“All is not right in the kingdom,” King Corporate sighed as he sat upon his royal throne in the Great Hall of Commerce. . . . “I need someone who will make the town criers stop gossiping and saying those awful things. We need to improve the Queen’s image and get the townspeople to sing her praises. I need someone who will prove that the moat water is harmless and that these old people are getting sick because they are old.”

—“A Fable,” from the website of the Karwoski & Courage PR firm ¹

You are widely seen as being a bad actor. . . . How do you move from being a bad actor to being seen as a good actor, as a good guy?” Peter Sandman asked, pacing as he addressed the audience of 400 public relations and mine managers from Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.

Billed as the star attraction for the Minerals Council of Australia’s 1998 Annual Environmental Workshop, Sandman was posing a question that the Australian mining industry had been asking itself with increasing urgency. The industry had spent millions of dollars on failed PR and advertising campaigns to improve its reputation. Now Sandman, an affable “risk communication” consultant, was delivering his recipe for success.

Sandman began by ticking off the reasons for the industry’s falling public image: debate over the role that the Rio Tinto mine played in sparking civil war on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea; the dumping of mine tailings in a Papua New Guinea river; the collapse of a tailings dam at another mine; and the push by one company to build a uranium mine in a national park against the wishes of the traditional Aboriginal owners. “There is a growing sense that you screw up a lot, and as a net result it becomes harder to get permission to mine,” Sandman said. The solution, he advised, lay in finding an appropriate “persona” for the industry.

One option, he said, was to present the industry as a “romantic hero . . . which basically says, ‘Well, the critics are wrong. I am not a bad actor. I’m terrific. The mining and minerals industry is what made the world the wonderful place that it is.” He noted, however, that this approach had already failed when it was used as a basis for the mining industry’s TV advertisements.

The next option, he suggested, would be to portray industry as a “misunderstood victim. . . . You feel you are David and [environmentalists] are Goliath.” But this approach was equally unlikely to succeed. “No one thinks you are David,” he said. “You look like Goliath, especially in Australia. ‘Misunderstood victim’ doesn’t play very well.”

A third option would be to present the industry as a “team player.” However, Sandman told the miners, “You can’t get from ‘bad actor’ to ‘team player’ without pausing at some other image. As a characteristic of human nature, I don’t think people can go from thinking you are bad guys to thinking you are good guys, without pausing somewhere in the middle.”

One intermediate position, he suggested, is the role of “reformed sinner,” which “works quite well if you can sell it. . . . ‘Reformed sinner,’ by the way, is what John Brown [of British Petroleum] has successfully done for his organization. It is arguably what Shell has done with respect to Brent Spar. Those are two huge oil companies that have done a very good job of saying to themselves, ‘Everyone thinks we are bad guys. . . . We can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realized we were bad guys and we are going to be better.’ . . . It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys after you have spent awhile in purgatory.”

For the Australian mining industry, however, Sandman thought that even “reformed sinner” would be a “tough sell,” because “the public is rather skeptical when companies say they have reformed.”

Fortunately, there was one more “middle” role that the industry could adopt on its path to salvation. “There is a fifth image that I think works by far the best,” he said, “and that is the ‘caged beast.’ What is the persona of this ‘caged beast’? Useful, perhaps even indispensable, but dangerous. This is the image I would recommend to you. If you want to come back from ‘bad actor’ to ‘team player,’ the easiest path back is to make a case that you would continue to be a bad actor if you could, but you can’t, because the cage works.”

Why should the industry portray itself so negatively? Because, Sandman explained, the “caged beast” was a marketable image that at least would convey the idea that the industry was no longer harmful. “You are behaving much better, not because you want to, not because you have become the Mother Teresa of the mining companies, but because nongovernmental organizations have been successful, regulators have been successful, your neighbors have been successful, the entire society has been successful in persuading you at least that you will make more dollars if you reform.

“You have two basic postures,” Sandman advised. “Either you are free to rape and pillage as you want to, but fortunately you don’t have the taste for it. Or you have a taste for it and you might continue to rape and pillage if you could, but fortunately you can’t get away with it anymore,” he said. “I believe the second is true, and I am certain the second is salable. I can’t imagine why you keep claiming the first except that it nurtures your self-esteem, it reduces your outrage. Once again, whose outrage do you want to mitigate? The critics’ or yours? Do you want to get even or get rich?”

Environmentalism in Moderation

Sandman’s candid advice may seem unusual, but some of the largest companies in the world view him as a risk communications expert and pay big bucks—between $650 and $1,200 per hour—for his analysis. His clients have included the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, the U.S. Department of Energy in connection with the proposed high-level nuclear waste dump in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on radon testing in houses and home testing for lead. What kind of clients would he turn away? “I wouldn’t work to develop risk communication strategies to keep tobacco sales high,” he says. “I have never been asked to work for the handgun industry, but if asked I suspect I’d say no. Now that I think about it, I might even work for the tobacco industry if they were prepared to come clean. There are a few specific companies that I believe have behaved so dishonorably—killing Karen Silkwood comes to mind—that I doubt I would work for them unless they were prepared to come clean.”²

In style and even in substance, Sandman defies many PR industry stereotypes. Formerly a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, he works from a small office in Newton, Massachusetts. In an industry dominated by big companies, he adamantly refuses to let his one-person company get any bigger. He is a prolific writer, describes himself as a “moderate” environmentalist, and works on retainer to the Environmental Defense Fund. He is scathingly critical of manipulative PR techniques and, unlike many PR people, talks candidly about his strategies and tactics. Ask a straight question, and more often than not you’ll get a frank answer.

