3 Takeaways - How to Not be Manipulated: A Clever, Crafty PR Exec Reveals Tricks of His Trade (#239)

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Warning: People are out to manipulate you. How? With very sophisticated, deceptive PR techniques. Here, one of Washington’s most wily manipulators of news, Phil Elwood, reveals tricks of his trade ��� like astroturfing and detonating bombs in a safe location. The more you know about these tricks, the less likely you’ll be conned by them.

I'm going to begin this episode with my guest reading a quote from his book. You enter a liminal space where truth and reality can be whatever you want. It's almost as if the world freezes, and if you're good at what you do in public relations, you can manipulate things. People, facts, the truth, before the world starts back up again. It doesn't matter what the truth is, the facts get changed, the public takes up your narrative, and you watch as the world resumes turning. Does that really happen? And what are some examples?

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Phil Elwood. After working for nearly 20 years in the Washington Public Relations business for clients, including Livia's Kaddafi and Syria's Assad, as well as many well-known glue chip companies,

Phil Elwood reveals how stories literally get spun out of thin air. His job, which he was superb at, wasn't to manipulate public opinion, but to get others to do it for him. Phil's new book, which is a great read, is All the worst humans, how I made news for dictators, tycoons, and politicians. I'm excited to find out from Phil how a PR operative manipulates people, facts, and the truth so we know what to be on the lookout for. Welcome, Phil, and thanks so much for joining

Three Takeaways today. Thank you so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you so much for having me on the program. I'm really excited to be here. I'm excited too. Let's start with some of your most astonishing campaigns. You ran a no fingerprints campaign to kneecap Los Angeles' bid to host the Soccer World Cup. The campaign for Los Angeles to host the Soccer World Cup was spearheaded by Bill Clinton. Tell us about it. My client at the time was the royal family of Qatar and they engaged the firm I was working for to help them secure their hosting rights to the 2022 World Cup. My job was not to promote the Qataribid. My job was to go negative on our opposition to host the games. And that principally was the United States of America. So we tried a number of different strategies and tactics, but it

wasn't until the U.S. Congress passed a sense of the House resolution. Now, this is a resolution that means absolutely nothing as no enforcement of law. They passed a sense of the House resolution saying they thought the United States should host the World Cup. Well, this enraged my client who instructed my employer to instruct his man in Washington, me, to get a resolution introduced into the US Congress opposing our own bid to host the games. Seemingly an impossible task. Now when my employer told me what he wanted, he said to me, Phil, I said it, you make it true. And then he hung up on me. So what I did was I went out to a bar and I was sitting there having two or three vodka sodas. I was sitting

outside and a group of school children walked by and they were all morbidly obese and this gave me my idea. And on a cocktail napkin I wrote a resolution that said the United States government would not support bids for any international games, World Cup or Olympic, until we fully funded physical education programs in public schools. I then took this napkin and met up with a lobbyist, who I paid $10,000 to, I believe, who got a member of Congress from Detroit to introduce the resolution. I then leaked the text of the resolution to a reporter from a publication called Politico who published an article two days before the vote in Switzerland over who would host the games with the headline World Cup versus gym class.

Now the important part of this was that it showed that not only was there dissension in the US Congress, but dissension in the United States about who should host the games. But when you were involved with this, Los Angeles lost their bid and Qatar won. Exactly. It wasn't just Los Angeles. It was several other cities. Los Angeles was one of the bidding cities. So what they it. But no, LA and the rest of the United States lost the bid. Qatar hosted the games in 2022 and it was pretty rough. So this, what seems like a prank here, getting a resolution introduced, actually, and if this is tragic, turned into a human rights issue. Qatar, unbeknownst to me at the time, Qatar has something called the kafala labor system. It's essentially indentured servitude. They estimate that about 5,000 people died building the stadiums in Qatar. This is one of the

deepest regrets of my career. It is so shocking. And you even included Michelle Obama's words. Yes, she had a whole campaign to get kids moving. So part of the idea in public relations is to fit your strategy into the zeitgeist of the time. And Michelle Obama was very big on childhood obesity. So what we did was use that messaging and just put it into our resolution and got a reporter to write the story that we used as evidence of the dissension of the game. Now, I won't say that I switched a single vote by a FIFA member because there was a lot of bribery going on. But what it did was provide cover for every member who voted against the United States to say, look, not even the US Congress wants it.

