The Bloomberg Files

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Oh the irony of ironies! Leave it to Gawker to re-open the Bloomberg spying debacle with new revelations on just what client information reporters had access to. Gawker's Nitasha Tiku is giving Hamilton Nolan a run for his money in the "make-a-splash" department though it's doubtful she'll ever match his proclivity for profanity.

In her piece that posted this afternoon, she reveals that:

"Every Bloomberg subscriber has a bio page with the user's photograph, employment status, and office telephone number. At the bottom of each page is a link called REPN, accessible to any of the 2,400 journalists Bloomberg employs worldwide.

REPN, which is also searchable by name, is like an internal data dump where Bloomberg journalists share intel on sources. That's where reporters are encouraged to leave private cellphone and home phone numbers, email addresses, interests and hobbies, best time of day to call, whether the source is married or has a girlfriend or has recently separated, and details on how to get them to start talking—try to bring up his two daughters, hates the cost of private school tuition—all concerning highly-influential, market-moving bankers and politicians."

(Image via Vocus)

Some years back, I was contacted by a reporter for another esteemed business news organization. The Wall Street Journal had learned that we (Burson-Marsteller) maintained an electronic database of reporters to which any of our colleagues had access and could add anecdotes such as "home phone numbers, email addresses, interests and hobbies, best time of day to call, etc."

The Journal was aghast that a PR firm would have the audacity to do such a thing.

As it so happens, I grew up with the WSJ reporter who was assigned to write this story. In weighing whether to participate in her piece and grant her access to our media database, I had a vivid flashback to our youth. I remembered when she was a senior in high school, a close friend's Mom caught her and my pal imbibing (and other things) in the basement of his home. All hell broke loose.

Hmmm. Should I add this juicy little tidbit to her profile and then let her surreptitiously stumble upon it? Ultimately, our firm passed on the opportunity to participate in the story, but the irony of the situation given Bloomberg's current PR peccadillo certainly is not lost.

The Perfect PR Storm

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Jay Carney on the Hot Seat (Photo: Saul Loeb, Getty Images)

You gotta feel for Jay Carney. Not one, not two, but three concurrent crises for which he alone has been saddled to articulate the Administration's positions. Well, not exactly alone, but compared to how previous administrations have handled such affronts -- political or otherwise -- Carney's the man in the hot seat charged with addressing all three crises in a single presser.

From Bloomberg's story in which some Democratic PR consiglieres reflect on the "laxity" of the Administration's scandal response:

"'There’s an industrial-scandal complex that exists in Washington, D.C.,' said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked as a special assistant counsel to Clinton. 'You need to have some kind of entity within the building that’s capable of managing these situations.'

Clinton organized a group of lawyers, communications specialists and legislative affairs experts to manage his administration’s response to investigations into the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the Whitewater real estate deal when he was Arkansas governor and firings in the White House travel office.

The West Wing is now in damage control without the first-term team of political advisers, who include former press secretary Robert Gibbs, political strategists David Axelrod and David Plouffe and former chief of staff turned mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel."

To be honest, I have never been impressed by young Mr. Carney. I find his communications style to be halting, and his choice of words to often miss opportunities to hammer home the message. He just appears nervous standing up there, which is not an impression that inspires confidence. Here's a direct quote from him in response to emails the GOP used to bolster its spurious Benghazi narrative:

"I think the entire email — the report I read showed the entire email, and what it showed is that Republicans who were leaking these press — these emails that have been shared with Congress didn’t just do that; they decided to fabricate portions of an email and make up portions of an email in order to fit a political narrative," Carney said. "And I think -- I'm not surprised by it because we've seen it again and again."

Right Wingleader Matt Drudge

Huh?  Admittedly, the holder of this particular job in this political climate requires considerable fortitude to parry with a rabid White House press gaggle that increasingly derives its narrative from a calibrated right wing media machine. Brent Budowsky, writing for The Hill, talks about Obama's need for his own Drudge to drive his narrative:

"Organizing for Action is fine, but what is needed, as well, is support for media structures similar to Drudge, state party-building outside of Washington and grassroots movements that transcend any one president at any given moment.

The unprecedented influence of Drudge is that he offers a scandal and message megaphone to conservative media, politicians and ideas that drive the national narrative that Drudge horizontally cross-promotes.

GOP attacks rocket from Issa’s keyboard to Fox News and Drudge’s site, which beams them outward to be repeated from “Morning Joe” to the evening news and daily newspapers. Armies of mainstream media insiders pore over the Drudge Report like Talmudic scholars, which arguably make Drudge the single most influential person in American media."

