Weblog: A Round-Up of PR News From the WorldWide Web

Why do British PR people seem so much more interesting than American PR people? The latest example is Max Clifford—a cross between celebrity publicist Lizzie Grubman and the late John Scanlon—who lets rip at the British media in an interview reported in The Guardian. According to Clifford, journalists are "vicious", "miserable" "alcoholics" and the industry is"bloody horrible." What's more amazing than the outburst is that anyone cares enough to report on it.

Why did The Wall Street Journal bury its original story on the tryst between former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch and Harvard Business Review editor Suzy Wetlaufer? This was not simply some salacious gossip about a star CEO, it was a serious story about journalistic ethics at one of the country's most respected publications, which gave Welch unprecedented authority to veto aspects of the story—even the proposed headline. But it's not until the third graf of the story that the most significant aspect of the story— "Wetlaufer told at least three Review staffers that she and Welch were having a romantic relationship"—is introduced. As a New York Observer column pointed out, "It was akin to breaking a story about Gary Condit’s relationship with Chandra Levy in the fourth paragraph of a story about agricultural reform." Fortunately, a brief item by Howard Kurtz raises all the pertinent issues the Journal ignored.

Rob Walker reviews the latest ads from Ford—all featuring new CEO Bill Ford—and finds that while two of the four ads "are a reasonable attempt at leveraging Bill Ford's most obvious asset, which is in fact his link to the company's storied past," the final ad, in which Ford tells how his two great-grandfathers, William Ford and Henry Firestone, went camping with presidents. "Any feeling of 'Gosh, that Bill Ford is a regular guy' pretty much evaporates with the story of Gramps camping with the president.... and the mention of Firestone... serves as an unpleasant reminder of corporate bickering."

There are computer games for people who like to pretend they're car thieves, and computer games for people who want to command their own gangs of soccer hooligans, and now there's a computer game for people who want to play at being anti-globalization protestors. AlterNet reposts a Salon article about State of Emergency, a new game "set in a very near future, when the wildest anti-globalization prophecies have to come to pass: A giant multinational corporation now dominates the entire country, devastating the environment, dissolving democratic governance, controlling all media." Originally, players would have waged war against the American Trade Organization but that was changed to The Corporation after protests from people who decried the game as "corporate co-optation" of the anti-globalization movement.

Like new, never opened... TheSmokingGun.com is offering the Enron ethics manual in downloadable PDF format. The 64-page booklet was distributed to employees along with an introductory letter from chairman Kenneth Lay noting the "moral and honest manner" in which the energy firm's business affairs should be conducted.

Is this headline deliberate self-parody, or is it the single least exciting business news story of the year? (Link to New York Times requires registration.) If you see a less exciting business news headline, e-mail us at pholmes@holmesreport.com.

Confidence in American corporations is so low that some consumers will believe almost anything. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, for example, there was a rumor that Snapple was owned by Osama bin-Laden. Such rumors are the subject of a pair of columns by Rob Walker at Slate, who draws on a recent book, Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner's Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America, which devotes a chapter to outrageous rumors that over the years have attached to various corporations. Says Walker, "Their point is not to snicker that anyone could ever believe wild stories, but to try and work out why certain sorts of rumors seem to have a life of their own." As the title of the book suggests, race has played a huge role.

John Rendon, president of Washington public affairs consultancy The Rendon Group, has been at the center of the storm of criticism over the Pentagon's ill-considered and ill-fated Office of Strategic Influence, and now an article at TomPaine.com provides a profile of Rendon and his work, which includes getting American flags into the hands of liberated Kuwaitis at the end of the Gulf War. The article alleges that Rendon "helped divert millions of dollars" from his fees to the Iraqi National Congress, an alliance dedicated to toppling the regime in Baghdad.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, there's more focus than ever on the way corporations use donations to buy access to policymakers, and that concern makes some corporate leaders uncomfortable. At BP, chief executive John Browne is sufficiently uncomfortable to announce that his company will no longer use corporate funds to make political donations. Says Browne, "We will engage in the policy debate, stating our views and encouraging the development of ideas—but we won't fund any political activity or any political party."

In honor of the Pentagon's ill-considered plan to systematically lie to foreign media (a plan made all the stranger by the decision to tell people about it in advance), LostBrain has introduced The Pentagon News Herald, its mission: to seek truth in one out of every five stories. Among the headlines from the first issue: Islamic Clerics to World: Christianity is the One True Faith! and Benevolent President Bush Rescues Twenty Islamic Fundamentalists from Burning Mosque.

You probably thought dishonest management and sloppy accounting were to blame for the Enron scandal, but the real culprit, according to Charlotte World columnist Warren Smith is rampant homosexuality in American corporations—and particularly in its PR departments. According to Smith, a small minority of corporate “social engineers —often found in the human resources and public relations departments of our largest companies—have played a part in creating a culture in corporate America that encourages its leaders to make up the rules as they go along.” Specifically, these "social engineers" have been pushing companies to recognize same-sex domestic partners, even in states where sodomy is illegal, and any company encourages employees to "compromise their moral standards" is likely to think nothing of breaking the law.

The U.S. government, in an attempt to ensure that its pronouncements have even less credibility in the developing world, is reportedly "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries," according to The New York Times. The new Office of Strategic Influence is headed by Brigadier General Simon Worden, who envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.

The Age of Transparency: There are no secrets any more. Want proof? Check out this website, which has 40 pages of correspondence between George W. Bush and his good friend Ken Lay. The letters were released following a Freedom of Information Act request by The Smoking Gun, and suggest the two were clearly close. One highlight has Lay instructing then-Governor Bush to lobby the Texas delegation for corporate welfare in the form of federal appropriations to the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

So far, Enron's former employees are winning the public relations battle against the company. Of course, the fact that they didn't swindle millions of investors gives them a slight advantage, but they have also used the media in a surprisingly sophisticated way. This column looks at how the media have covered the human interest story, and how some enterprising former employees have made themselves available and quote-worthy. Says Deborah Perotta, a former administrative assistant, "This isn't about publicity; we're trying to put a human face at what happened at Enron."

Are rogue websites getting more sophisticated? Judge for yourself. On the one hand, the Global Double Crossing site (which villifies defunct telecom company Global Crossing) is replete with offensive language. On the other hand, it's well designed and unusually rich in information, with sections dedicated to the restructuring ("What else can we say... You're fucked") and to the company's services, including con artist services, embezzing services, and money laundering services.

Are newspaper conlumnists such as Lawrence Kudlow, Peggy Noonan, William Kristol and Paul Krugman—all of whom accepted payment from Enron for various speaking or speechwriting activities—"journalists or PR flacks?" That's the question asked by Bonnie Erbe of Scripps Howard News Service. Says Erbe, "The very term 'journalist' has been perverted beyond its original meaning to include a whole class of money-hungry self-promoters who ride the revolving door among politics, the corporate world and journalism to self-enrich and proselytize a particular political agenda." But as The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal points out, Erbe hosts the PBS show To the Contrary, which is made possible by a generous grant from Mitsubishi Motors. To the Contrary looks at issues from a women's perspective, and Mitsubishi is a company recovering from a highly publicized sexual harrassment case. So is Erbe actually a "PR flack" herself?

