Public Relations

According to O'Dwyer's PR, James Carville, former political advisor to Bill Clinton, and his partner Stanley Greenberg will be working to "spruce-up" the image of Israel in the U.S. Carville and Greenberg met with Israel foreign ministry officials, but are to be paid by a group of American Jews who believe Israel's PR "needs improvement," according to The Jerusalem Post. O'Dwyer's says it is unclear whether the Israeli government will contribute to the PR effort. Carville and Greenberg have worked for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The bold announcement from Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) that it had taken steps to create human embryos through cloning was more hype than reality. The methods used had already been done in animals, and some scientists insisted it wasn't cloning at all. Also, the few embryonic cells it had created had died. "This was a public relations campaign," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Building "buzz" was the hallmark of dot-com PR, writes Lois Paul of the PR firm of Lois Paul & Associates. Now that the dot-coms have crashed, she says PR must deliver "real messages" and present "real companies, not personalities or 'vision.' ... The best PR people are invaluable to companies during this type of downturn," she says, because "PR today is all about reputation management."

Public relations people are not all bad -- a fact that probably gets insufficient mention at PR Watch (sorry, guys). Mark Bingham was CEO of The Bingham Group, a PR firm with offices in San Francisco and New York. He was also aboard United flight 93 when it went down in Pennsylvania on September 11, and he is believed to be one of the passengers who stormed the cockpit and brought down the plane before it could hit Washington. His friends and family have established a website in his honor.