Old-Fashioned Paid Punditry

SpinWatch's Eveline Lubbers recently read Karen S. Miller's 1999 book The Voice of Business, Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations. While Hill & Knowlton's work for the tobacco industry in the fifties has been covered by PR Watch and others, the PR firm's earlier work for the steel industry is not as widely known. Miller, who teaches PR and media history at the University of Georgia, documents that H&K "took part in preparation for testimony before a congressional committee investigating the industry’s record of suppression of labor’s civil rights in June 1936. This subcommittee of the Senate and Labor Committee, chaired by Robert La Follette, exposed four antiunion practices which had frustrated labor organization for decades: espionage, industrial munitions, strikebreaking, and private police," Lubbers writes. "The committee revealed that Hill and Knowlton sponsored antiunion messages appearing in the news media. George Sokolsky, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly received $28,599 from H&K from June 1936 to February 1938, chiefly for consultation to the American Iron and Steel Institute. When writing against the steelworkers union, the articles failed to mention his connection to H&K or the Institute."