McDeaths...Blog Post Week #7

I found an article on prwatch.org that I found to be interesting. The article is called “McDeaths” and includes an excerpt from the book Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry by Bob Burton. This excerpt basically gives the background information about an incident in Australia involving a man named Brian Page. Page took his daughter to McDonalds one night and soon became vary sick and eventually died. Further investigation concluded that Page was not the only one with similar symptoms. Twenty-two other people reported similar symptoms and six of them, including page, died. The bacteria the ultimately killed page, Legionella, is found in poorly maintained water-cooled air-conditioning systems. Officials tracked the paths of the infected individuals and later discovered that they all entered the same McDonalds. This excerpt recalls how McDonalds placed “spin” on the incident. According to the excerpt, “McDonald's got a tip-off from someone in the Fairfield City Council, stating that it had been specifically named in the Health Department's draft report on the outbreak. With the benefit of advance notice, the company scrambled its crisis management team, comprising senior executives, PPR staff including its founder Peter Lazar, its advertising agency and company lawyers.” McDonalds feared that the report would be made public and scrambled to re-word the release to shift the blame. In all this story and incident reflects how a company can influence and place spin on a report. To read this article in full, click here.

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