• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, November 14, 2005

With business acumen that is typical of self-absorbed, high-profile Hollywood stars, Tom Cruise has fired his personal publicist, replacing her with one of the industry's "most respected veterans." Apparently the departed one is taking the fall for Cruise being "brutalized in the press both for his relationship with actress Katie Holmes and his avid advocacy of Scientology, particularly its views concerning psychiatry and medically prescribed drugs," as reported in one story.

While I have done PR for a number of people who consider themselves "rock stars" in their own little niches, it was never my ambition to attach myself to a theatrical star, since they have a tenuous grip on reality at best. By the same token, few media executives have much of a clue how PR works, either.

I can say with some degree of confidence that Tom's former flack did not encourage him to jump up and down on Oprah's sofa, and probably begged him repeatedly to keep his idiotic thoughts about psychiatry and medically prescribed drugs to himself. It reminded me of when I worked (briefly) for Dick Snyder, then chairman of Simon & Schuster and notorious for his cruelty to employees. After one of his legendary short-man-in-a-tall-man's-world outbursts, I told him: "Look, I can work for 18 months to repair your reputation and make it appear to the outside world that you are in fact a human being, but in 30 seconds of childish behavior you can erase all that work."

"You want me to become somebody I'm not," he protested. To which I said: "No shit, you are in fact your own worst enemy, and if you don't change, I can't help you." Needless to say, I was drummed out of the corps at His earliest convenience.

Good reporters do not sit around waiting for e-mailed press releases from PR folks to start their days. They make calls and talk to your competition, who will tell them every dirty little secret about you they can think of. Or better yet, they will talk to one of your current or recent former employees--who thinks you are a horse's ass--to get an unfiltered view of how you make the sausage.

PR is not a tool to kick dust over your mistakes. It is a way to clearly communicate what you are about (and why it might be newsworthy), hopefully without a lot of hyperbolic language that frankly hurts you more than it helps. Can you pull the wool over a reporter's eyes once in a while? Sure, but sooner or later he will find out and spend the rest of his career kicking your butt.

Relations with reporters become adversarial when you lie to them or tell them less than the whole truth (as you know it), or constantly trash your competitors.

If you screw up your business, don't expect your PR folks to do anything more than help you clean up the mess with as much transparency as you can stomach. Don't ask them to cover it up or "make it go away." Even the most powerful PR folks don't control where reporters get their information--and believe me, there are plenty of folks inside and outside your company who are happy to be "unnamed sources" when you drop the ball. Worst possible idea: a "don't talk to the press" policy. It will be ignored or even e-mailed to Web sites or bloggers just waiting to post it.

Publicity can be a two-edged sword. It can help you raise your profile with potential customers or investors, but at the same time it puts you in play with reporters who are obligated to report the bad along with the good. Be wary if your PR folks assure you that under their direction, the waters will always be calm and friendly.

Life ain't like that. Ask Tom Cruise.