Press credibility all at sea in Beirut

Last week a story appeared in a Lebanese daily alerting the country’s multimillionaires that Beirut Boat 2014, “Lebanon’s biggest boat and yacht show”, was “making a return this spring at the Port of Beirut’s Pier 1”. The event, we were told, would be “the ninth instalment of the expo, which brings together owners, buyers and dealers along with others specialising in luxury lifestyle products every evening from May 14-18.” Phew. Someone had been reading his press pack.

The piece, which carried no by-line, continued in the same cheery vein, making zero reference to Lebanon’s woeful economy, political paralysis, security nightmare and record-breaking refugee crisis.

The peerless Andrew Harvey, my former boss when I was a business reporter on the Beirut Daily Star in the late 1990s, would have chuckled to himself before throwing me the press release and telling me to find out why anyone would be mad enough to hold a boat show in a country that was staring into the abyss. That should have been the story.

But in the absence of such basic instincts, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at the paper’s media sales department suggested that it run what we would euphemistically have call a “down page” piece because the boat show’s organisers, International Fairs and Promotions, were, or might be, placing an ad.

The IFP press office was no doubt very satisfied with the final story, which ran with a sanitised picture of beautiful people enjoying themselves on deck of a motor yacht. And rightly so. They essentially managed to get a press release placed as editorial content. A result.

All this is par for the course in Lebanon. For as long as I can remember, the relationship between the press and the advertising world, operates a quid pro quo in which journalistic integrity has been thrown to the lions and the client can pretty much call the shots.

To be fair, even in the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, the commercial realities of publishing mean that editorial and advertising often coexist in a murky place, and it doesn’t take much, if you know what you’re looking for, to spot signs of collusion. The difference is the elegant way in which this essential relationship is conducted. The reader does not feel insulted.

A less straightforward understanding is that between the press and the client when it comes to repaying, what I can only describe as corporate hospitality. In 1999, I was invited to Germany by BMW to cover a press conference at which the Bavarian automotive giant would release its annual results.

BMW, being BMW, knew how to keep the media sweet, from the moment I was picked up at Munich airport in a 7 Series Beamer driven by a supermodel who asked me every five seconds if there was anything I needed to the “fun” part of the trip when we were allowed to thrash two very expensive cars around a skidpan while two scary-looking men taught us how to reverse out of a potential kidnap scenario. All very exciting for us hacks, and an opportunity for the famous marque to ensure the press were topping up on the BMW Kool-Aid.

I remember asking the omnipresent PR manager what happened to those members of the press who consistently failed to “deliver”. “Not much,” she confessed. She wasn’t really expecting a story on the security driving class but as long as the media felt warm and gooey about BMW, she was doing her job, which she saw as cultivating brand ambassadors.

And she’d be right. For if we work on the basis that journalists cannot be bought or told what to write, PR is an art that requires instinct and the ability to work on “slow burn” to nurture relationships, so that in the end a client might be saved by what is not written, as much as it might be enhanced by what is.

Sadly in Lebanon, such sophistication is rare. Good PR should leave no fingerprints and this is clearly a lesson we still have to learn.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer based in Beirut

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