How did you wield the power of the press to shame Saudi Arabia into releasing a Turkish barber? That to me was another one of your extraordinary campaigns. Yes, that's the flip side of things. That's one that I'm incredibly proud of. There was a situation where a Turkish barber named Sabri Bagde. Turkish barbers are coveted throughout the Middle East. They're known for being good barbers. So, you can set up a Turkish barber shop in a country and do quite well. Well, he set up a shop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He had an altercation with a client and said the words, God damn it.

And this client called the religious authorities. And on the same day, Sabri Bagde was arrested for blasphemy. And he was given a one-day trial with no lawyer and no translator. And he was condemned to death. My client at the time was a Turkish American who read about this in the Turkish news. He personally translated an article for me that he emailed to me with the subject line, get the English speaking press to write about this. So I thought about what the pitch could possibly be. And well, he was a barber. So the first thing that came to my mind was barbarism. And so I emailed several reporters and said,

look, I think you need to cover this case of this Turkish barber. Finally, the Huffington Post, two reporters there who were very good friends of mine, wrote a story that detailed the entire thing. So what I did was I sent that to a bunch of other journalists. And then a couple of weeks later, Saudi Arabia was hosting a conference at the United Nations on, of all things, religious tolerance. And I sent a few reporters to go and ask them questions about this Turkish barber. Shortly thereafter, he was given a pardon by what is called the Keeper of the Two Great Mosques, or the King of Saudi Arabia, and a one-way ticket to Istanbul and told never to come back to the kingdom, which I am sure he hasn't.

So we helped to get a guy off of death row in Saudi Arabia using Shane. Danielle Pletka Phenomenal that you got him off of death row and free. Before we come back, when I ask you more about your tactics and how you invisibly influence news, let's talk about some more examples because the examples are extraordinary. Let's talk about a blue chip client. When you worked for one of the biggest public relation firms in the United States,

your largest client was the U.S. Tuna Foundation. Tell us about that. That was another one that was entirely regrettable now that I look back on it. The U.S. Tuna Foundation had a problem because the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, issued a report saying that pregnant women should avoid eating too much canned tuna. In the United States, if you say something is bad for pregnant women, it is a bellwether for all human health. So people stopped buying tuna. And the reason was the mercury content in tuna.

The Tuna Foundation is entirely funded by the tuna industry, the canned tuna industry. So they freaked out a little bit and wanted the firm I was working for at the time to push a campaign to get pregnant women to eat more tuna and to kind of rebut this report by the FDA. And there was a series of efforts to get astroturf organizations and academics to argue that the mercury in tuna, the molecule was too large to cross the blood-brain barrier. Something about the difference between ethyl and methylmercury. Really, I'm not a biochemist, so I shouldn't have been talking about this at all, but used it to kind of push the agenda that they should eat more tuna. And shortly thereafter, we were caught by the New York Times, who wrote an expose

on this PR firm's efforts to do this. And it was quite embarrassing and I left the firm shortly thereafter. But the firm essentially paid academics to make the arguments. Yes, that was part of it. It was a honorarium is what they called it. You mentioned the term astroturf organizations.

What is that? Let's start with what a grassroots organization is. A grassroots organization is an organization built up of people who all have a common political alignment. So something like the One Campaign or the NRA is a grassroots organization. An astroturf organization, by contrast, is a fake grassroots organization. An astroturf organization, by contrast, is a fake grassroots organization. Generally it's a tax filing in Delaware with a bank account and the ability to issue press releases and there is no grassroots support. It's all fake. So that's hence the term astroturf. And in the tuna public relations, you use an astroturf organization. Can you share on that?

They were one of these kind of in between half legitimate, half paid by industry organizations. But yes, they were mentioned in the New York Times article as being paid off by the TUNA Foundation. And it sounds like such a, at least to a naive person, a legitimate organization, the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition. Exactly. That's what they do. They put together names that sound completely benign. Just astonishing. You describe what you do as quote, unobservable forces that produce effects by insensible or invisible means unquote. Can you explain? Sure, I mean it's like I was talking about before. I have to remain

kind of the invisible hand behind what's going on in the story. And so it's a little like a Rube Goldberg machine sometimes. So you get a ball moving that runs into something else that causes something else to happen that causes a fire to light that causes the end result. So that's a little bit of what I do is plan these things out and think about how to use news coverage to influence outcomes in the real world.