Scratch the surface, however, and you can find attitudes that are remarkably similar to the rationalizations of conventional spin doctors. Take, for example, the case of Shell’s collaboration with the military dictatorship in Nigeria, where military repression aimed at the indigenous Ogoni people has helped facilitate Shell’s extraction of natural gas from Ogoni lands. When playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa became a leader for the Ogoni people, he was arrested by the country’s military dictatorship. Following a trial before a military tribunal, Saro-Wiwa and seven other Ogoni activists were executed by hanging in 1995.

Sandman sighs when asked if Shell deserved the international condemnation it received followed the killings. “Oh boy, is that hard,” he says. “I think the outrage was absolutely legitimate. I also think that Shell had nothing it could have done.” While acknowledging the Ogoni grievances as “largely justified,” Sandman characterizes Saro-Wiwa as the “Tom Paine” of the Ogoni and describes their campaign as an armed rebellion. “Though Saro-Wiwa was not armed . . . he was their pamphleteer,” he says. “Some of the people with whom he was executed were soldiers in this rebellion.”

Setting aside the question of whether people like Thomas Paine deserve to be killed, the facts themselves in Sandman’s rationalization are strongly disputed by Andy Rowell, a Britain-based freelance writer who has monitored Shell’s activities since 1992. “Sandman’s views are typical of a corporate spin doctor relying on information from a client. They bear no relation to the truth about the events which actually occurred in Nigeria,” says Rowell, who is the author of numerous articles on the subject as well as the book Green Backlash. “Sandman’s story is not what happened, but what Shell wants us to believe happened,” Rowell says. “It is a virtual reality, which has been worked out in PR offices in Europe. . . . The Ogoni struggle was a non-violent struggle for ecological and social justice. It was not an armed rebellion. All they were demanding was an end to the double standards of the oil industry that had devastated their environment, and a greater share of the oil wealth that was drilled from under their land. The Ogoni suffered a brutal backlash. Over 2,000 were killed, 30,000 made homeless, and countless others were raped and tortured by the Nigerian military, which received logistical and financial support from Shell.”³

Shell is Nigeria’s largest foreign investor, earning an estimated $312 million a year in profits from its oil operations there. Its high-pressure pipelines crisscross the Niger Delta where the Ogoni live, emitting air and noise pollution as well as bright flames of light, sometimes as close as 100 meters from Ogoni houses. Massive oil spills and unlined waste pits from company operations have also contributed to the devastation of the region.

Sandman’s claim that Shell was powerless to prevent the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa also repeats the official company line. “Some campaigning groups say we should intervene in the political process,” Shell stated around the time of the execution. “But even if we could, we should never do so. Politics is the business of governments and politicians. The world where companies use their economic influence to prop up or bring down governments would be a frightening and bleak one indeed.”⁴

Rowell and other observers familiar with Shell’s massive presence in Nigeria say that reality belies the talk about nonintervention. When local Ogoni communities began organizing in 1990, Shell in fact sent a letter asking the Nigerian government to “urgently provide us with security protection.” The government sent in its notorious Mobile Police Force, whose actions included the massacre of 80 people in the village of Umuechem in 1991. In 1993, the growing opposition to Shell culminated in a 300,000-person mass rally, and Shell was forced to suspend its operations in the Niger Delta. That same year, General Sani Abacha took control of the country and began a vigorous persecution of the protesters, killing more than 2,000 people. Internal memos from Nigerian security forces document Shell’s support of the Nigerian military, including payments to soldiers engaged in what one memo described as “ruthless military operations . . . undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence.” Military tactics included “wasting operations” (killings) coupled with “psychological tactics” and the “restriction of unauthorized visitors, especially those from Europe to the Ogoni.”⁵

“Shell is involved in Nigerian politics up to their neck,” said Ken Saro-Wiwa’s younger brother, Dr. Owens Wiwa. “If they had threatened to withdraw from Nigeria unless Ken was released, he would have been alive today.” Wiwa recounted his own personal meetings with Brian Anderson, the head of Shell in Nigeria, on three separate occasions during the months leading up to the executions. “Each time I asked him to help get my brother and others out,” Wiwa said. “He said he would be able to get Ken and the others freed if we stopped the protest campaign abroad. I was very shocked. Even if I had wanted to, I didn’t have the power to control the international environmental protests.”⁶

Calculating Outrage

As the Nigeria example suggests, Sandman tends to accommodate himself to his clients’ views, but this does not mean that he merely tells them what they want to hear. As a specialist in what he calls “outrage management,” he tells companies that they have to change their behavior, at least on the surface, if they want to win public acceptance.

