Imagine you are working for a business and your business is receiving some unfavourable media coverage. The business, and the team who run it, have been typecast as “insensitive and hyper-aggressive” and the agreed objective is to challenge that. You want to paint a better picture of the company and you need to build a better relationship with the media. How would you go about that?
A senior executive at Uber, for whom the situation isn’t hypothetical, suggested hiring a team of researchers to look into the personal lives and families of journalists who are writing negative stories about the business to give the media a taste of its own medicine.
We know this because Emil Michael made the suggestion at a dinner in New York in the presence of a journalist who reported his comments. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith reports that the executive was focused on one female journalist in particular.
“Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service.
“I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.”
Michael elaborated that his hypothetical team of dirt-diggers could expose something in Lacy’s personal life. Unsurprisingly, the story has attracted the executive and the company even more unfavourable coverage. Sarah Lacy’s response to learning of Michael’s suggestion “The moment I learned just how far Uber will go to silence journalists and attack women” is worth reading.
There seems to be no doubt that hiring investigators was not a policy endorsed or even considered by Uber; it was merely Michael’s personal folly.
“The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them,” Michael said in a statement.
That might be true but he didn’t deny making the suggestion. And aside from being laced in malice and lacking in morality, his suggestion reveals an extraordinary lack of judgement, not merely in conceiving the idea but also in sharing it.
Yet, this is a man who is described as “one of the top deal guys in the Valley”, he is a senior executive in a business worth $18 billion and he sits on a board that advises the Department of Defense in the US. He was educated at Harvard and Stanford and is, no doubt, paid considerably more than the average American or Australian.
Despite these credentials, or perhaps because of them, digging dirt and exposing a journalist’s personal life is his strategy for combatting the company’s negative publicity. If that’s the best idea an executive has, I’d suggest Uber start asking whether that is the best executive they have. I sincerely hope the answer is no.