All the Worst Humans
How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians
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3.8 • 18 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Editors' Choice
"A rollicking, unexpectedly affecting story. . . It’s going to be one of the big, buzzy Beltway books of the year."
—Politico
A bridge-burning, riotous memoir by a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the $129-billion industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media—from a man who used to pull the strings, and who is now pulling back the curtain.
After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that’s made him so successful. The first step is revealing exactly what he’s been up to for the past twenty years—and it isn’t pretty.
Elwood has worked for a murderer’s row of questionable clients, including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar. In All the Worst Humans, Elwood unveils how the PR business works, and how the truth gets made, spun, and sold to the public—not shying away from the gritty details of his unlikely career.
This is a piercing look into the corridors of money, power, politics, and control, all told in Elwood’s disarmingly funny and entertaining voice. He recounts a four-day Las Vegas bacchanal with a dictator’s son, plotting communications strategies against a terrorist organization in Western Africa, and helping to land a Middle Eastern dictator’s wife a glowing profile in Vogue on the same time the Arab Spring broke out. And he reveals all his slippery tricks for seducing journalists in order to create chaos and ultimately cover for politicians, dictators, and spies—the industry-secret tactics that led to his rise as a political PR pro.
Along the way, Phil walks the halls of the Capitol, rides in armored cars through Abuja, and watches his client lose his annual income at the roulette table. But as he moved up the ranks, he felt worse and worse about the sleaziness of it all—until Elwood receives a shocking wake-up call from the FBI. This risky game nearly cost Elwood his life and his freedom. Seeing the light, Elwood decides to change his ways, and his clients, and to tell the full truth about who is the worst human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A PR man with a newfound conscience recalls his propaganda campaigns in this raucous debut memoir. Elwood recaps his career at leading Washington, D.C., public relations firms and his strategies to promulgate spin concocted to serve his clients' hidden agendas. These included a campaign to procure a congressional resolution opposing America's bid for the 2022 soccer World Cup on the ground that the money should be spent on children's physical education instead—a ploy that convinced FIFA to let his client, Qatar, stage the Cup—and a successful effort to get Vogue to write a puff piece on the wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that painted the country as "a place without bombings, unrest or kidnappings." Elwood hit bottom working for Psy Group, an Israeli company that peddled election-influencing services; his activities got him investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller, which provoked a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. (Later chapters trace a redemptive upswing, which included doing PR for ketamine as an anti-depressant.) Elwood's picaresque features mordantly funny scenes (a standout chapter involves shepherding client Muammar Gadafi's deranged adult son Mutassim around Las Vegas) and a savvy exploration of the machinery of public relations, including how astroturfed nonprofits and content-hungry journalists function as PR mouthpieces. The result is an entertaining, wised-up account of the dark arts of reputation laundering.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating!
I never knew this part of the news world existed. Is there such a thing as fake news? Maybe, maybe not. At a minimum, I will consider “spin”, money, and influence impacting all news sources now. This is a very timely book! I am naive no more!