Sandman’s theories have been programmed into Outrage, a software package designed to assist companies in predicting and managing the anger of “stakeholders” affected by corporate actions. The Outrage software sells for $3,000 a copy or $48,000 for a worldwide license. A demonstration version is also available, which provides a revealing look at the limits of Sandman’s approach to corporate enlightenment. The demo offers a hypothetical sample “situation definition” that lays out the following scenario: “Our factory in the South Side neighborhood has long had visible air emissions, sometimes very thick. The poor, minority residents, with whom we have very little relationship, recently began organizing to do something about the problem, maybe even shut us down.” The demo then leads users through the steps needed to track and categorize people as allies, neutrals, or opponents. Among the sample “opponents,” it lists names including “S.S. Latino Assn.,” “Mrs. Charles,” “City Air Quality Board,” “Sierra Club,” “Greenpeace,” “South Side Elementary School,” and “nearest neighbors.”

“For obvious reasons, we are also interested in how much power each important stakeholder can bring to bear,” the demo explains. It invites users to use a fairly crude but effective formula that maps the overlap between “passion” and “power” among stakeholders. Depending on how they rank in these two areas, the company can choose one of four strategies: “deflect, defer, dismiss, or defeat.” Stakeholders with power but no passion should be “deflected.” Distract them, change the subject, or just wait them out until their attention wanders elsewhere. People with passion but no power, on the other hand, can be “defeated.” Sure they care, but can they do anything about it? And people with neither passion nor power are easier still. Just “dismiss” them. The one occasion when real reform is necessary, Sandman says, is when dealing with people who have both high passion and high power. Those people are “a force to reckon with,” and the company will eventually have to “defer” to their demands—“one way or another, to one extent or another.”

In most cases, Sandman believes that the public inaccurately perceives the level of hazard and risk associated with a company’s activities. Where the public and the experts disagree, he thinks the experts are usually right. “The most usual situation,” he says, is that “the company isn’t doing a lot of damage, but is acting like a jerk: unresponsive, contemptuous, even dishonest. The company thinks that because it isn’t doing a lot of damage, it is entitled to act like a jerk. The public thinks that because the company is acting like a jerk, it must be doing a lot of damage.”

This analysis suggests that rather than focusing on real hazards or harm to the public, companies should focus their public relations attention on perceptions of process. Does the public think the company is “responsive” or “unresponsive”? Is it “honest” or “lying”? Do decisions that affect the community seem “voluntary” or “coerced”? Is the company seen as doing something “natural” or “industrial”? “Familiar” vs. “exotic”? “Fair” vs. “unfair”? Answer these questions, Sandman says, and you are well on your way to managing public outrage. In order to stop seeming like jerks, companies should adopt a posture of apologetic humility in their public communications. “Acknowledge your prior misbehavior,” he advises—within certain limits. “I don’t chiefly mean things you have done that nobody knows you have done and when we find out you will go to jail,” he adds. “If there are any of these, I urge you to seek legal counsel before you seek communication counsel. I’m talking about negative things on the public record. . . . Should you keep talking about them or is it enough that you have revealed them once? The argument I want to make is that you should keep talking about them incessantly. You should wallow in them.”

The reasoning behind this strategy of public humility is encapsulated in a formula that Sandman has invented and which is now widely quoted within the public relations industry. Humility helps reduce public outrage, he explains, and public outrage can be as big a threat to corporate profits as any actual hazard. “Risk,” he says, “equals hazard plus outrage.”

This deceptively simple formula has become a staple in PR industry discussions of risk communications. It has been adopted as gospel by leading practitioners such as James Lindheim at Burson-Marsteller and Thomas Buckmaster, chairman and general manager of the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton. By understanding that risk equals hazard plus outrage, Buckmaster says, risk communicators can overcome the fear and hostility of “grassroots members, stakeholders and the public at large.” The “irrational” factor of outrage, he says, “makes it impossible to teach anyone anything—when they are afraid. . . . Once people are outraged, they don’t listen to hazard statistics . . . don’t use numerical risk comparisons.” In fact, he says, “managing the outrage is more important than managing the risk.”⁷

Rolling the Dice

For most people, “risk” and “hazard” are virtual synonyms, although conventional risk analysts assign them somewhat different meanings. A sharp knife blade, they will tell you, is an example of a hazard, while risk is the probability that the knife will actually hurt someone. Sandman’s formula, however, is concerned with a different kind of risk—namely, the probability that a given hazard will hurt a company’s bottom line. His formula recognizes that beyond the direct liabilities associated with a hazard, a company’s reputation and profitability are affected by the way the public reacts to it.

