The Image Consultant's Role in Local Government Ethics

Things have changed. It used to be that the first thing you did when you found out the local ethics commission was investigating you was hire a lawyer (which is itself a change from the days when you found out you were being investigated by the D.A. and handed him a bribe).

In this era of the image and the consultant, the truly with-it (if that term is still in use) government official turns to the image consultant. And that is what Baltimore's Employees' Retirement System board has done, according to an Investigative Voice post on Sunday.

The firm apparently hired is Levick Strategic Communications, which primarily works to control the media coverage and preserve the reputation of companies and brands, but also works for public officials, who also have reputations, and are sometimes brands in their own right.

Here's one of the firm's pitches:

Regulatory or congressional investigations. A defective product. An illegal or embarrassing act by a bad actor. An adversary trying to use the media for leverage. Sometimes the odds are against you. The roles in the drama have already been cast and you’re set up as the bad actor.

At such moments, you need to control events. You need to get out of the news.

In the corporate world, hiring such a company is old news. But in local government ethics, it's new news. As is the question of who's paying for the firm's services. Is it not a conflict of interest for individuals to vote together to use public funds to protect their personal reputations?

Levick is not a little boutique firm that's found a new sort of niche. It consists of high-powered former journalists and corporate communications executives and, according to the biography of one of the senior VPs, Michael Robinson, its Anti-corruption and Good Governance practice is "a fully integrated component of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Anti-corruption Center of Excellence."

But from the sound of their pitches, the work they do is anti-anti-corruption, and protection of bad governance.

Here's an excerpt from the biography of the firm's president and CEO, Richard S. Levick:

On a daily basis, Mr. Levick’s prestigious team of professionals spearheads many of the world’s highest-profile campaigns – including Guantanamo Bay; the Catholic Church; the Wall Street crisis; the largest data security breach in history; front-page product recalls; the merger of global financial markets; bet-the-company regulatory actions; and some of the most important public affairs matters arising out of the Middle East.

Here's another nice quotation, this time from Levick's Anti-Corruption and Compliance page:

As veterans of the DOJ, SEC, and NGOs such as Transparency International, Levick’s senior counselors understand how these formidable institutions utilize the media spotlight to build a case in the Court of Public Opinion – and, more important, how companies can best shape the story when allegations of bribery or corruption arise.

This all seems like overkill in the decidedly unformidable realm of local government ethics. But why shouldn't a pension trustee's reputation be worth as much Wall Street's or the Catholic Church's?

The big question remains, Who is going to pay to protect their reputations from the big, bad Baltimore ethics board? The pension board's minutes do not appear to be available online, and the Investigative Voice has apparently not found out the answer to the question, either.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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