by Phil Elwood ★★★★☆
The subtitle of All the Worst Humans—"How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians"—pretty much sums up Phil Elwood's life, with "made" being the operative word. Elwood has worked in Washington, D.C. since he was a teenager, originally starting as an intern on Capitol Hill and eventually moving into PR. He quickly realized that he had a talent for crafting and selling stories that could manipulate the news cycle and start to skew a narrative enough that his clients, originally destined to be the villains of a story, regularly found their way out of a negative news cycle. "As CNN broadcasts my message to millions of Americans, I realize my job isn't to manipulate public opinion. My job is to get gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me. Once you have ink, your story becomes real. A conversation starts that didn't exist moments before, a conversation nobody would think to have if you hadn't started it. The public begins to accept something you created out of nothing."
The book is part memoir, part pull-back-the-curtain on how things actually work in a world of news heavily influenced by public relations firms. Elwood pulls no punches about the realities of his job, or the impact it has on society. "The best journalists in the world aren't always breaking stories because of their dogged reporting skills; they're breaking them because they rely on people like me to feed them exclusive scoops. We use journalists to do our clients' bidding. And then the public reads their stories and believes them because they are coming from a trusted news source and not a corporate bagman." He finds it distasteful; he's also very good at it, and he can't conceive of another job at which he'd be any where close to as good.
Elwood's stories are interesting, whether he's recounting having to effectively babysit Mutassim Gaddafi (son of Muammar) in Las Vegas or drumming up ways to help Qatar win a World Cup bid. He consistently sets his morals and opinions aside in deference to his clients and jobs, something he at least has the wherewithal and self-awareness to find disturbing. There are points in the middle of the book where things jump inconsistently and the narrative thread is lost; I think that comes down to editing and/or an inability to share certain details publicly. At one point he writes "Gaddafi, Assad, Qatar, Sarajevo, Dubai (I can't even tell you what happened in Dubai)...", and that can't-tell-you moment in Dubai is where the story feels disjointed.
The constant feeling of immorality eventually catches up to Elwood. As he says, "I'm proud of my work, but I'm not proud of what I've done. I've manipulated narratives—even invented them when needed—to fix problems for a client. My stories didn't occur in a vacuum, They circulated out in the world. And they changed it. Sometimes for the worse. Often for the worse." I was hoping for a bit more of a redemptive arc for Elwood, and there is, a bit, but it's limited. Compared to other memoirs (or novels) where our main character finally sees the light and changes, Elwood mostly just sees the light.
Friends have heard me say in recent years "we've never had access to more information, and it's never been harder to determine the truth." All the Worst Humans shines a bright spotlight on the veracity of that statement. With constant manipulation of the news, amplified through social media and a 24-hour news cycle, and now made even murkier by AI and deep fakes, those working to bend (or change) the truth to fit the desires of their clients—who, most times, are on the wrong side of a news story—is particularly frustrating and distasteful to me. Elwood summarizes how things feel when he's truly in the zone in a news cycle: "You enter a liminal space where truth and reality can be whatever you want. It's almost as if the world freezes, and if you're good at what you do in PR, you can manipulate things—people, facts, the truth—before the world starts back up again. It doesn't matter what the truth is. The facts get changed, the public takes up your narrative, and you watch as the world resumes turning."
Elwood is truly an anti-hero, and never really pretends to be anything different. But in spite of that, you do at times feel yourself rooting for him, and despite his very fluid relationship with the truth, the memoir feels wholly authentic and believable. He's broken in a lot of ways, but he at least recognizes that. The positive side of Elwood exposing the reality of PR's role in manufacturing news is that it hopefully causes people to pause, look for additional information, and focus more on direct quotes and interviews than manipulated opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. I appreciated the book for its candor, and for its ability to shine a light on an industry that primarily operates in the shadows. It's eye-opening, and at just over 250 pages it's a quick and worthwhile read.
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