Businesses are accustomed to thinking of risk as an economic reality. They take a serious approach to dealing with it and have evolved rigorous and elaborate systems for managing it, with their own specialized vocabulary: country risk, currency exchange risk, inflation and price risk, credit risk, insurance, cost of residual uncertainty, risk pooling, probability, variation, standard deviation, diversification. “Every financial firm of any substance has a formal risk management department,” says Daniel Geer, an e-commerce security expert. “The financial world in its entirety is about packaging risk so that it can be bought and sold, i.e., so that risk can be securitized and finely enough graded to be managed at a profit. Everything from the lowly car loan to the most exotic derivative security is a risk-reward trade-off. Don’t for a minute underestimate the amount of money to be made on Wall Street, London and/or Tokyo when you can invent a new way to package risk. . . . You don’t have to understand forward swaptions, collateralized mortgage obligations, yield burning, or anything else to understand that risk management is where the money is. In a capitalist world, if something is where the money is, that something rules. Risk is that something.”⁸

Businesspeople gamble with money, and a bad gamble simply means that someone loses some cash. “Risk analysis” of chemicals and other potential environmental and health risks is derived from “cost-benefit analysis,” which in turn derives from simple profit-and-loss accounting used by private companies. Arbitrary and indefensible assumptions enter the equation, however, when this methodology is used to gamble on things as important as human lives or the natural environment in which people live. What is the dollar value, after all, of a human life? What is the value of the air we breathe, the fertility of our soil, or our continued health and ability to have children? A price can be put on the cost of hospital care for cancer patients, but what price can we put on the suffering that the patients and their families endure? These questions have been asked by government regulators and in product-liability lawsuits, with widely varying answers.

A growing number of hard decisions facing modern societies involve the question: “How safe is safe enough?” Nuclear waste, recombinant DNA, food additives, and chemical plant explosions are just a few of the effects of technological progress that raise this question. The answers are difficult, because they involve multiple uncertainties: uncertainty about the magnitude of the risk at hand, contradictory data and theories, business trade secrets, conflicting social values, disagreements between technical experts and the public at large. What makes these problems even more intractable is that politics and sophistry are frequently used to shift the blame away from those who cause the harm to those who suffer the consequences. “Risk analysis is a subtle discipline,” observes Ian Stewart, a mathematics professor at Warwick University in England. “It is an elaborate and rather naive procedure that can be abused in several ways. One abuse is to exaggerate benefits and tone down risks. A particularly nasty kind occurs when one group takes the risk but a different group reaps the benefit.”⁹ Risk management is not merely a technical discipline. Psychology, economics, politics, and the power of vested interests all lurk beneath the seemingly objective language of “balancing risks against benefits.”

The question of which risks are acceptable depends ultimately on where the person passing judgment stands in relation to those risks. Under our current regulatory system, the risk of chemical exposures is usually passed on to the people who suffer those exposures. If 10 or 20 years later they come down with cancer or their children suffer health problems, identifying the cause—let alone proving it in a court of law—is virtually impossible. Companies find this arrangement profitable, and it certainly encourages technological innovation, but the cost to others can be considerable, as the tobacco industry and the makers of leaded gasoline have tragically proven.

“Risk assessment is a decision-making technique that first came into use during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was trained as a nuclear engineer,” says Peter Montague, the editor of Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, a newsletter that offers weekly investigative reporting and opinion on issues of ecology and public health. “At its best, risk assessment is an honest attempt to find a rational basis for decisions, by analyzing the available scientific evidence. In theory it is still an attractive ideal,” Montague says. “However, 20 years of actual practice have badly tarnished the ideal of risk assessment and have sullied the reputation of many a risk assessor.” It arose, he says, in response to the growing realization that “many modern technologies had far surpassed human understanding, giving rise to by-products that were dangerous, long-lived, and completely unanticipated.” The same technologies that have created unparalleled wealth have also created unparalleled problems with municipal and industrial wastes, agricultural chemicals, auto exhausts, smokestack emissions, and greenhouse gases.

As government regulators and pollution-producing industries came under pressure in the 1970s to address these problems, they began devising quantitative measurements to assess impacts, to weigh risks against benefits, and to establish numerical thresholds that would distinguish between dangerous and safe exposure levels. The effort to develop these quantitative standards, however, is fraught with difficulties. The natural environment is quite different from a laboratory, and laboratory studies cannot hope to duplicate the myriad conditions and environments into which chemical compounds are being released. Financial realities also limit the quality of the information that can be generated through laboratory research. To determine whether a chemical causes cancer, for example, researchers typically take a relatively small number of mice and pump them with large quantities of the chemical in question, because the alternative approach—using tens of thousands of mice and subjecting them to lower exposures—would cost a fortune. The effect of low-dose exposures is estimated by statistical extrapolation from the high-dose exposures. When one set of researchers set out to assess the accuracy of high-dose to low-dose extrapolation models, however, they found that the predicted low-dose results vary by a factor of a million. This, they note, “is like not knowing whether you have enough money to buy a cup of coffee or pay off the national debt.”¹⁰

