McGuireWoods Consulting, a Chicago-based PR and lobbying firm, has been hired by the FutureGen Alliance to lobby Illinois legislators to financially support FutureGen, a proposed coal-fired power station which would use the experimental Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology. (CCS is often touted as "clean coal".) "Their task," writes Kurt Erickson, is "to convince the state to buy all the electricity the plant produces. Such a move would help FutureGen secure federal funding" to underwrite the plant's costs. While proposed legislation mandating the purchase of electricity from the plant has won support from an Illinois Senate committee, others have been wary as "FutureGen has not been able to say exactly how much taxpayers would be charged." Working on the account at McGuireWoods Consulting are Tom Londrigan, a former attorney during the first term of former Governor Rod Blagojevich’s and Kyle Barry, a former attorney for the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

Victoria Police has negotiated a formal agreement with the developers of a desalination plant to provide police files to the project developers. Paul Austin reports that "Victoria Police has agreed to hand over photos, video recordings and other police records to the international consortium AquaSure to help it 'manage' protests and potential security threats." A 20-page agreement was signed between Victoria Police and AquaSure in late August and contains a provision that police ''will release law enforcement data'' to the desalination plant developers. AquaSure is a consortium which comprises water, construction and finance companies Degremont, Suez Environment, Thiess and Macquarie Capital Group. Michael Pearce, the president of the civil rights group, Liberty Victoria, said "this seems to be a part of the Government's heavy-handed response to relatively low-level protest activity which is a part of the democratic process in relation to a project of enormous public significance.''

The Seattle Times' Jonathan Martin reports, "In response to a request to talk with [T-Mobile] CEO Robert Dotson and other executives this week, I got an email back from the PR firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide that ended with a strange request.

Hi Jonathan, Thank you for your phone call this afternoon and your patience while I looked into your request. While we won't be able to provide you with an interview we are able to provide the following statement. ... Please note that if you plan to use this statement in your piece, I am not a T-Mobile spokesperson and to use my name would be inaccurate. If you are required to include attribution please do so to a 'T-Mobile Spokesperson'. Thank you and have a great weekend! Best, Danielle

To be clear, the statement is from a 'T-Mobile spokesperson,' but the spokesperson has no name, and saying that the spokesperson does have a name would be 'inaccurate.' ... John Stauber, author of Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, said farming out media inquiries to external PR firms is a strategy to 'distance the company from uncomfortable questions.' "

The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon was using one of its favorite public relations firms, the Rendon Group, to produce profiles of reporters requesting to embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan; that the profiles graded reporters' past coverage as "positive," "neutral" or "negative," sometimes suggesting how to "neutralize" expected negative coverage or how to design embeds to "result in favorable coverage"; and that, in some cases, the profiles prompted military officials to reject reporters' embed requests. After the series of exposes, the Pentagon announced that it was terminating the Rendon contract. Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith told Stars and Stripes, "As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon's support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction." In a statement on the firm's site, Rendon maintains that its profiles did not rank reporters, and weren't "provided as the basis for accepted or rejecting a specific journalist's inquiries." The statement doesn't mention that the profiles suggested how to shape reporters' future coverage. Rendon is infamous for organizing the pro-regime change Iraqi National Congress and has also worked in Colombia, Haiti, Kosovo and Zimbabwe.

A British public relations executive is cautioning PR professionals not to release bad news in the wake of Michael Jackson's death. "No-one can ever trump Labour aide Jo Moore's debacle during the September 11 attacks, but there'll be cynics out there watching very carefully for companies releasing stuff under cover of global mourning," said Dougal Paver, Managing Director of Paver Smith. (Moore, a media adviser to the Transport, Local Government and Regions Secretary, infamously wrote on September 11, 2001 that "It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.") The Australian government, however, couldn't resist. Hours after the news of Jackson's death, late on a Friday afternoon, the Australian Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs, Craig Emerson, announced that he was axing the establishment of a website comparing grocery prices between retail chains. Most major supermarkets objected to the proposed website, which would have been run by the consumer group Choice.

