Re: 4/14/00 - Blue shield: Public Affairs weathers the storm
Blue shield: Public Affairs weathers the storm
By Andrew Heller
For the most part, it's been a good year for Yale's Office of Public Affairs (OPA). With the announcement of the $500 million Science Hill initiative and the new $160 million Medical School building, Yale has garnered a great deal of positive attention from the national press over the past few months, including coverage of the Science Hill announcement in The New York Times.
On Wed., Mar. 1, however, everything came crashing down for the people at 433 Temple St. At 10 p.m. that night on 20/20, ABC broadcasted a report on the December 1998 murder of Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin. For the first time, students heard James Van de Velde?the only known suspect in the brutal killing?proclaim his innocence on national television.
Tucked neatly between Van de Velde's statements, though, was a seemingly innocuous quote from reporter John Miller: "When we asked Yale University to talk to 20/20 about the Jovin case and Jim Van de Velde, a University spokesman told us that bringing more attention to the murder can only hurt Yale. The spokesman said they want to put the murder behind them, that it is time to move on."
For most Yale students, the statement may have been a bit startling, but nothing out of the ordinary when compared to 20/20's emotional interview with Jovin's parents. For OPA, though, it was the beginning of a public relations nightmare.
True or false
Two weeks after the show aired, political science Professor David Cameron was already decrying the "insensitivity" of Yale's statements to ABC, statements that University spokesman Tom Conroy said he never made. "I have never expressed...the sentiments attributed to me by 20/20, nor are they true," he wrote in a letter to the Yale Daily News [YDN] on Tues., Mar. 28.
Two days later, however, Thomas and Donna Jovin responded with a strongly accusatory letter to the YDN, calling the University's alleged statements to 20/20 "callous, disingenuous, hypocritical, and self-serving." And when things could not get any worse, a group of current and former Yale students sent an e-mail to over 4,000 undergraduates calling for the resignations of both Conroy and University Secretary Linda Lorimer, LAW '73, in light of the ABC News controversy.
After such a firestorm of harmful publicity, most would assume OPA would be pursuing serious damage control these days. But, when the Herald recently sat down to talk with Larry Haas, OPA director, he seemed surprisingly confident about resolving the 20/20 fiasco.
"I'm not laying awake at night worrying about this, in all honesty," Haas said. "I stand by Conroy 1,000 percent." Earlier, Haas told the Herald that "like everyone else at the University, we obviously would like to operate without any controversy. But we've had one. So be it."
So be it, except for the fact that ABC News stands firm in its belief that Conroy did indeed issue the statement that he denies ever making. "We were surprised when Yale declined over a dozen requests from us to make a University administrator available for an interview," an ABC press release said. "The only official statement offered to us was Yale University spokesman Thomas Conroy's comments, which he repeatedly confirmed to us as being Yale's current official position on the matter, and which we accurately presented in our report."
According to OPA, however, there was no such statement, and Conroy's alleged "repeated confirmation" never occurred.
"We have had a basic difference in opinion with 20/20 about events surrounding their show," Haas said. "We remember the events one way, they remember the events another way."
Like any other?
Still, this hasn't been the semester's first he-said, she-said feud in which OPA has come under fire. In early February, African-American studies Chair Hazel Carby resigned when University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, lauded Harvard's department above her own. In an interview [YH 3/2/00], she attributed some of the praise that Harvard generally receives not to better academics, but simply to a more effective publicity machine.
Carby described a Chronicle of Higher Education study of Af-Am departments at various schools, and claimed that Yale professors spent quite a bit of time talking to the Chronicle's reporters. But, she claimed, "in the article, [Yale] was sort of left a sentence or something, and they focused on Harvard because they have a sort of celebrity status." She added that this was to be expected at Yale, because "you have a system that's geared toward pushing out publicity."
Though Carby criticized Yale's public relations office for not getting much word out about the University's own Af-Am program, OPA maintains that they've since covered their bases. According to Haas, his office has already distributed a packet about the new program with information about its history and most prominent faculty. "As different studies are published and new faculty are hired, we'll be on top of it," he said. "[The new department] is a very exciting program, and I consider it a top priority."
Still, why does Carby claim that Harvard's Office of News and Public Affairs is so much more adept than Yale's? Do the two organizations really operate all that differently? According to Joe Wrinn, the director of news and public affairs for Harvard, not really.
"One of our main functions is to publish stories on the web and produce tip sheets for reporters, just like Yale or any other university," he said. "As far as I can tell, Yale has done a great job with that. Getting the story about Yale's science initiative to The New York Times was a huge success. Very often, stories like that remain [only in the local press]."
But even as Yale enjoyed success on the Science Hill announcement, Carby stressed that Harvard has a much stronger mechanism for disseminating non-science press releases. Yale employs two people whose sole duty is to publicize science and medicine news. Announcements come from them every few days. Arts, humanities, and the social sciences, on the other hand, are covered only by a single individual.
Picking up the pieces
Even when the publicity machine does work, it is hard to get the story right. Like Yale, Harvard experiences a fair share of dilemmas with the news media. "I don't think you're going to find a PR person in the world who hasn't had problems with the media," Wrinn said. "That's just the nature of the game. In today's world, once a story is out, if it's incorrect, it's impossible to put it back into the bottle. What we try to do if something is misunderstood or misconstrued is repeat the information that we think is credible and try to get it into the hands of journalists. Most times, if there is a sincere mistake, it'll be corrected."
In the case of Yale and 20/20, though, that obviously has not been the course of events. And that once again raises a critical question for OPA: did Tom Conroy really make those comments to ABC News about "putting the Jovin case behind us"? And, if so, who should take the blame for it?
According to Haas, no one person can be held accountable for any single press release or statement issued by OPA. "I don't [draft statements] in a vacuum," he said while describing how writing major announcements?like the Science Hill initiative?works. "[OPA] does a first draft of a press release, [which is] then circulated among the officers and other important people [at Yale]," he explained. "I get their comments, do a second and maybe even third draft, and everyone who is connected to the issue [gets] a chance to see this?it could range anywhere from six to 12 people."
Still, it's improbable that a definite conclusion will ever be reached as to whether Yale gave any "insensitive" statements to ABC, and, if they did, who's to blame. Lorimer issued a statement through OPA claiming that ABC should have drawn on earlier comments by the Administration regarding Jovin, which "honored Suzanne's memory." Yet on Thurs., Apr. 6, Levin issued a prepared statement to the Yale Daily News saying he regretted "any offense [Conroy's alleged comments] gave to the Jovin family." Indeed, as Haas pointed out, "The most important people at this University have confidence in their top people."
Confidence, yes. But if the controversy goes on, what happens now for the OPA? Where do they go from here?
"You know, I just don't view the world that way," Haas said. "It's not like we've been somewhere and now we're going somewhere else. This has been something that obviously we've had to deal with?it's been a bit of distraction?but you know, it just doesn't affect the day-to-day operation of this office."
Still, one wonders whether Haas's decision to record his own copy of his conversation with the Herald is standard operating procedure. "What we do day-to-day around here is try to put the best possible face forward for the University and its people," he said. "And the day-to-day work around here is not worrying about the occasional controversy."
All materials ¸ 2000 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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