In 1995, three well-known and respected risk assessors—Anna Fan, Robert Howd, and Brian Davis—published a detailed summary of the status of risk assessment, in which they pointed out that there is no scientific agreement on which tests to use to determine whether someone has suffered immune system, nervous system, or genetic damage. In other words, the best available science lacks the tools with which to provide definite, quantitative answers to the questions that are at the heart of risk assessment. “There are other problems with risk assessments,” Montague observes. “Science has no way to analyze the effects of multiple exposures, and almost all modern humans are routinely subjected to multiple exposures: pesticides, automobile exhaust, dioxins in meat, fish and dairy products; prescription drugs; tobacco smoke; food additives; ultraviolet sunlight passing through the earth’s damaged ozone shield; and so on. Determining the cumulative effect of these insults is a scientific impossibility, so most risk assessors simply exclude these inconvenient realities. But the resulting risk assessment is bogus. . . . Risk assessment, it is now clear, promises what it cannot deliver, and so is misleading at best and fraudulent at worst. It pretends to provide a rational assessment of ‘risk’ or ‘safety,’ but it can do no such thing because the required data are simply not available, nor are standardized methods of interpretation.”¹¹

Publicly, industry and government remain committed to risk assessment, but defectors are increasingly willing to admit that it is an art rather than a science. Different risk assessors, using the same evidence, can easily come up with radically opposed conclusions as to the costs and benefits of a course of action. Where uncertainty reigns, spin doctors rush in to fill the information vacuum. Notwithstanding its limitations, the methodology of risk assessment offers important advantages to the corporate spin doctor. “These methods are especially valuable politically in that their use tends to obscure the basic policy questions of government regulation of business in a technocratic haze of numbers (numbers readily manipulated), focusing attention upon the statistics rather than the issues,” observes science historian David Noble. “The methods offer other advantages as well, not least of which is the seeming monopoly on rationality itself. All qualitative or subjective decision-making is relegated to the realm of irrationality and dismissed without a hearing. By invalidating experience and intuition, they thereby disqualify all but the technically initiated from taking part in the debate, which becomes enshrouded in an impenetrable cloak of mystery. People are encouraged to suspend their own judgment and abandon responsibility to the experts (who have already surrendered their responsibility to their paymasters).”¹²

Risk analysis comes in a variety of flavors. One approach seeks to quantify everything in the analysis, assigning dollar values to such unquantifiable, qualitative things as human lives and environmental beauty, along with genuinely quantifiable factors such as corporate profits and wealth created. The analyst then totals up the sum of various alternatives, and whichever one costs the least is deemed the most “acceptable” risk. Another approach relies heavily on comparisons between different types of risks. If the risk to health posed by the use of a technology or chemical is questioned, the analyst calculates the likelihood of someone dying from exposure to that chemical and shows that it is less likely than the risk of dying from other events such as a car crash or drowning in a flood. Since people choose to drive cars and live downstream from dams, those risks must be acceptable to the public, the analyst concludes, and therefore this chemical must be acceptable too.

“If a person is horrified by the consequences of a carcinogenic pollutant, he is reminded that every day he takes greater risks driving to work, so what’s all the fuss: Be consistent,” Noble observes. “The appealing thing about such methods for the analyst aside from the fact that they reinforce his prerogatives is that they so often yield counter-intuitive results; the answers come out in ways one would not have anticipated (unless, of course, one were the analyst). The happy consequence of this, for the promoters of the techniques, is that the naïveté of the non-specialist is forever being revealed; the public is thus further cautioned about relying upon their experience and intuition and encouraged instead to rely upon the wisdom of the expert who alone can put things in perspective.”¹³

H. W. Lewis, a professor of physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara who has chaired numerous government risk-assessment committees on defense, nuclear power, and other matters, exemplifies the attitudes of the modern risk assessor. He has written a book, Technological Risk, which promises to reveal the real dangers, “if any, of toxic chemicals, the greenhouse effect, microwave radiation, nuclear power, air travel, automobile travel, carcinogens of all kinds, and other threats to our peace of mind.” It offers mortality tables and a lesson in the statistical techniques used to measure risk and is in many ways a useful and thoughtful guide. Lewis believes that the problem of overpopulation is more serious and pressing than technological risk, a judgment with which many reasonable people would certainly agree. He points out that some of the largest risks confronting individuals today stem from activities such as smoking and automobile use, facts that are indisputable. He notes furthermore that it is impossible to eliminate all risk from life, which is also indisputable. Why, then, he asks, do people worry about little things like nuclear waste and pesticides, which he regards as trivial risks? The answer, he concludes, is that the public is irrational and poorly educated. “The fraction of our population that believes in UFOs and reincarnation is mind-boggling, less than half of us know that the earth goes around the sun once a year, and it is an unending struggle to keep the teaching of evolution legal in the schools,” he writes. “Our very literacy as a nation is in danger.”¹⁴

The ignorance of the masses is such a serious problem, Lewis believes, that democracy itself is a dangerous proposition. “We are a participatory democracy and it is everyone’s country, not just the educated,” he writes. “The common good is ill served by the democratic process. The problem is exacerbated by the emergence of groups of persuasive people who specialize in technology-bashing and exploitation of fear, make their livings thereby, and have been embraced by large segments of the media as experts.”¹⁵

