTER HABITATS, voiced in the person of Hendrik Nollens, a vet at SeaWorld:
SeaWorld’s killer whale habitats are among the largest and most advanced in the world. But that’s not enough. Here in San Diego, we're set to transform these habitats into dramatically larger, more natural settings. These new habitats will provide all of us—marine experts and visitors alike—with a deeper appreciation and understanding of these magnificent animals.1
There are two useful conclusions worth noting about this particular case. First, SeaWorld may triumph and win back its audiences with a sustained campaign. We have short memories. And many Americans shy away from messages that redefine entertainment preferences as ethical choices. Second, and even with my caveats, it’s hard to imagine a single documentary that has so galvanised so many Americans. Blackfish is convincing evidence that the long-form documentary is a powerful kind of persuasion.
At the rate we are going, all of us will have to suffer the fate of seeing our names–the forenames our parents so thoughtfully contemplated–appropriated to identify some crummy storm that has found its way to Wichita.
A tendency to see everything as a crisis is a prime symptom of what mental health professionals sometimes diagnose as a “borderline personality.” Obsessions over supposed disasters consume persons with this tendency, which converts relatively minor concerns into major personal crises.
In television news—especially its forms on the major 24/7 cable outlets—we see the same pattern: too much of an obsession with one concern at the cost of a more varied news agenda. Anyone looking at this journalism these days will notice recurring patterns of repetition, overstatement and willful simplification that make it distinctly different from the nuanced exchanges most Americans have every day. Sometimes this overcoverage is just silly, as with the compulsive over-coverage of deflated footballs in the NFL, or there is endless piling-on about a minor story such as Brian Williams inflated claims of danger after reporting from Iraq.
For sure, the chance to roll out the“Breaking News” slide pumps a network’s ratings. CNN President Jeff Zucker seems to have believed that full and continuous days of coverage of the Malaysian Airliner that disappeared over the Southern Ocean a year ago was justified, even though there was precious little hard news to report. It was the same kind of endless hyping that characterized the network’s laughable coverage of what was a relatively minor January snowstorm in New York. This overreach left an anchor driving down Broadway in a “Blizzard Mobile” in search of a stray car—any car—that might be stuck in the three inches of snow that fell. The halcyon days of network news are clearly in our past.
This kind of fabulism is also the operating principle in the seemingly more science-driven precincts of weather reporting. Inexplicably, The Weather Channel has taken to naming every snow or rain storm that crosses a populated area as if it were a weather disaster. We no longer need a Hurricane to declare a weather emergency. At the rate we are going, all of us will have to suffer the fate of hearing our names–the forenames our parents thoughtfully contemplated–appropriated to identify some crummy storm that has found its way to Wichita.
To be sure, the nation’s Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers did much the same thing in the heyday of yellow journalism during the later part of the 19th Century. Drumming up passion against the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines became a way of life. It’s basically the same hunger for narratives of villains and victims that still serves as the primary formula for most versions of local television news, which feature the very worst that has happened in the last 24 hours. Within metropolitan areas of 4 or 5 million, that means there’s usually some awful mayhem to breathlessly report.
The price of all this media fabulism is that it forces the nation’s attention to news that most viewers cannot use. Riveting images of criminality give viewers little to act on, other than a vague sense that their communities are not safe enough. With uninflated footballs to endlessly mull, who has time for the nation’s systemic challenges–underfunded schools, crumbling highways, aging mass transit, broken city budgets–with admittedly less interesting “B” roll footage, but more important consequences? Read some of the good newspapers that are left in the United States—the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and others—and its easy to still discover what we are missing with single-focus coverage. As the Progressive journalist Bill Moyers asked last December, where are the stories on CIA kidnappings and other governmental “black ops,” the widening gap between rich and poor, or impediments to voting that have been approved in many states? Some of our better media cover these stories some of the time. But cable television producers generally shy away from events that do not also have dramatic images.
Dramatic images of bedlam and bloodshed encourage individuals to view their world as more threatening than it is. Older Americans are especially prone to attitudes of chronic pessimism created by cable news coverage that makes nearly every story appear to confirm their worst fears: governments that don’t work, violent crime that is out of control, schools failing to serve their students, epidemic levels of pregnancy and alcohol use among teens. In fact, even against these perceptions the trend lines generally allow for more optimism rather than less. For example, most American cities are far safer now than they’ve been in the last 40 years. Most states, including my own, have many superb schools. And drinking and pregnancy rates for teens are falling dramatically.
The recommendation researchers make to those who care for the aged is usually always the same: don’t let television news become a dominant activity in a senior’s life. But the same recommendation should hold for the rest of us as well. We all need to resist the tendency to get sucked into the gore that is justified by a news organization’s desire to troll for ratings on the pretext that its the next big story.
