Antidote

Why people hate corporate PR

The bankers and tax-dodgers may get the headlines, but the Occupy movement is also taking aim at the corporate PR and lobbying industry. It has an astonishingly bad reputation: anti-democratic, unaccountable fixers for the special interest of the 1%, sitting at the nexus of big business, government and finance. Here’s some of the critical voices:

• “PR agencies gloss over, tone down and greenwash some of our more controversial industries” – Andy Rowell of the excellent Spinwatch website.
• “Some PR companies on the one hand work for an environmental organisation and on the other hand are getting paid by some agent of the military-industrial complex.” – Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International talking to Ethical Corporation.
• “Sometimes PR companies try to defend the indefensible, and often they are unable to hold up the opinion that their clients want.” – Alex Wilks of Avaaz.org
• “The “invisible men” who control our political debates and public opinion, twisting reality and protecting the powerful from scrutiny”. – Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch website. They go on to say: “[PR is a] multi-billion dollar propaganda-for-hire industry [that] concocts and spins the news, organizes phony grassroots front groups, spies on citizens, and conspires with lobbyists and politicians to thwart democracy.”

It’s hardly surprising – the industry has a long, shameful record of using dubious methods to promote clients’ interests: fake science, spin, smears, abuse of political access. Here are some examples:

BURSON-MARSTELLER was busted in May last year for trying to plant bogus anti-Google stories on behalf of Facebook. It’s response was also less than honourable: blame the client. John Vidal’s account of the company is extraordinary:

The world’s biggest PR company was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family.

Its corporate clients have included the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, Union Carbide after the Bhopal gas leak killed up to 15,000 people in India, BP after the sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker in 1967 and the British government after BSE emerged.

In the past few years it has acted for big tobacco companies and the European biotechnology industry to challenge the green lobby and counter Greenpeace arguments on GM food.

APCO is imfamous for running the Phillip Morris funded Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, set up to discredit links between tobacco and cancer. In 2010, the “Push Michael Moore Off a Cliff” smear campaign was exposed by a whistle-blower:

We felt that this movie would have such an impact that it would really pave the way for legislation to be passed that could be very detrimental to the insurance industry. So it was very important for the insurers to attack this movie as fiercely as possible,” Wendell Potter said. “We developed a very, very sophisticated communications campaign to make sure that people saw him [Moore] as a Marxist, as a socialist, and that he was going to be destroying the American Dream.

BELL-POTTINGER was secretly recorded by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism boasting about its access to the heart of the government, and how it uses the “dark arts” to bury bad coverage and influence public opinion. It also flaunted its prowess at cleaning up Google results and “sorting” Wikipedia entries. It’s excruciating to watch, but here’s the film:

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said,

I am astonished at the ethical blindness of Bell Pottinger’s reaction. That their strongest true response is they didn’t break the law tells a lot about their view of the world, I’m afraid.

“Ethical blindness” would seem a kind way to describe some of these misadventures. The industry clearly has an ethical issue. This blog is about “the power of communications to bring about positive social change” – that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda for most PR houses. Yet they have an extraordinary opportunity: in many cases, they are the conduit between public sentiment and the powerful elites. That’s got to be an interesting place to be.

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