Paradoxically, however, Lewis also believes that “the core of the anti-technology movement today” is composed not of society’s least-educated members, but of the wealthiest and therefore the best-educated. “It seems to be an upper-middle-class phenomenon,” he writes. “We in the affluent societies are preoccupied with safety, while risk is recognized as a normal condition of existence by the less affluent. . . . Such people are genuinely concerned that technology may be destroying the environment, and have presumably never seen the environment in other, less technically advanced, countries.”¹⁶

Following this logic to its conclusion would seem to suggest that we should be taking our cues on matters pertaining to risk from impoverished sweatshop laborers in Central America, but since many of them are indeed genuinely illiterate and in any case rarely receive invitations to write books or serve on risk-assessment committees, the burden falls upon Lewis himself—a member of the educated upper middle class—to speak on their behalf.

When Risk Turns to Crisis

One problem with efforts to assess risk is that many factors—notoriously, the human factor—can never be quantified. Take, for example, the case of the 1984 poison leak in Bhopal, India, which is widely recognized as the world’s worst industrial accident. The Bhopal disaster killed more than 2,000 people and seriously injured an estimated 200,000, many of whom suffered permanent blindness and damage to their respiratory systems. The disaster occurred when a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide released methyl isocyanate gas, creating what Time magazine called “a vast, dense fog of death” that wiped out whole neighborhoods. “Even more horrifying than the number of dead,” wrote Fortune magazine, “was the appalling nature of their dying—crowds of men, women and children scurrying madly in the dark, twitching and writhing like the insects for whom the poison was intended.”¹⁷

Peter Sandman, who helped advise Union Carbide in the aftermath of the disaster, believes that the accident was triggered by deliberate employee sabotage. “Union Carbide has persuasive evidence,” he claims. “The guilty party probably didn’t intend to kill and maim thousands of people; he just wanted to get even for some real or imagined mistreatment by ruining a batch of methyl isocyanate.”¹⁸ In making this claim, he is repeating a theory that Union Carbide has repeatedly floated over the years. However, the company has never provided enough specifics to enable independent verification of whether this was indeed what happened.¹⁹ Even if this version of events is true, of course, it in no way mitigates the company’s responsibility for the disaster. A whole cascade of failed safety measures went into the Bhopal tragedy. At the time of its occurrence, a refrigeration unit designed to prevent just such a catastrophe was shut down and had been inoperative for five months. Other fail-safe devices were also out of commission. The plant was understaffed, and employees were inadequately trained due to budget cutbacks. The plant lacked a computerized monitoring system for detecting toxic releases. Instead, workers were in the habit of recognizing leaks when their noses would burn and their eyes would water. No alarm system existed for warning the surrounding community, and no effort had been made to develop evacuation procedures and other emergency plans that could have saved many lives. As the New York Times concluded in its report, Bhopal was “the result of operating errors, design flaws, maintenance failures, and training deficiencies,” all of which reflected corporate management decisions—human factors, in other words, not technical ones.²⁰

“There are two kinds of uncertainty,” Montague notes. “First, there is risk, which is an event with a known probability (such as the risk of losing your life in a car this year—the accident and death rates are known). Then there is true uncertainty, which is an event with unknown probability.” The human factor, and many of the risks associated with environmental problems, involve true uncertainty. Since these risks cannot be quantified, they tend to be treated as ghosts within the machine of risk assessment—minimized, or subjected to arbitrary estimates based on guess-work rather than hard knowledge.

In the wake of most major accidents it is usually easy to find embarrassing examples of experts who predicted beforehand that such an event could never, ever occur. “I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. . . . Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that,” said Edward J. Smith, captain of the Titanic.²¹ A year before the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, a Soviet deputy minister of the power industry announced that Soviet engineers were confident that you’d have to wait 100,000 years before the Chernobyl reactor had a serious accident. ²² Shortly before the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, Bryan O’Connor, NASA’s Washington-based director of the shuttle program, recalls that he “asked someone what the probability risk assessment was for the loss of a shuttle. I was told it was one in ten thousand.”²³

When actual disaster strikes, risk communications gives way to another PR specialty known as “crisis management.” Emerging in the aftermath of the 1979 nuclear near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, crisis management is now taught by highly paid consultants in industry seminars and conferences. Crisis managers help companies cope with bad publicity in the wake of everything from sexual harassment cases and embezzlement scandals to plant explosions, strikes, employee shootings, toxic leaks, product tamperings, and food poisonings. Examples include the Exxon Valdez oil spill, E. coli-contaminated hamburgers at the Jack in the Box restaurant chain, the crash of TWA Flight 800, and the Pan Am Lockerbie disaster.