Why would a public company hide good news? That's the question Rob Walker asks and answers in a recent Slate column, looking at companies that deflate their earnings (GE and Microsoft are among the accused) in order to smooth out their quarterly growth curve and have something in reserve in case of an unexpected disappointing quarter. It's an activity that symptomatic of a serious problem. Says Walker, "What sounds like a pretty good idea for the investors— frequent disclosure of a company's performance—clearly has a down side: Too many businesses are managed for the very short term, because the markets pay a great deal of attention to the short term."

Whenever The Onion turns its attention to corporate social irresponsibility it seems to hit the target, and this week's story—"A new television commercial from General Electric, unveiled Tuesday, proudly trumpets the company's federally mandated cleanup of a river it polluted"—is another bullseye. It captures the vapidity of most corporate advertising perfectly, and don't be surprised if you see the tagline—"We bring good things back to life"—in a real GE ad soon.

The sad thing is, you can tell somebody's heart was in the right place... but their heads were obviously somewhere else. Otherwise, how do you explain the promotion that a Giant Food Stores supermarket ran to show its support for Black History Month? ""In honor of Black History Month, we at Giant are offering a special savings on fried chicken," read the sign outside the store in Harrisburg, Pa. Giant Food Stores apologized and said the sign was not meant to be offensive.

Mark Warren Sands, a laid-off public relations executive, wanted to prove to himself that he still knew how to spark the interest of the media, so he began setting fires at construction sites in his hometown of Phoenix, then claiming responsibility on behalf of a group he called the Coalition to Save the Preserves. His actions generated a heated debate over eco-terrorism, until his real motivations were discovered. In an interview with The New York Times, he explained, "I knew what a good news story was; I knew how to sell it. My drug was the news media coverage. There was the excitement of waiting for the media coverage to come out. There was a sense of power." Sands is now looking at serving 15 to 20 years for his crazed publicity stunt.

Mitch Daniels, the head of the Office of Management and Budget is not a finance expert but "an operative chosen for his political skills, particularly his ability to sell the administration's economic proposals in the media," according to an article at Salon, which bemoans "the importance PR tactics play in American politics." The problem is that Daniels, a former pharmaceutical executive, doesn't appear to be doing a particularly good job of selling the president' budget; his main achievement appears to be generating articles like this one, which focus on the "spin" coming out of the White House rather than on the substance.

Supporters of campaign finance reform have been eager to capitalize on the Enron scandal and the attendant anti-corporatism to promote their anti-free speech agenda, but this Wall Street Journal column by Bradley Smith points out the gaping hole in their argument: the complete lack of any evidence that Enron influenced a single politician to vote against his or her conscience. As Smith points out, "Politicians did about what we would expect them to do based on their ideologies, campaign promises, and publicly stated positions."

Critics have been swift to condemn any attempt by corporate America to exploit the events of September 11 for marketing purposes, but nothing big business has done was nearly as offensive as the advertising unveiled by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the SuperBowl—ads suggesting that kids who light up a joint are thus supporting international terrorism. The ads were as exploitative as they were unconvincing. Says Ariana Huffington at Salon, "If that goad pushes a single drug user into newly responsible behavior, I'll donate my fee for this column to the president's reelection fund. But if I win the bet, 10 million of your tax dollars will have been wasted."

I'd like to tell you what I think of Network Associates' software, but I can't. If I did, NA might sue me. It says so on the company's diskettes, which carry an agreement that says, "The customer shall not disclose the results of any benchmark test to any third party without Network Associates' prior written approval," and, "The customer will not publish reviews of the product without prior consent from Network Associates." The New York state attorney general is now suing the company for what appears to be a blatantly anti-consumer stance. In the meantime, since I can't tell you what I think of NA's software, I'll tell you what I think of NA: I think it's clear the company doesn't trust its products, and if it doesn't, why you should you?

The Enron debacle continues its descent into absurdity with the news that executives at the company's energy services unit asked employees to impersonate sales representatives to fool visiting analysts into believing the company actually did something. "When we went down to the sixth floor, I remember we had to take the stairs so the analysts wouldn't see us," a former employee recalls . "We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in." But rest assured, Enron spokesperson Peggy Mahoney says "We weren't trying to mislead anyone." Slate, for one, doesn't buy it, presenting Mahoney with its Whopper of the Week award. Is there no end to this journalistic cynicism?

Not Richard Edelman? Then the chances are you are one of the tens of thousands of public relations professionals who didn't get an invite to the World Economic Forum in New York this week... and chances are you're wondering what you missed. If so, check out Michael Kinsley's slightly jaundiced view in The Washington Post. Kinsley is particularly amused by the program language: "Members contribute to the Forum's mission of improving the state of the world while benefiting from unique networking opportunities with other world leaders." As he points out, it's the word "other" that makes that sentence so powerful. He also provides a little insight into the way the WEF treats the media: "There are 'two different types of journalists,' the guide explains. Print and broadcast? Good and evil? No, 'Media Fellows and Reporting Press.'" Media Fellows (like Kinsley) are important; Reporting Press "are reporters who have limited access to the Meeting."

Thinking of putting your company's name on a sports stadium? There have been lots of articles detailing the high failure rate of companies that buy stadium naming rights—PSINet Stadium in Baltimore, the TransWorld Dome in St. Louis (named for TWA) and of course Enron Field in Houston—but now comes statistical evidence that putting your name on a sporting venue spells doom. If you bought into a mutual fund consisting of companies that put their names on stadium, the study says, you would have received a rate of return 2 percent lower than the overall S&P. "Of the 53 stocks in the mythical fund, only 19 have performed better over the relevant time periods than the S&P index. In fact, fully 6 of the 53 companies in the fund have stock that is either worthless or nearly so because of bankruptcy."

There are interactive Enron graphics everywhere you look on the Internet, but none so useful as the chart to be found at Slate, which helps you track "the Enron blame game." Using this handy feature, you can click on any one of a couple of dozen icons (representing Kenneth Lay, Andersen, even President Clinton) to learn who they blame for the company's collapse. (Hint: It's never themeselves.)

"Ultimately we must wean ourselves from fossil fuels," says Jim Rogers, a remark that would be unremarkable if it didn't come from the CEO of Cinergy. An article in Fortune takes a look at an energy company chief executive who wants to compromise with the environmental movement and who repeats the advice he once received from former Democratic Party chairman Robert Strauss: "When a parade starts to form on an issue that affects you, you can do one of two things: You can throw your body in front of it and let 'em walk over you; or you can jump in front of the parade and pretend it's yours."