U.S. Army officials have barred a reporter with the military newspaper Stars and Stripes "from embedding with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division that is attempting to secure the violent city of Mosul" in Iraq. In the refusal letter to Stars and Stripes reporter Heath Druzin, an Army public affairs officer wrote that "Mr. Druzin refused to highlight" good news about "Iraqi Army leaders, soldiers, national police and Iraqi police display[ing] commitment to partnership." The newspaper has "spent more than three weeks appealing Druzin's banishment to senior commanders in Iraq as well as public affairs officers at the Pentagon, but had been repeatedly rebuffed." In his appeal of the decision, Stars and Stripes editorial director Terry Leonard wrote, "To deny Mr. Druzin an embed under the reasons stated ... is a direct challenge to the editorial independence of this newspaper ... an attempt at censorship and it is also an illegal prior restraint under federal law. ... The military cannot tell us what stories to write or not write." The Army would only allow a different Stars and Stripes reporter to embed with a different military unit in a different Iraqi city, Kirkuk. The president of Military Reporters and Editors blasted the decision, writing to Army and Pentagon officials that barring Druzin "violates both the spirit and the letter of the embed guidelines that Military Reporters & Editors and many other journalists have worked so diligently to implement."

Following a December 2008 massive coal ash spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA's) Kingston coal-fired power station in Roane County, Tennessee, local officials want a three-year, $1.9 million public relations campaign. The Roane County Long Term Recovery Committee is asking the TVA to bankroll the campaign, which would be carried out by a Nashville PR firm, McNeely Pigott & Fox. "The campaign would feature tracking polls to gauge current perceptions about Roane County," with "two years of advertising and a 'news bureau' that would cost $726,000 each year," reports the Knoxville News Sentinel. One of the PR firm's partners said the goal would be "overall reputation building for Roane County to the tourism and economic development industries." Another Nashville firm, Cooley Public Strategies, would assist with the campaign. "Soon after the ash spill, TVA contracted with The WadeGroup Inc., of Washington, D.C.," but "TVA has not provided a copy of the WadeGroup's contract despite several requests from the News Sentinel." TVA had earlier "agreed in principle" to fund a longer PR push. The coal ash spill released 5.4 million cubic yards of sludge, 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

First, it was British Petroleum. Then, after a multi-million dollar rebranding as "green," the oil giant renamed itself Beyond Petroleum, or simply BP. Now, BP says its "number one priority" is responsibility. BP spokesperson David Nicholas described the change as "an evolution and expansion of green as a brand value rather than a replacement. ... 'Responsible' encompasses BP's original aspirations towards the environment, in addition to ... safety and social welfare." But environmental groups think BP is further distancing itself from renewable energy. Greenpeace climate change adviser Charlie Kronick called the change "classic smoke and mirrors," saying BP is giving itself "carte blanche to sell off its unprofitable green energy arm." BP never spent more than "1.5% of its budget on solar power," recently cut renewable projects and is invested in Alberta's tar sands, an especially dirty source of oil. One thing is certain -- BP's new emphasis on responsibility is meant to help "regain the trust it lost following the 2005 Texas City explosion, which killed 15 people and injured more than 170 others," reports BBC. BP consultant Tom Woollard said BP's "new brand value" is "a promise to potential partners that another Texas City is not on the cards."

Ben Smith reports on the Common Purpose Project, a new group formed to enforce message discipline among liberal organizations supporting the Obama Administration. It meets every Tuesday and brings together liberal organizations including major unions and MoveOn.org. The group has an overlapping membership with a daily phone conference run by John Podesta's think tank Center for American Progress and David Brock's Media Matters, the organizations behind Progressive Media, another part of pro-Obama PR and strategy coordination. "Unlike those other groups, however, the Common Purpose meeting has involved a White House official, communications director Ellen Moran, two sources familiar with the meeting said. It's aimed, said one, at 'providing a way for the White House to manage its relationships with some of these independent groups.' The group's founder, political consultant and former Gephardt aide Erik Smith, described it in general terms after others had confirmed its existence. ... Its political director is another former Obama aide, Miti Sathe. Part of the group's role is to enforce a kind of message discipline" and it "shares some aspects with Grover Norquist's long-running Wednesday Meeting of conservative activists, but is more focused on messaging day-to-day politics and doesn't include journalists and academics."