Unlike risk communicators, whose job is usually to tell the public that hazards are slight and risk is remote, crisis managers warn their clients that danger is everywhere and disasters are bound to happen. “There are two kinds of companies: those that have had crises, and those that will,” proclaimed PR Week in May 1999. “It is a matter of timing and prescience but sooner or later most companies will probably need a crisis expert to help them.” The Pittsburgh managing director for the Ketchum PR firm estimated in 1999 that 35 to 40 percent of the income for his unit came from crisis counseling. In the near future, PR Week predicted, “crisis consulting could mean hundreds of millions of dollars to the PR industry.”²⁴

“All corporations are living closer to the edge, increasing the potential of crises. Things are being done faster with fewer people, which is adding more risk,” explained Robert Wilkerson of the Corporate Response Group, a PR firm whose crisis résumé includes a major fraud case and labor dispute in Europe, a food embargo, a plane crash, oil spills, product recalls, and two hostile corporate takeovers.²⁵

As the range of these examples indicates, crisis management is not limited to health and safety issues. Spin doctors repair the reputations of politicians, celebrities, and corporations alike—anyone, in fact, who is rich enough to afford the service. Rubenstein Associates, owned by attorney Howard Rubenstein, is considered one of the top crisis managers in the business. The firm’s clients have included George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, “Queen of Mean” Leona Helmsley, and sportscaster Marv Albert. Rubenstein came to the aid of billionaire Adnan Khashoggi when he was accused of helping Imelda Marcos defraud the Philippines, saw both Murdoch and Trump through high-profile divorces, and soothed Kathie Lee Gifford’s embarrassment during husband Frank’s extramarital fling and also when it was discovered that child labor was being used in sweatshops to manufacture clothing that bore her name.

“For me, it’s fascinating to be able to deal with a Kathy Lee Gifford problem or a Leona Helmsley case. It’s the kind of thing that pushes your intellectual skills,” says Rubenstein vice president Gary Lewi. Speaking at a PR seminar titled “How to Polish a Tarnished Reputation,” Lewi stressed the moral as well as mental rigor of his craft. “There was nothing unethical in our dealings with Kathie Lee Gifford,” he said. As for Leona Helmsley, “I think that while she may be a tough SOB, it’s not the kind of thing you go to jail for. . . . At the end of the day, you only have your ethics. No client is going to be in a situation where they dictate to you your morality and your ethics. If I find myself lying to the press or stonewalling to the press, and the press is no longer taking my phone calls because they regard me as a lying heathen, I might as well open up a deli.” Asked for an example of a client that Rubenstein has turned away, he answered, “There was a fellow who was trafficking kiddie porn on the Internet. The company canned him and wanted to rebuild its image, and we declined. It was clearly something that had gone on for a while, where the corporate culture had allowed it. We didn’t want to go anywhere near it.”²⁶

Sometimes, however, the PR industry seems to take perverse pleasure in exploring the “intellectual” challenge of rehabilitating clients who are appallingly beyond the pale. In the July 1997 issue of Public Relations Tactics, a monthly tabloid published by the Public Relations Society of America, writer Steve Crescenzo examined the case of Swiss authorities who were being sued by Jewish Holocaust survivors seeking to reclaim the assets of their murdered family members. “Would you accept as a client someone who knowingly purchased gold that had been pulled from the teeth of people murdered by the Nazis?” Crescenzo asked, and then went on to praise the work of PR firms that indeed accepted just those sorts of clients.²⁷ Following the rape conviction of Mike Tyson and the controversial acquittal of O. J. Simpson on murder charges, Public Relations Tactics devoted its cover story and several accompanying articles to another challenging PR problem: “What do you prescribe for a public relations client who’s a world-class athlete, charged with a vicious crime, and forced to endure a protracted incarceration?” It surveyed a variety of PR professionals, whose free advice for Tyson and Simpson included the following:

• “Tyson’s handlers need to ‘reinvent’ him, similar to the way Richard Nixon was reinvented.”

• Tyson “ought to think seriously about cultivating a handful of journalists he can trust and then build on those few relationships.”

• Simpson “has a lot of rebuilding to do,” observed one PR director. But Run Fuhs, a PR manager for the Whirlpool Corporation, opined that “through some sort of public atonement process he could probably serve as a celebrity spokesman in a limited situation.”

• For now, Simpson’s best strategy is to “retreat for a time, say little, speak humbly, and become a nice guy,” suggested another PR pro. “He’ll have to feed himself back slowly. Public service would be a good start.”²⁸

The PR formula for Simpson or Tyson, in other words, would be basically similar to the advice that Peter Sandman offers the Australian mining industry and other companies faced with bad publicity. Speak softly. Show humility. Create a process of “public atonement” for your sins. Crisis Communications, a PR textbook, offers the following observation in a case-study analysis of the Exxon Valdez oil spill: “If the media had captured, on video and film, the CEO on the site at Prince William Sound holding an oil-covered bird in his hand and looking as if he were crying, the entire story would be told differently today.”²⁹ There may be no point crying over spilt oil, but there is certainly a point to looking like you’re crying.