Did Wal-Mart play a role in Time magazine's decision to surrender its last vestige of editorial integrity and name Rudy Giuliani its Man of the Year? That's the gossip in the publishing trade, according to the New York Post's Neal Travis, who says the giant retailer "told Time honchos that if [Osama] bin Laden was on the cover in any kind of laudatory position, its stores would refuse to stock that edition." There's nothing laudatory about the Man of the Year honor, of course (it's given to the person who most affects the course of the news) but Time elected to pander to ignorant jingoism rather than explain its long-standing policy, so Rudy got the nod.

Benetton has taken some criticism over the years for its always edgy, sometime outrageous, and some would say offensive advertising, so it's nice to see some kudos come the company's way. In a Salon column, the site's "People" editor Douglas Cruickshank offers an effusive review of the latest issue of Benetton's magazine Colors, which offers a photo essay about mental illness, and how its sufferers are treated around the world. Colors, says Cruickshank, is "one of the best periodicals on the planet. The fact that it's owned by Benetton... makes the quality of the magazine's singular brand of photojournalism more remarkable still."

Is the tragic death of former President Clinton's dog Buddy simply a cynical PR ploy by an ex-president chagrined by all the attention his successor is getting? That's the question weblogger Mickey Kaus asks in his recent Slate column. Actually, Kaus's column is a dead-on parody of all those websites still trying to suggest that Vincent Foster's suicide was actually the result of an evil plot by Bill and Hillary. It even includes nine suspicious facts about Buddy's death. Number five: "The 17-year-old 'high school senior' who allegedly ran over Buddy has been described in the press as a 'pretty brunette'—the same description, practically, that was once applied to White House intern Monica Lewinsky. What, if any, was her connection with the ex-President?"

CNN "made a terrible gaffe" over the weekend when it ran an ad touting its new morning news star Paula Zahn as "just a little bit sexy," according to New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd. Media pundits across the land have been weighing on the ad, a terrible admission of what every viewer in America already knows: that TV news anchors are hired for their faces, not their faculties. Far from being a gaffe, the ad was simply a new twist on an old idea: create an ad so controversial no one will run it, then get tons of publicity out of the fact that the ad is banned. In this case, CNN couldn't do exactly that—how could it refuse to run its own ad?—but it did the next best thing: running it, pulling it, apologizing for it; claiming that Zahn was outraged.... and generating more publicity for its sexy new star than it could have gotten by running the ad 1,000 times.

Is honest analysis making a comeback on Wall Street? That's the theory half-jokingly suggested by Rob Walker at Slate, after two major analysts issued a "sell" recommendation on Kmart and Conseco. How unusual is it for brokerages—which are often vying for business from the companies they rate—to issue a "sell" notice? Half of them probably still have Enron as a "hold" and I bet if you looked hard enough you'd find a "buy" out there somewhere. Don't get too excited about this newfound candor, however. Says Walker, "You might think that it would be more useful for an analyst to recommend that shareholders sell sometime before a stock had lost 70 percent to 90 percent of its value. But as these things go, both of these sell calls are actually unusually bold."

Steal a $1 carton of milk from your local supermarket and you may end up in jail; steal millions of dollars from shareholders and you'll probably end up with a slap on the wrist. (Follow the Enron case if you don't believe me.) But in Business Week columnist Howard Gleckman makes the case for getting serious with white-collar criminals. "This country has a long and sad history of letting hustlers, stock market manipulators, and other white-collar con artists off the hook," says Gleckman. But prison sentences may be needed to deter future Enrons: "I don't know if the certainty of prison is going to stop a kid from robbing a 7-Eleven. But I'm willing to bet it will stop a guy in a suit from manipulating a financial statement."

Okay, it's not exactly anthrax, but the Times of London warns that the new European currency, the Euro, could "give millions of people eczema" because of the high nickel content. The Times used to be the most patrician of London newspapers, and its Eton-educated upper-crust writers could blame centuries of in-breeding for their occasional eccentricities. But since it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, it's no longer quite so blue-blooded, so it's hard to account for this kind of thing except as a symptom of Britain's extreme Euro-phobia, which seems designed to ensure that American hegemony remains unchallenged in the 21st century.

This month's Bad Timing Award goes to the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants, which publishes a magazine called Today's CPA, presumably on a very long lead time. We can make that deducation from the fact that the December issue features a five-page cover story filled with breathless praise for the corporate accounting practices used by, you guessed it, Enron. The Austin Chronicle reports says the magazine "paints a glowing portrait of Enron's swashbuckling corporate style." The article, meanwhile, paints a damning picture of just how far the accounting profession—which is supposed to guard the public against fraud like the one perpetrated at Enron—has fallen.

The New Year's day edition of the Washington Post led with one of those stories that reinforces every liberal's worst suspicions about corporate America, detailing a prolonged cover up by Monsanto (already the poster company for anti-business forces in Europe) in a (literally) dirt poor Alabama community. For nearly 40 years, while producing PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto routinely discharged toxic waste into a localn creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. In 1966, company execs discovered that fish submerged in the creek "turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked in boiling water." They elected not to share that information with local residents. Yes, it all happened 40 years ago, but it is a particularly egregious example of corporate cynicism.

Journalist Joshua Micah Marshall theorizes that Suleiman Abu Ghaith, press secretary to Osama bin Laden, was a victim of the American bombing in Afghanistan (scroll down for story) and that bin Laden's communication has suffered as a result."On the most recent tape bin Laden pretty clearly seems to have been reduced to writing his own material, which has reduced his effectiveness both in sowing terror and communicating his message," says Marshall. Another presentation problem: "Exotic rocky crag now replaced by unappealing brown sheet background."

If Nike is responsible for working conditions in its overseas factories, is McDonald's therefore responsible for working conditions in the meatpacking plants from which it gets its ingredients? McDonald's might not like the analogy, but Eric Schlosser makes the case in The Atlantic, arguing that bringing pressure to bear on the fast food giant could help make "the country's most dangerous job safer." Says Schlosser, using the company's recent concessions to the animal rights movement as leverage, "If McDonald's can send auditors into slaughterhouses to ensure the ethical treatment of cattle, it can certainly do the same for poor immigrant workers."

The demise of the cruise industry, the derailment of Amtrak, and the mass disillusionment of corporate travelers were the three biggest under-reported stories of 2001 in the travel industry, according to Elliott, which bills itself as "the last honest travel site." These stories were "glossed over by the mainstream media, buried on the inside of newspapers, relegated to minor mentions at the end of TV and radio broadcasts, or ignored altogether," says site editor Christopher Elliott.

While Enron executives were lining their pockets and making dubious deals, employers found themselves locked into a 401k plan that invested 58 percent of its assets in the company's stock—thus ensuring that when the house of cards collapsed they would lose both their jobs and their life savings. Not surprising, some of them are unhappy, and are venting their collective spleen at a new website called the CrookedE.com. They would like to see former Enron execs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling behind bars. "I really do not see how these people can look at themselves in the mirror every day knowing that their greed and lust for power has caused the 'worst corporate meltdown in U.S. history,'" writes the author. "I find it extremely ironic that 'Respect,' 'Integrity,' 'Communication,' and 'Excellence' are/were the core values at Enron."