Let's talk about some of your strategies. One of your strategies that you tell your clients is don't be a hero, always find a better villain. Can you tell us about that and give some examples? Every news story has three elements, a villain, a victim, and a vindicator. The idea isn't to turn your client into the hero most of the time, it's to find a better villain. So if you can switch your client from being the villain to the vindicator or the victim rather than the villain, you're in a very good position. One of the things we talk about is don't be the slowest gazelle. If the media is the lion in this analogy, you want to be the second slowest gazelle because the slowest gets eaten by the media. The lead one gets mentioned in the story,

but if you're right there in the middle of the pack, no one notices you. So say you're a company involved in an oil spill and you make a part that malfunctions, you want to point to the owner of the oil company rather than your part that malfunctioned. This is a hypothetical example. You want to point to the bigger bad guy and say, write the story about them, not us, and just push the media towards a bigger villain. Every industry has multiple competitors. So if your company is being targeted by a reporter and there's a bigger villain, point the reporter out to the bigger villain. Or if your company, say, makes a product that's defective, you know, say it's a lack of

government oversight. Blame the government. They're generally a good villain. One of your other strategies is paying people to say nice things. Can you tell us about that and give some examples? Yes, it happens sometimes where you provide someone with a fee for writing an op-ed that supports your client. That happens from time to time. Other firms have done this to great success. There are a lot of former government officials who say used to work at the SEC or used to work at the FCC even.

And if your client is in trouble with that agency, you can often go to them, engage them as a consultant to your client and get them to sign an op-ed that supports what your client is doing or trying to do or why somebody else is a bigger villain. So yes, they're often referred to as coin operated advocates. It's a really terrible practice that I don't engage in anymore. Another strategy you talk about is what you're calling the AstroTurf strategy. How common is that? Incredibly common.

It's used far too often. There is absolutely no regulation of it. It's not good. It's very devious. It's another one that I don't engage in. One strategy that is used is called detonate the bomb in a safe location. So what this is, this is a very dangerous strategy, by the way. If a negative story is going to come out about your client in a major publication, If a negative story is going to come out about your client in a major publication, one thing you can do is take that negative information, give it to a reporter from a less well-known publication or a tier two publication, and let them write the story. So the New York Times say they were pursuing your client.

If they see it in another publication, their editor will spike the story. Would you rather get hit by Mike Tyson being the tier one media or would you rather get hit by somebody named Mike from accounting? I take my odds with the guy who's good with spreadsheets. Phil, what are some other strategies that you've used and that you see? Well, one of the key strategies that I tell people in media training that we all tell people in media training is don't repeat the negative. Can you give me a quote from Richard Nixon? Like the one thing anybody remembers, Richard Nixon said, I'm not a crook.

You got it. Now, why do you remember that? Because he repeated the negative. If he had just said, I am an honest man, no one would have remembered it. But instead, he repeated the negative. So that is a main strategy that we teach people in public relations media training is don't repeat the negative. If somebody asks you if you're a thief, don't say, I'm not a thief. Say I'm an honest man or an honest person. You know, go with the positive or obfuscate or, you know, do something. Don't repeat the charge

that has been leveled against you. Your media training must be fascinating. What impact has all of this had on you? Well, if you ask my psychologist, my mental health diagnosis is about a page long. But the highlights include I have what is called bipolar 2. That's a naturally occurring thing. That's not the fault of my job. But I have a mild case of PTSD and extreme depression and chronic anxiety. So those are kind of the highlights of my psychological diagnosis. A lot of that was exacerbated by

my job. It also helps explain a lot of the things that I did. Someone with my condition has a tendency to engage in risk-taking behaviors, like we've been talking about in this conversation. And this was untreated. I was undiagnosed until I was about 35. Once I received a diagnosis and went on a plan to treat it, things got better for me. I mean, it's not resolved. Like, you don't get cured from being bipolar, but you can treat it. And you no longer do the types of public relations that you used to. I've set what I call a deadline for myself. I set this deadline for myself that said I wouldn't work

against democracy, I wouldn't work for a dictator, and I wouldn't break the law. Now those seem like very basic ideas, but you would be surprised the number of clients that rules out. I take everything on a case-by-case basis. On occasion, I'm asked to do things that are questionable, but I just don't anymore. I don't engage in those behaviors anymore. What I like to say is that I apply all of the things that I learned working for evil people and I apply them to better causes. Phil, would you mind reading a quote from your book? Sure. Once you have ink, your story becomes real. A conversation that didn't exist moments

before, a conversation nobody would think to have if you hadn't started it, the public begins to accept something you created out of nothing. Phil, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? The first takeaway is do not let your job destroy your mental health. job, destroy your mental health. The second takeaway is ask the question, should I do something? Not just can I do something? And the third takeaway is that when talking to the media, do not repeat the negative. Thank you.

Your book is certainly eye-opening. It will help us all to see what we read and hear on the news in a different way. So glad you enjoyed it. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com

where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.