It was bad enough that the PRS board slammed us five times in a letter to leadership April 9 about our alleged failure to adhere to its standards of accuracy and truth.
But after taking this beating, we pick up the March issue of Tactics and there in all its inaccurate glory is yet another full-page send-up of Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the seven Tylenol murders in 1982 (“an enduring example of crisis management done right”).
This was not a PR triumph but a PR tragedy.
The tragedy is that Diane Elsworth, 23, of Peekskill, N.Y., the daughter of a state policeman, died in 1986 because J&J had quickly brought back to the market the easily-spiked Tylenol capsules.
Tylenol article from March '08 Tactics recalls crisis as 'an enduring example of crisis management done right.'
Click to enlarge |
J&J’s artful PR blitz, swallowed whole by a supine press, framed the issue as a packaging problem rather than what it was — a product problem.
Also ignored was the fact that a killer was on the loose who hated J&J and Tylenol and might strike again. We’re reminded of the Virginia Tech tragedy last year and the failure of officials to immediately tell the campus that a killer was on the loose. That consideration should have trumped all others.
J&J CEO Jim Burke, commenting on the murder of Elsworth, expressed profound regret that J&J had re-marketed the flawed Tylenol capsules six weeks after the murders. He was the driving force behind that speedy re-introduction.
PRS’s own crisis expert Jim Lukaszewski had long ago (2001) called the Tylenol story of “immediate” withdrawal a “fairy tale.” Counselor Helio Fred Garcia had also labeled it “a myth” on the same program. Ironic is the fact that tablets dissolve just as fast in the stomach as capsules.
The PRS article reprints quotes from 25 years ago by Lawrence Foster, who was VP-PR for J&J.
There is nothing new from J&J because J&J has refused to discuss this topic for many years. The editors of Tactics probably don’t know it but this article is extremely irritating to J&J.
The FBI, after weeks of testing, had determined that the “tamper-resistant” packaging was only that and not “tamper-proof.” Someone had broken the seals (with no visible indication of this) and poisoned Elsworth to death.
What Is Truth About Ethics Board?
Since PRS is flying the flag of “truth and accuracy” so high, it raises the question of what is the truth about the national board, the EB and the cancellation of the old code in 1999.
We believe that code was killed because a member filed five ethics charges against the national board in 1999 and the EB, headed by Bob Frause (who has again become chair of the EB), rather than hear these charges, decided to rewrite the entire code and remove any enforcement mechanism. The EB has been silent since 2000.
Frause at the time said that accused members were showing up with lawyers and that it was hard to nail members with ethics charges when non-members were also involved.
But this had been true for decades. There was nothing new about such problems.
O’Dwyer Boycott Was New
Bob Frause |
What was new was the filing of formal ethics charges against the entire board on grounds that its announced boycott against the O’Dwyer Co. violated five sections of the code.
The PRS board, headed by Sam Waltz, had voted 16-1 to cut off leader and staff communications with O’Dwyer Co., claiming that it was not reporting enough of the information provided to it by PRS and that too much staff time was needed to answer the questions of O’Dwyer staffers. There were no charges that any stories covered by the O’Dwyer website or publications were inaccurate. The PRS boycott was circulated to the PR trade press.
Article 1 of the code, said the complaint, calls on members to act “in accord with the public interest” while article 3 says members must deal “fairly” with the public, clients and fellow PR prose, “giving due respect to the ideal of free inquiry and to the opinions of others.”
Article 6, said the complaint, forbids “corrupting the integrity of channels of communications” and the board’s move to silence a thorn in its side corrupts the integrity of channels of communications and the processes of PRS’s own governance.”
Board Charged with Blocking Dialog
Said the complaint: “The board is inhibiting a dialog of what may or may not be conflicting interests and certainly attempts to quell dissenting views.”
[Major PRS stories in 1999 included a $150K study by PRS and the Rockefeller Foundation that found “PR specialist” ranked 43 on a list of 45 “believable sources” and a College of Fellows study saying the impact of APR in the job marketplace was minimal; the O’Dwyer Co. had also done a 10-year study of PRS’s financial reporting that questioned the reduction of the deferred dues account from $904K to $169K].
Article 15, it was said, orders members to report code violations “promptly” and article 17 says members must “sever relationships” with any organization if such relationships require conduct contrary to the code.