Before October 29, troubled telecommunications giant Qwest considered KMGH-Channel 7 of Denver a suitable medium for its advertising. Not any more. What happened? Did the station's demographics suddenly change, or its rates rise? No. One of its sister publications, Business Week (both are owned by McGraw Hill) wrote an article questioning Qwest's accounting practices, and Qwest decided to punish KMGH by pulling its ads. In some cases, companies have attempted to justify pulling ads in response to editorial by pointing out that the ads are less effective in a hostile environment. It's a weak defense for censorship, and it's one that clearly doesn't apply in this case, which can either be interpreted as bullying or churlish, and either way is bad public relations.

Want a shining example of how the Internet has changed the customer service equation? Check out this PowerPoint presentation put together and posted to the web by a seriously dissatisfied customer of the DoubleTree Club hotel in Houston. The best slides detail the reactions of the night clerk Mike—living proof of the adage that one well-placed moron can destroy a corporate reputation—an interesting disagreement over the meaning of the word "guarantee," and the anticipated career path of said Mike. The presentation ends with a promise to send the entire complaint to Promus, the hotel's parent company. (We can empathize with this story because the same thing happened to us at Adam's Mark in St. Louis a few years ago.)

As recently as August, when fissures in the facade at Enron were already apparent, the Houston Chronicle was opining that "nothing major appears to be wrong at Enron." That's raised some questions at the city's alternative publication, the Houston Press, which wonders if the relationship between business beat writers and the area's largest company weren't a little too cozy. The company founder, Ken Lay, has "for years... been treated almost as a secular saint in the paper's pages.," says Press columnist Richard Connelly. The Chron, meanwhile, seems as protective of its own image as it was of Enron's, since many of the articles in which it supported the failing company do not appear in its archives.

Rocketing to the top of the best-seller lists is a new book from CBS news veteran Bernard Goldberg, who has somehow managed to get 300-plus pages out of recycling the conventional wisdom that liberals dominate the media and conservatives can't get a word in. Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News will no doubt be savaged by media figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Brit Hume (all of whom have been judged sufficiently liberal to have their own talk shows) and George Will, Fred Barnes, William Safire, and David Horowitz (all of whom, as this list points out, will no doubt express their outrage that conservatives have no voice in the media).

One of the best sites on the Internet for media gossip is Poynter.org, which is run by the Poynter Institute—a school for journalists. (Jim Romanesko's MediaNews column is particularly good.) But the Poynter site includes a column called PR Beefs, which details reporters' complaints about unprofessional or simply unresponsive public relations professionals. Although it hasn't been updated in a while, it's still a pretty lengthy whine-fest, containing all the standard journalistic grumblings about people without whom they could not do their jobs. So we figure it's about time to turn the tables. E-mail us and tell us the stupidest questions you were ever asked by a reporter, the dumbest thing that ever appeared in print about your company, the most unprofessional conduct by a reporter. We'll start our own column, and maybe even forward it to the folks at Poynter, so the discussion is no longer quite so one-sided.

Quote of the Week: From Gregg Easterbrook, who (among many other things) writes the vastly entertaining Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at Slate: "In other NFL news, is it me, or do the Vikings only play well in weeks when they have been relentlessly ridiculed by the media? Maybe the reason Minnesota honked last January's NFC championship game is that the sports press spent the prior week praising the team. If the Vikings are to bounce back, they've got to start urging sportswriters to attack them. Maybe they should hire someone to plant bad press. They could get the woman who used to be spokesperson for Gary Condit!"

Don't believe two-thirds of the hype. The Los Angeles Times reports that all three major video games companies—Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony—are claiming to be number one after the launch of new consoles. In a news release last week, Nintendo said its GameCube is "the fastest-selling new video-game console ever," but on Tuesday, Microsoft countered with its own announcement that its Xbox is "the best-selling video-game console launch on record." Sony says they're both wrong. "Aside from bragging rights, each company is trying to establish momentum and credibility," says the Times.

"Pay us our bonuses, or we'll stop running your company into the ground." That's the not-too-dire ultimatum issued by management at Polaroid, which slashed jobs and retiree benefits at the company before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but which doesn't want to lose out on bonus payments due to the top 45 executives at the company. In a filing before the court that exemplifies the dictionary definition of chutzpah, the company claims: "Because it is unlikely that [Polaroid] would be able to attract new employees, [Polaroid's] current key employees are truly irreplaceable." In other words, these executives have screwed up so badly, no one else would want their jobs.

KPMG, which prides itself on its e-business savvy, has aroused the ire of the weblog community after sending a letter to a British consultant telling him not to link to its corporate site. The company advised the consultant to be aware that "such links require that a formal Agreement exist between our two parties, as mandated by our organization's Web Link Policy." The consultant wrote back to politely inform KPMG that "my own organization's Web link policy requires no such formal agreement," but other netizens have taken up the cause and dozens are now linking to the KPMG site without any agreement. Our own suspicion is that KPMG is not as dumb as it is trying to appear: this whole scheme was designed to promote "rogue" linking and drive traffic to its otherwise not very interesting home page.

Business Week provides a handy guide to deciphering earnings press releases, which have been drifting further and further from reality as companies try to spin their numbers. Says the magazine, "This is a document to be read with great caution.... Because these statements are not reviewed by regulators they are largely public relations efforts."

Great news for television manufacturer Zenith: "From now on, if I ever see a guy who's peed all over himself, I'll definitely think of Zenith," says Rob Walker, praising the effectiveness of the company's latest ad campaign in his Slate column. He's commenting on an ad that shows guys walking out of a nightclub men's room after being distracted from the task at hand by a Zenith TV. The strangest thing about the ad—which Walker doesn't mentioned—is that their attention is riveted on synchronized swimming, about the least riveting pastime ever invented.

Dumb Quote of the Week: We like Al Ries, whose 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing challenges plenty of conventional wisdom and who has a more sophisticated understand of public relations that most of his marketing brethren. But when he says in a Forbes magazine, "When you're talking about a $3 product, consumers don't care about the name of the people who make it," he's gravely mistaken. Ries is questioning the value of a new corporate advertising campaign from S.C. Johnson & Co., which makes Raid and Pledge and Ziploc. The company will use chairman Samuel C. Johnson as a corporate pitchman in ads that emphasize that the Racine-based company is family owned, with family values. His comment ignores the activities of McDonald's, which markets hamburgers that cost a lot less than $3, but invests millions every year in its Ronald McDonald House charity because it believes consumers care about the corporation's social responsibility, or Procter & Gamble, which has spent just as many millions on legal fees fighting rumors that it donates money to devil-worshippers. Most consumers don't know who makes Pledge and who makes Endust—but some do, and some of them care, and in a competitive market ignoring them would be folly.

