PR pro Fraser Seitel has issued a list of the worst PR gaffes of 2001, with awards going to the now-defunct Extreme Football League, Sharon Stone, Bill Maher, and the Enron board of directors.

Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald uncovers a decades-long campaign by Monsanto to hide its extremely toxic PCB pollution in Anniston, Alabama. Monsanto held a monopoly on PCB production in the United States until they stopped making them in 1977. For nearly 40 years while producing PCBs at the Anniston plant, Grunwald reports, Monsanto knew that the PCBs they were dumping into an Anniston creek and open-pit landfills were toxic and they concealed that knowledge.

"In any great brand, the leverageable asset is the emotional underpinning of the brand," says Charlotte Beers, who heads the U.S. government's efforts to improve America's image in the world. According to Washington Post staff writer Peter Carlson, Beers specializes in "branding" -- "a quasi-alchemical process that promises to identify a particular company's product with desirable attributes." According to U.S.