a fire-breather gets scorched

At midnight last Halloween, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a government agency that provides political-risk insurance for American companies operating abroad, canceled the policy of a Louisiana-based multinational mining company called Freeport-McMoRan. Three days later, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans ran a wire-service story reporting that the cancellation was apparently linked to environmental damage at Freeport's gold mine in the remote Indonesian province of Irian Jaya. Freeport's c.e.o., James Robert (Jim Bob) Moffett, was not happy, and he and three employees marched into the offices of the paper the day the story came out, demanding a correction. They contended that OPIC's decision to cancel Freeport's $100 million insurance policy was based on potential rather than actual harm to the environment. "What they're saying," Moffett told the paper's assembled editors and its publisher, "is that a project of this size is going to be very controversial and might -- might -- create a controversy."

 The Times-Picayune listened and quickly began investigating Moffet's claims. But after obtaining OPIC's letter of cancellation, it ran an article refuting much of what Moffett had said. Freeport, the paper reported (quoting OPIC), had "severely degraded the rain forests" in Irian Jaya.

Freeport-McMoRan, which has affiliates in both Indonesia and in Austin, Texas, has constructed a mammoth public relations team and spent a great deal of money and time trying to shape public opinion. But the media in Austin and New Orleans have turned a skeptical eye on a company they see as trying to oversell its virtue.

Freeport-McMoRan's Austin affiliate, FM Properties, develops real estate and the Indonesian affiliate, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, mines the world's largest gold reserve and runs the third-largest copper mine. Since last spring, the company has been dealing with publicity about the murder and torture of indigenous people in Irian Jaya, first nationally publicized by The Nation magazine. Some environmentalists and human rights activists in the area claim that killings perpetrated by the Indonesian military occurred on Freeport property, and may even have involved Freeport security personnel. The company vehemently denies any involvement, and said so in December in a trio of full-page ads in The New York Times.

The story of Freeport's relationship with the media in New Orleans goes back to 1984. It was then that Times-Picayune environmental reporter Mark Schleifstein discovered documents showing that the Environmental Protection Agency was planning to grant the company an exemption to the Clean Water Act allowing it to dump 25 million pounds of gypsum, a byproduct from the production of fertilizer that contains phosphate and a trace of uranium, directly into the Mississippi river. In some places along the river the gypsum had been stacked as high as forty feet.

 Other stories about the gypsum contamination ran on local television news, including one five-day series in the late 1980s by Garland Robinette, then anchor and environmental reporter for WWL, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. Freeport built a $60 million system to reduce the runoff, a process that even the company's staunchest critics concede has significantly reduced the level of phosphate in the river.

 It also decided to build a massive public relations machine. Its first hire? Anchorman Robinette. Then came the environmental reporter from the NBC affiliate. In the end, Freeport had studded its large public relations team with former environmental reporters and activists.

 At the same time, the company was donating large sums to local universities and charity events -- from charity golf tournaments to hot meals for seniors to $600,000 for an environmental communications chair at Loyola University to train aspiring environmental journalists. And the company rarely missed an opportunity to promote itself. "Jim Bob Moffett spent more money on ads explaining why he was making the playgrounds than on the playgrounds themselves," one local reporter says. According to Robinette, the company bombarded the community with print and television advertising. "We circumvented the [media] industry," Robinette says, "and today Freeport is the most highly thought-of company in Louisiana."

 In Austin, Freeport has been under scrutiny for a different reason. Since 1990, the company has been attempting to develop 4,000 acres of land into a residential and commercial area. The development lies upstream from Barton Springs, a large spring-fed swimming pool visited by some 300,000 people a year, and has encountered fierce resistance. In 1992 Austin voted nearly two to one to impose strict development standards in the areas that contribute water to Barton Springs. The company is still trying to move forward with the project.

The vote may have been influenced by relentless and critical coverage in a local alternative weekly, The Austin Chron-icle. Two reporters, Daryl Slusher and Robert Bryce, wrote countless articles detailing Freeport's environmental record in both Louisiana and Indonesia. And as in New Orleans, Freeport tried to reshape its image, with heavy print and TV advertising and by hiring former environmental reporters to work on its public relations team. Its spokesman in Austin is Bill Collier, a former environmental reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. According to Collier, the company has donated as much as $42 million to charitable causes. Moffett and his wife personally donated $1 million for a new molecular biology building at the University of Texas at Austin, and Freeport matched the gift.

For years, while the Chronicle was bashing Freeport's environmental record, the American-Statesman consistently seemed to side with the company. The Statesman's publisher, Roger Kintzel, a member and onetime chairman of the Greater Austin chamber of commerce, was sympathetic to suburban development interests, according to the Chronicle's Slusher. At one point, Moffett flew top officials of Austin's chambers of commerce, including Kintzel, in his corporate jet to see his company's operations in New Orleans, a visit the Statesman dutifully covered in its people column.

As in New Orleans, however, Freeport may have placed too much faith in aggressive tactics. Last December, the company threatened to sue three University of Texas professors, two environmental activists, and two reporters (Slusher and Bryce of the Chronicle) for criticizing the company. The threat happened to follow the departure of Kintzel to The Atlanta Journal & Constitution and the arrival of a new editor, Richard Oppel, who had been Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder.

Oppel took the opportunity to blast the company, in a December 15 editorial marking what many consider a new era in Statesman coverage. "Corporate leaders today apparently are advised by public relations strategists and Wall Street analysts to strike back furiously, absolutely punishing critics, when drawn into controversy," he wrote. "The results are not pretty." Oppel went on to express his support for those who received the threatening letters.

 Oppel again reminded the company, in a February 4 column, of his suggestion that it withdraw the threats against its critics. But by then, in both Austin and New Orleans, some of the tension between Freeport and the press had seemed to ease. Oppel also concluded that evidence directly linking the company to human rights abuse in Indonesia was thin and had been contradicted by other sources, and thus was "no longer an issue," and that "Freeport executives in Indonesia are struggling to contain the environmental damage" from the mines.

The Times-Picayune, meanwhile, weighed in with an impressive four-part series on Freeport's Indonesian operations. Reporter Stewart Yerton explained that the abuses by the Indonesian military are real -- including torture and some sixteen murders, mostly in 1995 -- and that although some victims blame the company for bringing soldiers to Irian Jaya, a credible human rights observer did not charge it with direct involvement in the abuse. On the environment, as a page-one Times-Picayune subhead put it, "Critics say Freeport has destroyed ancient cultures and rainforests. . . . The company says damage has been minimal. . . . Somewhere in between lies the truth." Freeport's response to the series, unlike its response to earlier reports, has so far been muted and respectful, but it's hard to tell if its fire-breathing days are over. "The press," says Robinette, "will communicate maybe a half-dozen times. We'll communicate with the public a couple hundred times."

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