Corporate front groups can cause a "boomerang effect" to their sponsors, damaging the reputations of companies like ExxonMobil, Merck, and PepsiCo, when the sponsor's role in misrepresenting issues is widely revealed.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
After billionaire insurance mogul Maurice "Hank" Greenberg was charged with fraud and insurance and securities violations, he hired the eSapience PR firm — whose executives include the dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management — to buff up his image. Now eSapience is suing Greenberg for unpaid bills.
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"Exxon Mobil has teamed up with Stanford University to find breakthrough technologies that deliver more energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions," enthuses a TV commercial by the oil giant.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
Andrew Parker, the head of the Australian PR and lobbying firm Parker & Partners -- a part of the Ogilvy PR Worldwide network -- is worried that the Australian government will re-introduce a system of regulating lobbyists.
Submitted by Anne Landman on
The American Heart Association (AHA) is once again partnering with the Rite Aid Drug Store chain to promote its "Go Red for Women" campaign, aimed at increasing public awareness of heart disease in women.
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"The biggest leveraged buyout in history was notable not only for its finances, but also for its unusual feature of having multiple PR firms advising both sides of the deal simultaneously," writes PR Week.
In December 2006, I interviewed author Michele Simon about her book, "Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health and How to Fight Back." The excerpts below are from that original interview, which took place on WORT, community radio in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information on Michele and her work, please visit her website.
Judith Siers-Poisson (JSP): How did you personally become so involved and interested in food politics?
Michele Simon (MS): It started about 10 years ago when I was struggling with my own weight and turned to a vegetarian diet and, lo and behold, I lost the weight I was struggling with. And then, from there, I started to learn all of the other ways our diet impacts our own health, in addition to the environment, animal welfare, and labor, and so many aspects of society -- I was just amazed at how much was impacted by those food choices.
On February 9, 2007 the University of Virginia [http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=1469http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=1469# announced] its acceptance of a $25 million gift from cigarette maker Philip Morris to support biomedical research and "business leadership." In its press release, UV said the gift created a partnership between PM and UV "in a number of key areas in which they share a common interest." A medical school finding common interest with Philip Morris is somewhat of a stretch. It strikes me as a conflict of interest for a medical school to profit from a product that [http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2004pres/20040527a.html kills 440,000 Americans annually]. Moreover, tesearch on tobacco industry documents published in [http://www.news-medical.net/?id=5839 October 2004 in the medical journal Academic Medicine] shows that funding research, and particularly biomedical research, is how the tobacco industry buys legitimacy. Author Nathaniel Wander said that he found "PM wanted to be seen to contribute to medical research to counter the image of harm caused by its cigarettes." The exposure of Philip Morris' internal PR strategies notwithstanding, UV glowed over its new-found partnership with a tobacco company found [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_U.S._Government%27s_racketeering_case_against_Big_Tobacco guilty in federal District Court last August] of participating in a massive 50-year scheme to lie, conspire and defraud the public about the dangers of smoking. Maybe UV hasn't read its medical journals. Academicians have known for some time about the [http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/53/5/261.pdf covert influence of the tobacco industry on research]. It is also well established that making grants to carry out external biomedical research been long the centerpiece of the tobacco industry's decades-long propaganda campaign to keep the public confused about the health hazards of smoking and, more recently, the hazardous effects of secondhand smoke on nonsmokers.
Submitted by Bob Burton on
A majority of 350 people attending a debate on PR ethics voted against the team supporting the proposition that PR practitioners have a responsibility to tell the truth. The debate was hosted by the PR industry trade publication PR Week. The director of communications for the Church of England, Peter Crumpler, was disappointed with the result. "Truth and integrity have to be the cornerstones of our profession if we are to have any credibility with the media and the wider world," he said.
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