I will admit that Mr. Carney has shown improvement since his earliest days at the podium. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, continues to ignore his base and react to crises based on what he has been advised will effectively quell the issue. He continually misses opportunities to change the GOP narrative and in so doing, advance his own, as was the case with the burgeoning IRS scandal. From MSNBC:

"A clearly frustrated Obama made clear at a press conference on Monday that he was angry with the IRS, calling the organization’s actions “outrageous.” “There’s no place for it. They have to be held fully accountable, because the IRS as an independent agency requires absolute integrity,” said Obama, who said he became aware of the alleged actions on Friday, just like everyone else. “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and bipartisan way, then it is outrageous.”

Yes, true, but Mr. Obama somehow neglected to mention the explosion in 501 C-4 filings by political organizations in the run-up to the 2010 and 2012 elections. TPM's Eric Lach drudges up a fresh Q&A with Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division:

"Lerner began by describing the increase in 501(c)(4) applications the IRS received between 2010 and 2012. IRS employees in Cincinnati, Lerner said, had reacted by centralizing the applications for efficiency and consistency, something the IRS did 'whenever we see an uptick in a new kind of application or something we haven’t seen before.'

But in this case, Lerner said, the centralization had not been carried out properly. 'Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list,' Lerner said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate — that’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review.”

The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin (Photo: CNN)

Once again, the GOP media machine has succeeded in obfuscating the bigger issue of how political groups have sidestepped IRS rules to gain tax-free and opaque status for pure political means under the false guise of "social advocacy." The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin sums it up pretty neatly:

"It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates."

Then of course, there are journalists working for mainstream news orgs who just can't keep their wingnut opinions to themselves. Here are a few tweets from CNBC's John Carney (no relation to Jay Carney), and one from Time.com's Zeke Miller who's no stranger to letting his political biases frame his reportage:

Jeffrey Toobin's piece on the IRS scandal is utter BS. nyr.kr/17ZlwI6
— John Carney (@carney) May 14, 2013

Jeffrey Toobin treats politically biased tax enforcment as if it were an aside, the real scandal being the actual law. Blech.
— John Carney (@carney) May 14, 2013

Toobin also neglects to mention altogether that "social welfare" explicitly includes "political education."
— John Carney (@carney) May 14, 2013

Education of public by advocacy/lobbying to “make America a better place to live” would earn additional review -IG ti.me/YHMkde
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) May 14, 2013

Now who's slinging the BS?

NY Tech Meetup Strikes a Chord

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Client obligations and new biz dev kept me from the New York Tech Meetup these last few months, so I was glad to find a seat at the May gathering this week at NYU's Skirball Auditorium. Leave it to Nate and Jessica to keep it fresh. The evening kicked off with an a cappella singing group made up of who else? -- workers from various NYC startups.  It was their first public performance.

 

Not bad, huh?  We then segued to an IBM engineer named Spike who demo'd what the nano-technophiles were buzzing about all last week: the world's smallest movie, made entirely of atoms. Video here:

 

The 700+ on-site attendees (plus hundreds more remotely) were then treated to several demos of more dubious utility, mostly resulting from 24-hour hackathons. Not that I have anything against 24-hour hackathons. And who am I to question the value of a breathalyzer test that prevents coders from changing their code while drunk, or a robotic beer dispenser that works with a wave of an RFID-wearing wrist?

I personally get a bigger charge with new tech tools and apps that offer more redeeming qualities than the Arduino-based laser tag game with remote control tanks or the virtual drum set using just a mobile phone and HTML5. (I will admit, however, that I was in the minority judging from the warm reception these demos had.)  

Videolicious' Matt Singer

I did enjoy hearing from a very smooth David Mandel of PivotDesk, a company that matches a startup's workspace needs with others offering both excess office space and a good cultural fit.

A second cool company called Videolicious makes it painless for the burgeoning crop of video content creators to package HD video segments from existing and disparate clips -- on the fly with music too. It works with any touchscreen iOS device.

At a loss for finding fresh content that you actually want to share in your social circles? Rallyverse's algorithm delves into your social DNA - including your last 200 tweets -- couples it with its own proprietary database -- to identify content that is uber-personalized to your interests. So much for Google Reader and its successors.

The Muse's Kathryn Minshew & Team

Finally, I enjoyed seeing The Muse's svelte Kathryn Minshew again (I moderated her on a recent PCNY panel on the subject of "contributed content") waxing about her site's singular purpose of helping both job seekers and employers reach shared nirvana.

The May NYTM ended with a demo of IMRSV, a face detection software that turns any webcam into an intelligent device.  Unlike iPhoto's Faces, which can detect pre-selected faces of people you know, IMRSV's Cara software gathers robust, real time analytics that includes gender, age and attention time. A Cara-enabled webcam scans one's face and lets you know something about the person anonymously.



A scan of presenter Jason Sosa's face noted that he was a "young adult." Unfortunately (for him) his test demo using NYTM executive director Jessica Lawrence labeled her simply as an "adult." Oops. Game over.


Photos & Video: Peter Himler with a Canon PowerShot SX40 HS