In March, a former head of General Motors public relations, Bruce McDonald, died. For a generation of automotive reporters, that meant a lot.
McDonald reached the peak of GM PR in 1992. It was a gentler time back then, at least based on my experience.
McDonald, had to deal with a CEO (Robert Stempel) being forced out while a new chief executive (Jack Smith) was named as a replacement.
When you are the head of public relations, you have your hands full. At GM in the early 1990s, that meant a lot of work. You had to deal with lawyers and a board of directors that were confronting a crisis.
During this period, I worked at The Indianapolis Star. GM had a major manufacturing presence in Indiana. So, GM was my top coverage priority (GM had about 50,000 employees in Indiana when I started following the company.)
In the 1990s, I was thinking about going to the Chicago Auto Show. In those days, GM had a big presence at the Chicago show.
The then-CEO Jack Smith was going to attend the Chicago show during a media lunch.
I asked Bruce McDonald about press access. He said he couldn’t make promises. So, I committed to attend.
I got up early to make the drive to Chicago. When I got there, Bruce put me next to Smith at his table. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I wasn’t going to complain.
My reporter friends approached me, asking me to activate their tape recorders (and they were tape recorders in those days).
I was happy to do so. As far as I was concerned, I was playing with house money.
Since then, the relations between media and companies have become more combative. In the early 2000s, I moved to Detroit and learned that lesson the hard way. I would encounter PR executives who would take things to the limit where they could claim (semi-plausibly) they weren’t lying.
Concerning Bruce McDonald, I always got the impression he always played fair with the media. If only it were the same today.