Dress Rehearsals for Disaster

When PR firms are not fending off a real crisis, they help their clients practice for the ones that haven’t happened yet. In April 1999, the Hill & Knowlton PR firm unveiled The Virtual Crisis, an interactive CD-ROM that simulates a crisis exercise. Don’t look for it in stores, though. “The Virtual Crisis is not available as a stand-alone CD-ROM,” reported PR Week. “Two H&K facilitators, specially trained to conduct the simulation, must be present to lead as many as 20 corporate team leaders through the exercise. Following the simulation (usually six hours in length), the H&K staff provides a comprehensive oral critique of the participants’ decisions and responses. Pricing for the entire exercise is $10,000. . . . It is designed for top-level executives . . . who, in the case of a real crisis, would be called upon to act and to communicate the appropriate response.” Developed by H&K managing director Richard Hyde, who was part of the PR firm’s crisis management team at Three Mile Island, the exercise lets “participants attempt to ward off the media” while simultaneously coping with “a whole set of other distractions.”³⁰

Some crisis management experts specialize in “war games” that go beyond computer simulations and create actual on-the-ground situations to give corporate executives a more realistic role-playing experience. In one such drill, held after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the PR firm of Kamer-Singer & Associates used popcorn and orange peels in place of actual oil to simulate a 10,000-barrel spill during a two-day “megadrill” that involved some 600 Chevron employees. As employees pretend-battled to contain the fake oil spill, Chevron’s executives practiced handling a barrage of questions and complaints from Kamer-Singer’s staff and the company’s own internal PR people, who played the role of various outsiders: environmental activists, grandstanding politicians, aggrieved area residents, skeptical reporters, and so forth.

Crisis drills are more than mere exercises in PR symbolism. Kamer-Singer’s Larry Kamer notes that in a real crisis, people face stress, high emotions and other pressures that can exacerbate the original problem. Practicing for a crisis beforehand enables managers to test the vulnerabilities in a contingency plan, and may help save lives and property when a real crisis occurs. “Responding to a crisis or emergency without practice is highly risky,” Kamer says. “More importantly, it’s irresponsible. . . . A real crisis is no time to test plans or capabilities. You don’t want to be in the middle of the corporate equivalent of germ warfare before you find out whether the plan works or not.”³¹

Nevertheless, the symbolism and stagecraft associated with Kamer-Singer’s disaster rehearsals make interesting reading. In 1997, PR industry writer Paul Holmes participated in one such exercise and wrote about it as the cover story for an issue of his publication, Reputation Management. During the drill, he stated, the PR team worked from “four separate ‘scripts’ that are essentially lists of telephone calls to be made by the media, residents, politicians, and ultimately people with claims against the company.” Just as a conventional theatrical production tells us something about the worldview of its creators and audience, the scripts that Kamer-Singer prepared for Chevron provide an interesting peek at the PR/corporate worldview.

To begin with, Kamer-Singer’s script carefully minimizes the possibility of actual corporate culpability. The oil spill that begins its fictional version of a crisis occurs when a privately piloted airplane inexplicably crashes into one of the company’s oil tanks. As the drama unfolds, members of the general public appear in a succession of brief roles in which they are stereotyped as quaint troublemakers at best, dangerous fools at worst. “The community calls (by far the most entertaining, since they allow for almost infinite improvisation) range from a guy with a million-dollar view who was planning to sell his home this weekend to an irate commuter whose ferry was canceled to an elderly gentleman who broke his ankle falling out of bed after hearing the crash,” Holmes writes. Reporters first accuse the company of cutting corners for deciding that its cleanup crew will not work through the night, and then accuse it of bowing to political pressure when it changes its mind. A governor, a congressman, and a senator each call, threatening investigations. The mayor also calls, demanding on short notice to tour the disaster with an entourage of reporters, then fails to show up at the agreed-upon time. The company’s labor union uses the oil spill as a pretext to threaten a strike. An environmental activist group sets up a website, blasting the company for allowing the spill to occur. An area resident complains that one of the company’s cleanup vehicles ran over her cat. Another resident calls, threatening to “buy myself an [expletive deleted] gun and I’m going to pay you guys a little visit.” A producer calls from the “Bush Wambaugh show, one of this country’s leading conservative commentators. . . . Mr. Wambaugh is very concerned that this country is being taken over by pencil-pushing bureaucrats, feminazis, and tree huggers, and he wants to know why a giant corporation like Chevron is sucking up to namby-pamby liberals instead of protecting the interests of its shareholders.”³²

Come again? The producer for “Mr. Wambaugh” goes on to explain: “Your company is engaged in rescuing oil-covered birds from the water and from the shore, correct? . . . Then they’re cleaned up. And your company pays for the cleaning materials and the cost of the centers themselves, and pays people to supervise the cleanup? . . . Isn’t it true that even after being cleaned up, more than 90 percent of these birds will die anyway?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have that information. I’ll have to look into it,” the company’s PR man diplomatically replies. Holmes notes that Wambaugh’s observation “is, in fact, true. Almost all the birds ‘rescued’ after being covered in oil die anyway. The main advantage of cleaning them off is that it makes local volunteers feel as though they are doing something useful. It’s also an effective way to convey the company’s environmental sensitivity, even if it is largely a symbolic gesture.”³³