The Weekly Screed (#743)

Oh, Susanna, now don’t you lie to me
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Thanks to my wife, the hotshot high-tech journalist, I get to crash parties where I don’t belong. For me, “the turd in the punchbowl” isn’t just a grace note. It’s my red badge of impertinence.

So, there I was — without a necktie, in sandals and jeans — in Bordeaux’s Grand Hotel, in a private dining room that overlooked the luminous neo-classical façade of the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux. I was standing on the balcony, holding a drink, gazing down at the great plaza below and pretending to give a rat’s ass about automotive software. Hotlips’ beat lately is automotive software — self-driving cars are suddenly all the rage — and our hosts were a German outfit that designs the devices that take the steering wheel out of the driver’s hands and give it to a computer beneath the dashboard that never speeds, always signals, sees around corners and cannot possibly pancake a pedestrian or plow into a deer.

This was the dinner’s designated topic as we sat down to slosh three varieties of the local wine and nosh on locavore treats like carpaccio de canard. Trouble is, the German auto industry is currently in a spot of turmoil, thanks to the news that Volkswagen has been cheating for years on emissions tests, requiring the recall and retrofitting of — at least — 11 million dirty, smelly diesel VWs. Volkswagen’s head honcho had just resigned in disgrace. Ambulance chasers the world over were licking their lips over a carmaker founded by Hitler in the 1930’s and adopted by the anti-war counterculture — with all due irony — in the Sixties.

It’s been a long weird journey for Volkswagen, and here they were in the spotlight again. And here were me and Hotlips, nosy reporters, surrounded by tipsy corporate Krauts who regularly hoist dunkels at the biergarten with VW’s gruppenfeuhrers.

What would you do?

Our tablemates included Rolf, top executive, corporate spokesman and crack engineer. Handsome, multilingual and charmingly glib. On my right was Susanna, chief of public relations (PR). Buttoned-up, stern, alert, slightly arctic. Close by were several meek trade journalists who were too polite to mention you-know-who.

Hotlips crossed the Siegfried Line and asked the 64,000-deutschmark question. The other reporters’ ears perked up visibly. I merely smiled.

I watched a shudder pierce Susanna’s composure as the dread word “Volkswagen” landed on the white tablecloth like an unbidden blob of sputum. Gently but accurately, Hotlips noted that here, tonight, at an event focused on German auto-tech, Volkswagen’s transgressions ought to be a major concern. In two days at the Intelligent Transportation Systems conference, Hotlips said she hadn’t heard one mention of the VW scandal. She thought this odd. She added that, certainly, our hosts must have some sort of prepared remarks about the disgrace of their most important business partner. No?

Actually? No.

According to Rolf, his company was, well, sort of vexed over this kerfuffle, but really, gosh, what about all these cool buses running around the convention grounds without drivers, just tooling along with nobody at the wheel, ‘cause golly, there ain’t no wheel at all, and you can’t tell the front end from the rear, how about that, huh? Huh?

Rolf would have kept babbling, but Susanna intervened. She smiled tightly (no teeth) at Hotlips and purred, “We’re having such a lovely time. Why don’t we just keep things on a positive note, dear?”

Gallantly (I think), I came to my dear Hotlips’ aid, suggesting that it might be appropriate for VW’s colleagues in the German car racket to have something on a 3x5 card that expresses their feelings about one of the most shameless pollution scams in the history of carbon dioxide. One brave reporter joined Hotlips and me in pressing for a little more than “let’s stay positive” from Rolf and Susanna.

But Susanna began to grind her teeth so loudly that she almost drowned out the sound of Rolf erecting an emergency stonewall right there on the banquet table while laboriously changing the subject — to V2V SoCs, or something like that.

Susanna is, allegedly, a PR pro. But I’ve been a PR pro myself (as briefly as possible). Hotlips spent 11 years as a PR pro. Thankfully, we worked for bosses who would have demoted us to the newsclip morgue or just outright fired us if we had come to class — for a quiz we were sure to face — as miserably prepared as Rolf and Susanna were that night in Bordeaux.

Since we stumbled, long ago, into the news business (PR and journalism), Hotlips and I have witnessed the so-called “death of print” and the nibbling away of professional journalism by Web-based facsimiles that include aggregation, blogging, “crowd-sourcing,” “user-generated content” and plain naked propaganda.

Just as old-school reporters — the infantry of attribution, corroboration, investigation and background — have been shoved into the free-lance ghetto and the unemployment line, the always scarce news-conscious professionals of public relations have become older, tireder, fewer and farther-between.

My best PR bosses, foremost among them a mirthful stickler named Patrick, were guys who’d begun their careers as stringers, reporters and editors. They had been the press and they knew the press. They understood what information the press regards as news and, conversely, the sort of smokescreen verbiage that the press releases immediately into the wastebasket. And they knew that the press has a sacred duty to ask PR pros the questions that PR pros are most loath to answer.

All my life, I’ve had to cope with PR flacks who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer the 64,000-deutschmark question. This used to be normal. But the new normal — which should frighten everyone who still values the news — is flacks like Susanna, who don’t even see the question coming.