JULY / PUBLIC RELATIONS
ISSUE 151
Michael Sitrick, of the crisis management firm Sitrick and Company, at his office in Brentwood, California
over what transpired. I am seeking the counselling of my pastor, my mother and other loved ones and I am committed, with God’s help, to emerging a better person.” Sitrick has also deployed his strategies on behalf of Michael Vick (the dogfighting ring), Alex Rodriguez (the steroid scandal) and R. Kelly (where to begin). But although his celebrity clients attract a disproportionate amount of media coverage, they represent less than 10 per cent of Sitrick’s caseload, he said. Corporate crises are his specialty, including Exxon after the Valdez oil spill, Enron during its accounting-fraud implosion and Theranos, the company that claimed to have revolutionised blood testing but didn’t. Sitrick helped Roy Disney oust Michael Eisner and he helped American Apparel oust Dov Charney. He has represented the Daniel Pearl Foundation, on a pro bono basis, and the creator of Girls Gone Wild.
of the videos and raised questions about ABC’s practices, effectively turning a story about bad meat into a story about bad journalism. Richard Wald, an emeritus professor at Columbia, was an executive at ABC at the time, and he has asked Sitrick to address his journalism students over the years. The point of the lesson, according to Wald, is that “just because a journalist is finished with a story does not mean the story is finished with the journalist.” Of Sitrick’s work for Food Lion, Wald said: “He did an absolutely brilliant job, but it annoyed the hell out of me at the time.” Sitrick, 70, was once a journalism student himself, at the University of Maryland. He moved into public relations after graduation, following a stint reporting for the Baltimore NewsAmerican. “I love journalism,” he remembers telling his wife, Nancy Sitrick, “but I’d rather eat.” When Sitrick moved to Los Angeles with his wife and three young daughters and founded his firm, in 1989, he
Sitrick helped Roy Disney oust Michael Eisner and helped American Apparel oust its founder Dov Charney One of Sitrick’s more notorious cases was for years taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, a kind of cautionary tale about the perils of going undercover. In the early 1990s, two producers for Primetime Live, an ABC news programme, got jobs in Food Lion supermarkets and secretly videotaped workers, raising questions about the company’s meat handling practices. Food Lion then went to Sitrick, who obtained outtakes
made it something of a policy to hire onetime editors and reporters. “It’s easier to teach journalists PR than to teach publicists what news judgment is,” he said. Sitrick and Co. quickly acquired a reputation for pushing back against the press, using many of the same strategies as journalists. Sitrick represented the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles during its sex abuse scandal, the Kabbalah Centre when journalists suspected it of being a cult and the
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