One of the oddest jobs in the news business is to be a news business flack—that is, the PR guy for a company that is, otherwise, in the business of despising and thwarting and getting out from under flacks.
The
New York Times has announced that it's appointed a new one, Robert H. Christie, who has been the
Wall Street Journal's flack.
The
Journal is, of course, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who would like to see the
Times run out of business (or, better yet, himself owning it), and whose news outlets provide the
Times with the bulk of its bad coverage.
Practically speaking, the job of a media business flack is to protect one media business from other media businesses. In other words, while news businesses are supposed to be getting the story about others, they too, when it's about them, have an interest in keeping reporters from getting the story.
Often, as it happens, media flacks are better than reporters at the reporters' game. They are inveterate gossips, so they know everything.
And they wield the carrot and stick of their own organization against reporters with tenuous jobs at other companies. Gary Ginsberg, the Murdoch flack who was ousted a few months ago, partly because Rupert's son, James, wanted his flack to be in charge of what his father said (media business flacks are a small fraternity, and Ginsberg, while ever-desperate to graduate from flackhood to being a genuine media executive, has recently gone to work as Time Warner's flack), wielded Murdoch's promises and wrath in a way that allowed him to vet and negotiate and parse so many stories at so many news organizations that he might as well have written them.
Alas, this has not been true at the
Times, which has long come out on the short end of the PR stick.
This may be because the
Times has a genuine predisposition against the flack's craft (to have ended up at the
Times not as a journalist but as a PR person doesn't read well); or it may be because it is an organization that has so lost track of its message that no PR could save it; or because its primary spokesperson, Arthur Sulzberger, is so hopeless.
Robert H. Christie, a graduate of Mansfield College (this fact was noted, perhaps dryly, in the
Times' own story of the appointment), will, at the
Times, have to justify the very existence of newspapers; then, too, he will have to credibly explain the
Times' plan to outlast the death of newspapers, along with its precarious financial condition; and he'll have to grapple with the ownership stakes of both a Mexican bandit and a family who virtually no one believes has the brains to hold on to the paper.
Curiously, many people in the newsroom, who spend their days cursing flacks for doing their jobs, curse the
Times' flack for not doing the job better. They blame the
Times' dismal fortunes, in part, on the
Times' inability to tell a better story about its fortunes. They hate Rupert Murdoch but they would really like the
Times to be able to use its muscle to manipulate the press like Rupert Murdoch does (even though they hate him for precisely doing that).
Anyway, I'm counting on Robert H. Christie to call me soon.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWolffNYC.