Whatever else you say about Microsoft, you have to admire the software company's chutzpah. How it managed to convince critics that donating computers to schools was fitting punishment for stifling innovation in the technology sector is a mystery, but it did. When did we start chastising companies by forcing them to engage in good public relations? Of course, Microsoft managed to bungle even this opportunity to improve its image, as it soon emerged that most of the hardware the company would donate would be so old and slow as to be almost useless—including pre-Pentium machines, older than the students who will use them. California attorney general Bill Lockyer summed up the who bizarre idea perfectly: "It's like a tobacco company found guilty of marketing its cigarettes to school kids, and the remedy once they're caught is to volunteer to give them free cigarettes."

Reporters attending press briefings on the war "often comment that they feel like they know less after a briefing than they did before," says a journalist quoted by Slate's David Plotz in a wonderful analysis of how the Pentagon's Torie Clarke and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer are keeping a lid on important information. Plotz seems more admiring than outraged: The techniques applied "ought to be taught in PR school, in a class on different techniques for stymieing the press," he says. One such technique: Fleischer "rejects many questions by saying either, 'I won't get into hypotheticals' or, 'I won't get into specifics.' (Question: What else is there besides hypotheticals and specifics?)"

Biotech company Advanced Cell Technology certainly got a lot of coverage for its news release announcing "the first proof that reprogrammed human cells can supply tissue for transplantation," including a breathless interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press. But this story from the Buffalo News suggests the announcement was a triumph of hype over substance, and that reporters should have checked with biologists before they got carried away. (One talk show host even asked ACT's chief executive whether the technology could be used to clone Osama bin Laden.) "This was a public relations campaign," says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia—and he doesn't mean that as a complement. "It was aimed at investors and the public, but not scientists."

The collapse of Enron is likely to spur a spirited debate of the use of 401k plans that encourage employees to become owners of the company. As this Slate column by Rob Walker points out, such plans have been justified by companies because "it is important that employee interests be aligned with company interests." But such an alignment has to work both ways, meaning companies have to recognize an increased responsibility to their employees. Enron clearly didn't.

In 1938, Time magazine named Adolf Hitler its Man of the Year. In 1942, the "honor" went to Josef Stalin. At the time, the magazine explained that its Man of the Year designation was awarded to "the person who, for better or for worse, has had the greatest impact on history and the news in the past year." Given that criterion, there's an obvious candidate for the 2001 cover story, and already there is discussion over whether the mag will have the courage to name Osama bin Laden its Man of the Year this year. The pros and cons are examined by the Sacramento Bee, among others. Says Janice Castro of the Medill School of Journalism, bin Laden's unpopularity is "a consideration for the PR department. You just can't worry about it [as an editor]."

You don't need to know much more than the title—Torment Your Customers—to know that Stephen Brown's Harvard Business Review article (the complete version costs money) is a massively entertaining read. "I have nothing against customers," says Brown, "The truth is, customers don't know what they want. They never have. They never will. The wretches don't even know what they don't want, as the success of countless rejected-by-focus-group products... readily attests." Better yet, "If corporate functions were Dickens characters, marketing would be Uriah Heep: unctuous, ubiquitour, unbearable."

Also in the latest HBR, Robert Cialdini offers some advice on "harnessing the science of persuasion." The article that looks at how the principles of social psychology apply in the marketplace, and the learnings will be of particular interest to employee communicators.

If you're looking for good old-fashioned publicity stunts these days, the best are being perpetrated not by corporate PR people but by consumer activists. A group of women suing Merrill Lynch for sex discrimination provide a case in point, profiled in The New York Times. Convinced Merrill is not taking them seriously, the women have been flying planes with banners claiming "Merrill Lynch discriminates against women" over golf tournaments and other events sponsored by the company.

Clients are demanding more and more from agencies before they assign their business, as a story in the October 1 edition of Fortune makes clear. The "brave new work" column by Michael Schrage explains how Sun Microsystems had Alexander Ogilvy jump through a few hoops recently, asking the PR firm to deliver a team of junior account executives who would be working on its account to the company's Menlo Park headquarters—without any senior staff to ask as chaperones. The call came in at 6pm, and the a/es were expected by 11am the next day. "Sun's team was impressed by the response, the logistics, and the people," Schrage reports, and Alexander Ogilvy won the business. Watch for more clients to use the same kind of trick in future.

Take away local news and commercials, and almost a third of what you see on the networks' breakfast shows is "a kind of sophisticated infomercial," according to a study by The Project for Excellence in Journalism. Moreover, almost a third of the promotional items are for products owned by the networks' parent companies: The Early Show on CBS devotes 27 percent of its promotional time to products from Viacom, while ABC's promotional items are for Disney properties. The networks' response: "This is not the evening news.'' In other words, anyone who thinks Diane Sawyer and Bryant Gumbel are real journalists deserves whatever they get.

War correspondents put their lives on the line to bring back the news from Afghanistan—so far, this war has claimed the lives of more journalists than U.S. personnel—but The Wall Street Journal's Tunku Varadarajan has his priorities right. From his comfortable desk, Varadarajan offers a penetrating critique of the wardrobe and hair styles of Christiane Amanpour ("kitted out in flak-jackets and other kinds of tough-girl raiment") and MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield ("a fine-boned lady with large, titanium glasses"). Banfield, not surprisingly, wonders whether the focus shouldn't be on content rather than style.

You're either in favor of despoiling the environment or your against the war on terrorism. That's the none-too-subtle message from American Renewal executive director Richard Lessner, who recently unveiled a new ad camapign suggesting that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is a Saddam Hussein sympathizer. In a press release accompanying the ad, Lessner asks, "What do Saddam Hussein and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have in common?" The answer: "Neither man wants America to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." (American Renewal is the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council, which the Washington Post describes as a "think" tank, despite its association with Gary Bauer and James Dobson.) So does the fact that Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush both oppose federal restrictions on gas-guzzling SUVs mean that Bush is collaborating with the enemy too?

Even Dumber Quote of the Week: Ross Irvin, president of Canada's ePublic Relations describes himself as a "corporate activist" and runs an often entertaining and always opinionated website at www.epublicrelations.org, where his latest article takes on NGOs and in particular the efforts of PR executives to engage them in constructive dialog. (He's particularly critical of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, which has formed a special practice area dedicated to helping corporations work more closely with their critics.) Says Irvin, "The danger is that by engaging NGOs, companies and trade associations give NGOs political legitimacy which is undeserved and unwarranted in a democracy. By legitimizing NGOs, companies and trade associations are helping to undermine and subvert the democratic system upon which the free enterprise, capitalist system depends. NGOs are largely political organizations. They're formed by people who have said, at least in democratic societies: 'We can't get what we want through the accepted democratic electoral process so we'll find a new way to get it.'" That's a view that prompts a question and a comment. Question: A trade association is a group of companies banding together to achieve political objectives. An NGO is a group of individuals banding together to achieve political objectives. Why is this banding together legitimate for companies but illegitimate for individuals? Comment: In the U.S., at least, the right to petition government is not anti-democratic, it's enshrined in the constitution. NGOs are not undermining democracy; they're participating in it.

