Why Uber's 'Smear the Press' Approach Would Never Work

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Today we bring you a guest post from Andrew Graham, founding partner of Clear and co-founder of Grow America.

Uber has managed to give opposition research a bad rap.

What surprised me about Ben Smith’s scoop — that an executive at Uber floated the idea to use opposition researchers to smear journalists who write things the company does not want them to write — isn’t that the idea apparently existed in some form.

What surprised me is how profoundly bad that specific idea is on its own, and that it would even cross the mind of someone who has managerial responsibility at a company valued at $18b.

The idea, as summarized in BuzzFeed:

Over dinner, [Uber’s Emil Michael] outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists.

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