Frankie Flack: In defense of flackery

There is this guy, Dave, who plays on my softball team. He thinks I have the world’s worst job because I have to interact with the media.

“Hate those guys,” he tells me. “Useless, all of them. No faith in those guys at all.”

Every time he starts railing on the media, I have to go on the defensive. Try to dig a little deeper. Ask him why he doesn’t believe a group of people whose very job description is speaking the truth. And Dave rattles off a list of the people he “can’t stand.” The whole Fox crew makes the list.

But it’s not political. He hates Chris Matthews. Thinks Maureen Dowd is a bore. By the end of his rant, he’s named maybe a dozen different people he’d like to punch in the mouth. Nearly all of them are talking heads, op-ed provocateurs or partisan hacks. Dave doesn’t mention a single ink-stained journo out there doing shoe-leather journalism.

Ask him what he thinks of the “media,” and he jumps, selectively, to a pretty unrepresentative sample.

I thought about Dave today when I saw the posting about how little journalists trust corporate flacks. And I get it, in part. We can be cagey. We don’t like to talk about bad news. But I have to wonder where the trust deficit comes from. Is it a few bad eggs- – the Fox News of PR pros — who are skewing the results?

When 88 percent of respondents say that PR people need to better understand areas of coverage, it’s pretty obvious that the media polled aren’t talking about me or my folks. That’s not to say that we’re a totally benign bunch: we probably over-pitch, we do a crappy job of taking silence as an answer, we whine and parse small distinctions.

But at the top level, I feel confident that we do a decent job of not pitching tech reporters releases about trends in pet adoption.  But I know — and am amazed — that there are flacks out there with thousand-person media lists and a rudimentary knowledge of how to do mail merge. And I fear it’s those yahoos, who may be small in number but huge in terms of volume, who are fucking it up for the rest of us.

That doesn’t address the “trust” piece, and the fact that 90 percent of journalists wish that flacks tell the truth. Here, we’re mostly battling a perception problem.

If spokespeople were lying all over the place, newspapers would be filled with embarrassing “gotcha” moments. If I tell someone the widget plant is at full capacity, and then our quarterly report shows low production, I expect to be skewered.

That’s not happening.

Still, I don’t expect media to pass up the opportunity to bash us. We live in an era where pretty much every interaction, in every corner of society, is frame as an us-vs-them battle, so reporters trashing my folks isn’t a surprise. I hope that journalists don’t take too much pleasure in this little victory in the battle of hack-vs-flack, because the erosion of trusts hits them harder than it does us.

My buddy Dave isn’t alone. Last year, the public’s trust in the media dipped to an all-time low — 40 percent — according to Gallup. But even though Dave is in the majority, he isn’t right. Most journalists are doing a bang-up job of getting accurate information to the people.

And most flacks are doing a bang-up job of getting information out into circulation. I’d rather that polled reporters said they trusted my peers, but — as it is — I’ll sleep fine tonight.