Evidently, MGM Mirage senior vice president of public affairs Alan Feldman is unfamiliar with the conventional wisdom that good PR counselors try not to become the story. When the Las Vegas City Journal asked Feldman to explain why the company had asked for $100,000 of its $1 million September 11 donation to the Red Cross to be returned (a move unlikely to end up in the Public Relations Hall of Fame), he responded with invective. "First off, I hate your fucking paper because you're always taking this position," said Feldman in that charming manner PR people are famous for. He then threatened to pull the company's ads—a threat he made good on after the Journal ran its story. "I was personally and professionally offended by the article," Feldman told reporters. "[CityLife] is an irresponsible rag ... It doesn't bring us any business anyway."

Holman Jenkins, writing in The Wall Street Journal, suggests that the ouster of Jacques Nasser at Ford and Jim Goodwin at United Airlines came about because their respective boards expected them to serve "two masters" (presumably shareholders and employees, though Jenkins never states this explicitly.) "American corporations have messed up lately by ignoring an important wisdom of the ancients, who advised against the folly of trying to serve two masters," says Jenkins. "Management bust-ups at Ford and United Airlines are biblical-quality cases in point." He has it entirely wrong. American corporations have messed up because they hired CEOs who didn't understand that to survive in today's complex business world, they needed to serve not just one or two masters, but often four, five, six, even a dozen—reconciling differences and balancing conflicting claims. The ancient wisdom comes from a time when CEOs ruled by divine right. Jenkins may pine for simpler times, but CEOs have to live in today's real world.

Dumb Quote of the Week: In a recent column in The Nation Bill Moyers has some good points to make about the revival of support for the public sector in the wake of September 11, but why does he have to spoil it with a snide denigration of the entrepreneurial spirit. Says Moyer, "Today's heroes are public servants. The 20-year-old dot-com instant millionaires... have all been exposed for what they are—barnacles on the hull of the great ship of state." The increasingly dogmatic Moyers has either conveniently forgotten or simply does not care that the passengers who fought back on United flight 93—including late PR man Mark Bingham—were connected to Silicon Valley and/or the dot-com sector. Of course, that fact wouldn't fit into his

Another (mostly) flattering portrait of Pentagon PR chief Torie Clarke shows up in the Chicago Tribune, which acknowledges the concerns of some reporters—getting answers from Clarke is like trying to get "blood out of a turnip" says veteran defense correspondent Charles Aldinger—but gives her high marks for fairness and professionalism. The article also makes it clear that Clarke has a massive job: "Seventy-five people, including generals and admirals, work for her at the Pentagon, and she has another 1,000 subordinates stationed elsewhere in the nation and world."

It's a shame the Bush administration believes Osama bin Laden is hiding coded messages in his video news releases, because broadcasting the full tapes would obviously provide the White House with a massive public relations benefit on the home front. At a time when some are questioning the conduct of the war—the apparently slow progress and the civilian casualties—seeing the obviously insane bin Laden ranting against the U.S., the UN and sundry others would be a healthy reminder of why we're fighting in the first place, the way images of Hitler strengthened Allied resolve during World War II. It's especially sad because Al Qaeda terrorists in Europe can see the tapes on the BBC and other stations and presumably relay messages to their cohorts in the U.S., which means Bush may be giving up a PR godsend for nothing.

It's nice to know that the war effort is not distracting White House spokesman Ari Fleishcer from more important issues, like making sure people understand that George W. Bush doesn't hate the New York Yankees. Fleischer recently called New York Daily News staff writer Bill Hutchinson and spent 15-minutes berating Hutchinson for a column he had written quoting the president as backing the ultimately triumphant Arizona Diamondbacks. "I want a correction," Fleischer reportedly told Hutchinson.Why anyone should have to apologize for rooting against the Yankess is beyond us.

Rob Walker's Slate column (Moneybox) regularly produces some of the most provocative business writing on the Internet, and his latest effort is a good example. He looks at the narrative reporters build around leadership changes, using the departures of Jacques Nasser at Ford and James Goodwin at United Airlines: "There is a New Boss. He (or she, on occasion) replaces the Old Boss, whose tenure was widely perceived as being troubled... What was wrong with the Old Boss? Well, obviously, he was too bent on forcing major changes (Nasser). Either that or he was too stuck in the usual way of doing things (James Goodwin)... The New Boss is a consummate insider who truly knows and understands the company’s culture (like William Ford, great-grandson of the automaker’s founder, tapped to take Nasser’s place). Or he’s an outsider without the Old Boss’s baggage (for instance, John Creighton, taking over the CEO job at United)." It's a narrative developed by corporate communicators and for the most part swallowed whole by reporters because it's a compelling story. Whether it's true or not is apparently not the issue.

It's amazing how many bids for state contracts turn nasty, especially in California. Readers who have followed the history may recall that high-flying Los Angeles PR firm Pacific/West Communications was destroyed after an investigation into its billing expenses—an investigation prompted by a jealous sub-contractor and prosecuted by a corrupt official. For a more recent example, see the challenge brought by Weber Shandwick Worldwide against a $25,000 contract awarded to journalist John Iander to media train California Highway Patrol officers. Weber Shandwick says its bid was better, but it also questions whether Iander can take the state's money and still "report objectively, maintain the integrity of the journalism profession and be fair to the viewing public." The real story, of course, is that a $400 million PR firm is getting so nasty over a $25,000 contract.

The Washington Monthly has yet another column—they are starting to come from all directions—lambasting the performance of White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who has failed to endear himself to the presidential press corps and may soon be equally unpopular with other White House staffers. According to the Monthly (second item), "Reporters have had to go over his head, phoning senior White House officials for the most basic information‹something unlikely to endear Fleischer to his colleagues."

Dumb Quote of the Week: There's nothing unusual about someone blaming Hollywood for violent behavior, but it's a shame to see Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H and Nashville (and perpetrator of the recent Dr T and the Women) jumping on board the idiot bandwagon. Commenting on the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Altman opined "Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie." Like most others who hold the entertainment industry responsible for the ills of the real world, Altman offers an argument that is intellectually flaccid. It's inconceivable that terrorists could have dreamed up the attacks by themselves, but apparently quite conceivable that a Hollywood screenwriter could have done so. Altman's "logic" is either racist-Arabs aren't smart enough to think this stuff up without our help-or typical entertainment industry arrogance.

James Rubin, former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and now a consultant at strategic communications consulting firm Brunswick Group, offers tips on winning the public relations war at the always-provocative Slate. Rubin suggests that U.S. government officials should "adopt a daily schedule of... appearances on Al-Jazeera," the so-called "CNN of the Arab world," and adds: "Another issue that really needs to be pushed is the fact that America has gone to war to defend Muslims in Europe from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, often at great cost to our servicemen and our relations with other powers, especially Russia."