Press Boycott Was Issue
The PRS board and the EB, faced with the thorny issue of the ethics of a press boycott (and one of its own doing), decided to just fold the ethics tent. Reasons were given for doing this but we question the veracity of such reasons.
The issue has remained. Gail Baker, appointed as ethics chair even though she had never served on the EB, would not talk to us in March and we think that was unethical. Under rules of the EB, the chair is supposed to have served on the EB. We called up her boss, the chancellor of the University of Nebraska, to tell him about this. We don’t think that was unethical. Rather, the school should know about matters that could bring disrepute on it.
As in 1999, rather than face the boycott issue, the PRS board has now launched an attack on the reporting of this writer (without giving any specifics).
The EB, to show some independence, should take up this question. However, in recent years it has become a creature of the board with no independence that we can see.
We don’t pretend to have the whole truth about Tylenol or PRS because that can only be determined in open debate which is the American, democratic thing to do.
PRS leaders not only won’t talk to us, but won’t talk to members about important matters such as the death of the old ethics code, move of h.q. downtown, the ethics of a press boycott, suspension of the members’ directory, switching the charter to Delaware, etc.
Tylenol Victims Dehumanized
Very distressing in the Tylenol story is the de-humanization of the eight victims.
Although we have collected a huge pile of articles on the Tylenol murders, we have never seen pictures of any of them.
When Fortune did a Tylenol send-up last May, the magazine did not even have the courtesy of mentioning Elsworth by name. It only identified her as a “New York woman” and instead of her picture was a picture of Burke.
Newsweek, writing about Elsworth’s murder in 1986, similarly had a picture of Burke instead of Elsworth.
When J&J finally agreed to a settlement with the families in May of 1991, the names of the victims were not even mentioned in the story, much less their pictures. J&J had fought the families in court eight years, agreeing to a settlement only the day before a trial was to begin.
It seems that muzzling the families was part of the settlement.
Fed up with this de-humanization of the victims, we recall who they were: Mary Kellerman, 12, and Adam Janus, 27, who died of poisoned Tylenols on the morning of Sept. 29, 1982; Stanley Janus, 25, and his wife, Theresa, 19, died after taking poisoned Tylenols from the same bottle as Adam when they returned home; Mary Reiner, 27, who had just given birth to her third child; Mary McFarland, 31, and Paula Prince, 35, a flight attendant.
“Insider” Movie Was Wrong
Helping to perpetuate the Tylenol myth was the 1999 move “The Insider,” which had whistleblower Jeff Wigand (played by Russell Crowe) telling "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino) that: “James Burke, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, when he found out that some lunatic had put poison in Tylenol bottles, he didn’t argue with the FDA, he didn’t wait for the FDA to tell him, he just pulled Tylenol off the shelves in every store right across America instantly.”
Crowe emphasized the point by making a sweeping gesture with his arm as if to clear a table.
What actually happened is that J&J at first attempted to “localize” the withdrawal by taking two lots of 93,000 and 171,000 off the market.
But when another case of Tylenol poisoning showed up in Oroville, Cailf., the following Tuesday (the initial murders were on the previous Thursday), the FDA did step into the case with what we think was more assertiveness.
A nationwide withdrawal of Tylenol capsules was ordered but by that time there were hardly any Tylenol products of any kind on store shelves in the U.S. Major chains had announced the removal of Tylenol products on the previous Saturday.
J&J didn’t hold a press conference after the 1982 murders but handled reporters individually. Who knows what was said or not said to them?
Reporters had found J&J tough to deal with.
Before Tylenol, J&J “wouldn’t give us the time of day,” said Karen Ryan of ABC-TV. It was like “pulling teeth to get anything out of the J&J PR dept.,” she told PRS/New York April 28, 1983.
Camera crews would assemble at J&J only to be told the company had “changed its mind” about an interview, she said.
We don’t believe the statement in Tactics that “the crisis was not the company’s fault” because many pharmacists would not carry drugs in capsules that could be pulled apart and corrupted and J&J must have known about this packaging flaw.
Also, it had created enemies by being “an aggressive, even predatory marketer that frequently used litigation to stymie competitors,” said the Oct. 8, 1982 Wall Street Journal. |