MICROSCOFF: PUBLIC RELATIONS 98 -- HOW DO YOU WANT BILL GATES TO BAMBOOZLE
YOU TODAY

THE SOBER photo ops in inner-city classrooms didn't impress. The cuddly
interviews with Barbara Walters, Regis and Kathie Lee wore thin.

Say farewell to Bill Gates, Mr. Nice Guy. We hardly knew ye.

Having failed to quiet the antitrust hounds by giving its leader an image
transplant repositioning him as the regular billionaire next door,
Microsoft is now turning to hardball. With exquisitely perverse timing, it
is taking a new P.R. leaf directly from the playbook of the most despised
industry in America, Big Tobacco.

This bizarre scheme was revealed last week by the Los Angeles Times, which
obtained confidential documents outlining a plan for a stealth media blitz
in which flattering articles, letters to the editor and opinion pieces
would be commissioned and planted ``by Microsoft's top media handlers'' but
be presented ``as spontaneous testimonials'' to the attorneys general in
the dozen states that may join the feds' scrutiny of Gates' allegedly
predatory business practices.

The phony grass-roots campaign -- as Microsoft's own Web magazine, Slate,
has since labeled it -- is nothing if not a retread of familiar tobacco
tactics. As far back as the '60s, cigarette companies were caught having
paid for an ostensibly scientific article in True magazine disputing the
connection between smoking and cancer. The '90s have given us the National
Smokers Alliance, a loud smokers' rights group that tries to intimidate
anti-smoking legislators by bragging of its ``grass-roots'' organization of
``more than 3 million members''; it was exposed this year (also by The L.A.
Times) to be bankrolled largely by Philip Morris rather than by spontaneous
throngs of dues-paying citizens insisting on their right to smoke
themselves to death.

Embarrassing as it is that Microsoft has considered mimicking Big Tobacco's
P.R. stunts, the company is also toying with an even more lethal tobacco
habit -- lying. When initially contacted by the L.A. Times about the
stealth plan, Microsoft's spokesman pleaded ignorance -- even though his
name was on the documents the paper had obtained. Later he ``amended his
remarks,'' as it was politely put, and acknowledged attending a meeting at
which the plan had been discussed only three days earlier.

There is a fundamental difference between Microsoft, whatever one thinks of
its alleged monopolistic ambitions, and Big Tobacco. Gates' company helps
drive an industry that is not only creating wealth but also revolutionizing
the quality of life and work for many Americans -- mostly for the better.
The tobacco industry, while also creating wealth, is an
addictive-drug-and-death merchant that all too literally saps national
strength rather than adding to it. Why would Microsoft, a gem of American
capitalism, sink to a pariah industry's scuzzy level of corporate behavior?

The only conceivable answer is arrogance. Rather than make the case for
Microsoft on its merits, Gates and his handlers seem possessed by the
belief that the public and public officials alike can easily be bamboozled
by spin.

Perhaps -- but not so easily as in the past. If we have anything to thank
Big Tobacco for, it is for sowing public skepticism about the propaganda
campaigns of all corporate giants. Having been caught in so many lies -
whether about nicotine addiction or its marketing of cigarettes to kids --
Big Tobacco has fallen so low it can't even buy politicians anymore (if the
politicians want to be re-elected, that is). When it started a costly
campaign last week to derail Congress' proposed tobacco settlement, whining
in newspaper ads that the deal might drive it ``out of business,''
Americans just laughed and turned the page. Such is Big Tobacco's
credibility today that even were it to run ads admitting a direct link
between smoking and cancer, consumers would dismiss it as a trick.

Microsoft, which only discovered public relations since feeling the Justice
Department's heat, has taken just a small step down this cynical road of
dissembling, but a step it still is. And self-destructive at that: phony
``grass-roots'' campaigns reinforce rather than counter Microsoft's
troubled image as a power-mad bully that will stop at nothing to snuff out
competitors. Bill Gates, golf-playing love muffin, was a phony too, but at
least he was good for a laugh.