Ari Fleischer has not exactly covered himself in glory since the beginning of the war on terrorism, so it's not surprising that he's coming in for a little gentle ribbing. The Comedy Lab, an online humor site, has published Fleischer's Ten Commandments of Patriotism. Among them: "Thou shalt honor thy White House sanctioned spin," and "Thou shalt not laugh at Bill Maher, his jokes, or refer to his traitorous comments as 'free speech.' He's not funny, just smarmy and full of himself, and that pinko Hollywood homo-lover had better watch his back."

This month's Forbes contains more "bad news for advertising agencies." (Link requires regsitration.) The magazine reports that marketers are eschewing traditional ads and striving instead to create entertainment products that showcase their products. For example, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe's and Marriott International ponied up much of the production cost for the new NBC reality show Lost, which follows six people in a competitive race from the Gobi Desert to the Statue of Liberty. "Advertising agencies are scrambling to avoid getting written out of the script," the mag opines. Its thesis would be more compelling if the deal to tie the four companies into the show had not been brokered by Interpublic, the biggest (and in many ways the most traditional) advertising agency out there.

Almost every press release, every advertising campaign, every marketing strategy in the wake of the terrorist attacks involves some sort of judgment call. Is it appropriate to mention the events of the September 11? Is it worse to simply go on as if they never happened? It's not surprising, under the cirucmstances, that critics are ready to pounce on almost an post-9/11 ad campaign to make the case against "corporate insensitivity," and that's just what Al Krulick of the Orlando Weekly does in a column picked up by AlterNet. But the examples it uses, like General Motors' zero-percent financing offer, are pretty inoffensive, and its hyperbolic interpretation of the ads' message—"Forget about free speech and the freedom of religion. The greatest freedom is the freedom to drive"—add nothing to the debate except snide sarcasm.

The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, gives White House spokesperson (and former Hill & Knowlton exec) Torie Clarke high marks for her handling of the media so far, despite the fact that reporters say "the military is really clamping down" on the flow of information. The profile, gentle in tone, discusses Clarke's inexperience in military matters, which Kurtz says has not been a hindrance, as well as the impact of the war on her family life.

Is the U.S. losing the propaganda war to Osama bin Laden? Obviously not in this country, but perhaps in the international realm, according to an item at Slate. The article by William Saletan argues that the Bush administration failed to respond to last weekend's video news release by bin Laden, full of curious historical references and charges about the U.S. role in the humanitarian crisis in Iran and the troubles in Palestine. Says Saletan, "Americans may find this presentation ludicrous, but many Arabs and Muslims in Asia and Africa don't... Bin Laden's message tugs at them. They suspect he's right that the United States objects to terrorism only when it's practiced by Muslims."

Needless to say, if Osama bin Laden can't get to President George Bush, his next target is likely to be high-profile Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. At least, that's the rationale Ventura is using for making life even more difficult for the Minnesota media who are charged with covering his seldom-dull administration. Ventura, who has been conducting his own personal war with local reporters, will now no longer share his media schedule in advance. Says an aide, "My view is, that's a prudent precaution to take in light of world events." An AP reporter points out that Ventura's policy is more restrictive than the President's.

The Houston Chronicle was happy to share with its readers the story of public relations executive Mark Bingham, one of the heroes who helped bring down the United Airlines flight that was reportedly heading for Washington. But the newspaper didn't want to challenge any its readers' presumed prejudices, so it edited a story originally published in the San Jose Mercury News to omit any reference to Bingham's homosexuality and to expunge his life partner from the story.

While commentators in America, from Anthony Lewis in The New York Times to every single contributor to The Wall Street Journal, have sputtered their rage against anti-globalization protestors, a coherent discussion of their complaints is to be found in the Bangkok Times. That's where Belgian prime minister and current EU president Guy Verhofstadt acknowledges the protestors concerns, and writes, "I do not think it makes any sense to be unreservedly for or against globalisation. The question is rather how everybody, including the poor, can benefit from the manifest advantages of globalisation without suffering from any of its disadvantages."

The great "coming together" of America is one of the heartening aspects of the reaction to the September 11 attacks, and nothing is more heartening than the way right-wing activists are rushing to the defense of former President Bill Clinton. You'll remember that Bill Maher, host of TV's Politically Incorrect, criticized American policy in response to previous acts of terrorism, telling viewers: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." Those remarks—which would seem to apply to the policies of the Clinton administration—prompted a boycott of Maher's show by FedEx and Sears Roebuck, and now an organized protest, reported by Arianna Huffington. Very touching, but misguided: this is a time we should be celebrating the quintessentially American right to criticize and dissent.

"Managing in crisis requires planning, knowledge, hard work and intangible qualities of leadership," says Hill & Knowlton chief executive Howard Paster in a Manager's Journal column in The Wall Street Journal. Paster argues that while managers may not have foreseen a disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks, they should have had a crisis plan in place that would have enabled them to respond to both internal and external communications challenges once it happened. "Every crisis poses different challenges," says Paster, "but effective managers recognize one constant: Preparedness is the best approach to crisis management."

An interesting observation, received via e-mail: If you bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would currently be worth $72. If you bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer itself, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79. The author paraphrases John Belushi in Animal House, "My advice to you is start drinking heavily."

Dumb Quote of the Week: In the wake of a tragedy, it's important to get your priorities right, and for Mark Steyn (a movie critic for the Spectator and occasional columnist for The American Spectator) was using a national tragedy to score cheap political points. For Steyn, the great lesson to be drawn from the attack on the World Trade Center was the folly of legislation to help the disabled. Said Steyn, writing in the Spectator, "Employees in wheelchairs, whom… various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive."

Reasons to Hate Microsoft, #1,645: A weblog operated by Jerry Pournelle draws attention to a clause in the licensing agreement for Microsoft's new Front Page 2002, which "helps" people design websites. (I've used Front Page in the past, which is why the word helps is in quotation marks.) According to the licensing agreement, "You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services..." Thank goodness this is one area in which Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly. For reporters who might one day write an article critical of the software giant, or for PR people who might produce press releases comparing their clients' products to those of the Holy Redmond Empire, may we suggest Macromedia's Dreamweaver.

We can certainly understand why radio stations wouldn't want to offend their listeners—or cause them additional pain—in the wake of the terrorist attacks of last week, so we understand why Clear Channel Communications, which owns and programs air time for over 1,000 U.S. radio stations, put out an advisory asking DJs to avoid certain songs. We can even understand why Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" or even Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" made the list, but according to Slate, some of the other choices were strange, to say the least: "He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother" by The Hollies; "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" by Simon & Garfunkel; "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by Elton John. Oh yeah, and "Imagine" by John Lennon—obviously completely inappropriate at a time like this.

While most of the ad sector is slumping horribly, Omnicom has been able to hit profit targets with impressive consistency, as Fortune notes in an article headlined "Rocking Through the Ad Recession." Omnicom is "remarkably consistent," says Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine, noting that it manages to exceed expectations "without trying to hoodwink Wall Street with big acquisitions." The article cites several reasons for the company's success, including some creative ads (the Budweiser "Whassup?" campaign); its diversification (including PR firms Fleishman-Hillard, Ketchum, and Porter Novelli) and chief executive John Wren "whose management style runs counter to all the conventional wisdom on how to manage during a downturn. Basically, Wren makes aggressive bets on entrepreneurs and gives them enormous autonomy, on the assumption that the risk-taking will pay off in new ideas, connections, businesses, and, yes, revenues and profits."

