the Oasis

‘All the Worst Humans‘ lays bare the reality that journalists are easy prey for good PR operatives. And that we have almost no training to help us cut through the bull.

By Scott Morgan, Managing Editor,
Sept. 28, 2025

Only twice in my life have I bought a book because of a single sentence.

The first was in 1997, when I bought a horror anthology entirely because of the opening line of Brian Hodge’s Extinctions In Paradise. It’s still my favorite short story of all time, FWIW.

The second was yesterday. And I bought it for the quotation Phil Elwood used as his opening salvo:

‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’

It’s opens Elwood’s 2024 memoir, All the Worst Humans, in which he offers a kind of self-flagellation-as-confession for getting caught. His job, for about a decade leading into 2018, was to get the press to bite on stories that would serve his clients’ interests. Often, his clients were, say it with me, all the worst humans breathing air the same time he was.

If it matters for you to know this, it’s exactly the book it should be. Absolutely worth borrowing from the library.

Why this book matters so much to me, so soon, actually has nothing to do with how it’s written or even, really, what it says.

It matters because it’s such a clever illusion, and one that journalists would do well to read because we are not properly armed to fight it.

Take the quotation again. It’s attributed to George Bernard Shaw. Who didn’t say it. Or write it. Or post it to his Insta page.

An illusion about an illusion. Very meta.

When the book begins, it blows past the visit Elwood gets from the FBI and gets … where? Take your pick: Behind the curtain? Into the factory where the sausage is made? Into the locker room of professional baseball players, where the flakes in the air are not stardust, but dandruff? (To paraphrase/butcher Frank Deford).

The book wastes no time exposing how a kid fell in love with the Capitol Hill scene and learned to make a whole pile of money getting major news outlets to start covering his brain droppings; how quickly he realized that he could create the very stories the national press covers, and how eager the 86,400-second-a-day news media were to suck up the pitches he made, to fill at least 86,000 of those seconds.

The pitches were also an illusion. For example, Elwood writes about trying to get a war documentary film a PG-13 rating, despite its abundant profanity. The pitch was about providing access to the film to young men and women who might want to enlist for military duty in the Middle East..They should be able to see the reality of life served in a warzone, Elwood’s easily trained senator would say.

Elwood got the attention of CNN, and, thus, the idea that this film should not be rated R — because it would help expose reality to impressionable teens — was canonized for the American public.

The real reason Elwood pitched the PG-13 rating was ticket sales. R-rated films don’t sell as many tickets.

Leaf in the forest. If you want to hide a leaf, hide it in the forest, where no one will realize what they’re stepping over.

I’m not immune to a good pitch. I’m not even pretending to be. And I’m actually grateful to Elwood for boiling my blood. From time to time, journalists need a good wakeup claxon to shake them back to reality. Little does a better job of exposing reality than illusion.

The press, especially broadcast press, does a pretty solid job of selling our own illusions already. Major stations and national papers, in particular, like to present journalists as the bulwark against tyranny, First Amendment, stand beside her and guide her, and all that.

I wouldn’t do this job if I didn’t think that journalism actually was a goalie in democracy’s crease. But in the bigger picture, the game is about currency. Money, power, influence. Who gets to have it, who gets to keep it. The higher up on the industry food chain you go, the more money a news organization accounts, the more the showbiz takes over for the journalism.

I seriously hope none of that is a surprise to you.

Why I bring it up is to say this: So many of the issues you learn from the press, the ‘legitimate’ press, I mean, started with someone wanting something and finding a way to get the result without revealing the real goal. It’s not about ticket sales. It’s about protecting America’s youth.

And while journalists spend a decent amount of time admiring our efforts to save democracy, we ignore the fact that, as people, we are as easily led astray as anyone else. Only, it’s more dangerous to mislead us, because, despite protestations that the press is irrelevant infotainment in the Social Media Age, press coverage still legitimizes a topic like nothing else. We cover it, and it becomes more credible, more believable, more important to keep front of mind.

That makes journalists extremely vulnerable to illusions. We always need things to write about (always), we’re usually ideologues, we all want to break an important story, and I don’t know a single one of us who ever got training in how to spot the subtext of a pitch from a PR operative.

The dangerous world of online extremism has a term for journalists — ‘soft targets’. Meaning, we’re not armed and can’t shoot back.

We’re soft targets for a good PR operative too. Senators and business executives and pop stars have people who coach them how to talk to the press. How to keep harping the same five bullet points, especially live, when the reporter/anchor/show host has only four minutes to grill you.

The press? We have classes on communication law and video production at journalism school. We’re not armed for the actual fight we’re in.

The illusion, for us, is that we are reporting on the stories that affect The People. The reality is, the guy with the most compelling pitch creates the stories, and we have nothing in our pockets to help us cut through bullshit.

And that all is probably best summed up in this line from All the Worst Humans:

‘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.’

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