Joanna Weiss

Matt LeBlanc looks bedraggled in the pictures, eyes shallow, hair mussed, five o’clock shadow grown into 7:30. Message: I stink. And, of course, he does. The actor’s just confessed as much in The National Enquirer, beside the headline, ”MY WILD NIGHT WITH A STRIPPER.”

Next to the tale of a strip club encounter that actually sounds fairly chaste, there’s a different sort of photo of LeBlanc. Let’s call it the hostage shot; he’s sitting with an Enquirer reporter, proving that he spoke willingly. And that look in his eye is . . . what? A plaintive appeal for forgiveness? Or a teeny, tiny smirk that says, ”Suckers”?

Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman, who has seen this sort of thing before, immediately thought: negotiation. ”If that’s what they printed,” Bragman says, ”My question is, tell me what they had?”

But New York public relations maven Richard Laermer has a darker theory. ”Wow,” he says. ”NBC must be putting out all the stops to get one person to watch ‘Joey.’ ”

Even in an age of celebrity confessional, LeBlanc’s sit-down in this week’s issue seems a stretch: an aggressive assault of self-flagellation. It goes to show, publicists say, how much the Hollywood PR machine has learned since Hugh Grant pioneered a new form of contrition on Jay Leno’s couch.

These days, done artfully enough, confession isn’t just damage control; it’s a form of preemptive manipulation. And LeBlanc is only the latest purveyor; this spring, Pat O’Brien mea-culped to Dr. Phil about his alcohol-laced voice mails. Then Jude Law, nabbed for a tryst with the nanny, put out a press release just as the story broke, saying he was ”deeply ashamed and upset” and asking for privacy during ”this difficult time.”

To Bragman, it’s proof that celebrities and their publicists are approaching the news business with more realism. ”Hollywood publicists have always thought that they could operate on a different set of rules,” he says. But recently, he says, they’ve come to embrace a general principle of public relations: Confession ”is the smart thing to do in a crisis.”

That’s what Grant discovered in 1995, when he was caught in Hollywood with a prostitute named Divine Brown — and chose to apologize to the world (and, by extension, then-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley) on ”The Tonight Show.”

Today, the crises are even more inevitable, Bragman says; the advent of the camera-cellphone means that anyone can join the paparazzi. But the solutions come more quickly, too, he says, as celebrity news has become an increasing staple of the mainstream press. Confess to The National Enquirer, and other outlets will report that you did.

It helps, of course, that the confession has become a standard form of discourse, says Hollywood publicist Michael Levine. Sniffling on ”Oprah” is an accepted way to advance a career, he says, and celebrities will share details that might best be left unsaid: We now know that Cybill Shepherd has irritable bowel syndrome.

And when it comes to wrongdoing, Levine says, publicists have come to understand that if the sinner runs through what he calls the ”holy foursome” — ”humility, speed, personal responsibility, and contrition” — fans will forgive. Even in the heartland. Or especially there. After O’Brien’s turn on Dr. Phil, his hometown minor league baseball team in Sioux Falls, S.D., had him throw out the first pitch and gave away Pat O’Brien bobblehead dolls.

Laermer, the publicist and author of ”Full Frontal PR,” points out that the celebs get something, too — that Shepherd, in spite of her condition, has been plugging a stage show and a CD and plotting a return to television. Everything is connected, Laermer says. Nothing is spontaneous.

So when a movie is in the pipeline, he says, studio publicity folk will sit with a starlet — pretend her name is ”Uma” — and lay out a scenario. Let’s get you on the cover of the magazines, they’ll say, by capitalizing on your failing marriage. One story will focus on your life as a single woman. Another on your anguish. Another on motherhood. Another on your new image.

”They’ll map out a strategy, and they’ll call up a publication and say, ‘This is what you’re going to get,” Laermer says. ”And then they all have to work with Uma on talking points.”

And if everyone is talking about how bad they feel for Uma . . . well, they’re talking about her, right?

That’s the ultimate payoff of celebrity PR, Laermer says; those recent Tom Cruise crazies came at a time when his films weren’t working so well with younger viewers. And the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie drama, which played out around the release of ”Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” was followed by the highest box office opening ever for either of them.

”When the movie debuts on pay-per-view,” he says, ”I think they’ll go their separate ways.”