The Dumb Quote of the Week award goes to Stephen Schwartz, who suggested in a rant blaming anti-globalization protestors for the World Trade Center attacks (published in Wednesday's New York Post) that "the distance between breaking the windows of McDonald's to achieve that end [the 'intimidation' of world capitalism] and blowing up the World Trade Center is pretty damned narrow." How narrow is it? I've accidentally broken a window. I apologized, paid the cost of replacement, and it was quickly forgotten. I've never accidentally blown up the World Trade Center, but if I did I suspect it would cost a lot more and take a lot longer before I was welcome on those premises again.

Glenn Reynolds is the first to make an interesting point at his website, InstaPundit, suggesting that a commerical response to the World Trade Center catastrophe may be just as important—in the long term—as a military response. Quoting his brother, "whose credentials as a scholar of Islam are impeccable," Reynolds suggests the best way to suppress Islamic fundamentalism "is Western Culture in the form of music videos, KFC and swimsuit models. These are powerful forces for the insinuation of the real Western values of individualism and secularism." [This was the third item on this page at the time of posting; it will likely move rapidly down the page.]

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new trend among anti-globalization, protestors— "video activism." The newspaper explains that many activists now go into protests armed with video cameras, ready to film the actions of the police. "Their raw images are whizzed around the world over the Internet, presenting a partial, unprocessed glimpse at the action that some law-enforcement and media experts believe can be dangerously incendiary," according to the paper, which points to the images that captured police brutality in Genoa recently, leading to a government investigation of law enforcement strategies. Ironically, video activists have been empowered by companies like Apple Computer, which have made video equipment available to the masses.

Naomi Klein's anti-business book No Logo has become a cult classic, particularly in Canada and the United Kingdom; it's the bible of a movement that believes we must—as the subtitle has it—"take aim at the brand bullies." It's taken a while, but this week's Economist features a thoughtful, sympathetic response suggesting that the growing importance of brands gives consumers more power over corporate behavior, not less. "The attempt by brands to adopt a social component—to embrace a lifestyle—is giving consumers a lever to influence the behaviour of the companies that stand behind them," says the magazine. "The No Logo proponents are correct that brands are a conduit through which influence flows between companies and consumers. But far more often, it is consumers that dictate to companies and ultimately decide their fate, rather than the other way round."

Dumb Quote of the Week: "This campaign is designed to create a dialogue with people," BP spokeswoman Jennifer Ruys tells Chicago Tribune marketing columnist Jim Kirk, discussing a new advertising campaign that discusses the oil company's environmental initiatives. "It has nothing to do with PR." If public relations—the art of building relationships between a company and its publics—is not about "creating a dialogue with people" then what is it about? Unless she was horribly misquoted, one hopes Ruys, described by Kirk as a "spokeswoman" is not actually in PR, since she doesn't seem to have even the most rudimentary understanding of what it is. As for the BP campaign itself, it's everything that good PR should be: it starts by listening to what stakeholders want, it continues with substantive corporate change, and it culminates in clear, credible communication of that change.

The latest in product placement involves not movies or even TV, but a novel. A front-page story in The New York Times reveals that British author Fay Weldon—best known as the author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil—has accepted £18,000 from watchmaker Bulgari to feature its products in her latest potboiler. The company asked for at least a dozen mentions, but Weldon generously gave the product a featured role in the story, and called the book The Bulgari Connection. Bulgari's CEO says he came up with the idea because "when you take out an ad in a magazine, you only have a certain amount of space in which to speak." Michael Nyman of Interpublic PR agency Bragman Nyman Cafarelli says "books are the next wave of product placement." What's odd is that the story includes only one cry of alarm, from the president of the Author's Guild, who worries the arrangement "erodes reader confidence" and "adds to the cynicism."

Journalists love it when they get access to internal memos never intended for public scrutiny. For one thing it means they have gotten their hands on something they were never meant to see and for another they know how easy it is to quote passages from such documents out of context and make the authors look either incompetent or sinister or both. It's a cheap journalistic trick, but one Mike Mosedale at the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages is not afraid to stoop to in an attempt to make Allina Health System and its PR agency GCI/Tunheim look bad. Taking snippets from several GCI/Tunheim memos, Mosedale has constructed "the 13 secrets of crisis management." Among them: "Prey on the client's fear" and "No advice is too obvious."

For years, television and film producers have portrayed the Central Intelligence Agency in a far from favorable light. For the most part, the agency has been a sinister force, full of rogue agents dedicated to suppressing freedom in a misguided attempt to protect it. But all that is likely to change this fall, with three new network television shows depicting the CIA in a more favorable light, and the big reason is apparently a decision by the agency to open itself up to requests from producers. In a New York Times article, Chase Brandon, the CIA's public affairs liaison to Hollywood, explains: "Year after year, as moviegoers and TV watchers, we've seen our image and our reputation constantly sullied with egregious, ugly misrepresentations of who we are and what we stand for. We've been imbued with these extraordinary Machiavellian conspiratorial capabilities." With the CIA portrayed in a more heroic mein, will big business be the only villain left on television and in film?

The Bush administration may have dismissed the Kyoto treaty on global warming with a wave of its hand, but major corporations can't afford to be so blase about it. A Wall Street Journal article examines the dilemma facing some large companies that have invested heavily in corporate citizenship activities and are reluctant to undermine those efforts by opposing a treaty endorsed by environmental groups and most major governments. The story focuses particular attention on Ford, where a debate is taking place between U.S. management and the leadership at the company's Volvo subsidiary, which prides itself on its environmental stewardship. Activist groups like Greenpeace are attempting to put Volvo management on the spot and pressure the company into supporting the treaty.

Suppose Gary Condit is actually a lot smarter than you think. That's the proposition put forward by columnist Mickey Kaus (who maintains an excellent weblog focused on media and political issues) in an article that suggests he's so paranoid about admitting he's an adulterer that he may be inadvertently persuading some observers that he's a murderer. What Kaus calls the "paranoid adulterer theory" is a little far-fetched, and not entirely convincing (I'm not sure it's meant to be) but it's an entertaining new spin on the interview from hell. Says Kaus, "Perversely, anything that makes Condit look more like a despicable lying adulterer makes him look less like a possible murderer. And guess what he looked like in his interviews last week!"

You know your roots aren't really made of grass when the people you are taregting start to receive letters from dead people, as Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff did earlier this year when a group funded by Microsoft started to bombard him with e-mail urging him to go easy on the beleagured monopolist. The Los Angeles Times reports that Microsoft's letter writing campaign has been getting more sophisticated—letters are printed on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces—but several contained the same key phrase. "Strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry," is one key phrase, indicating that Microsoft—best known for stea... err, borrowing other companies ideas, repackaging them and putting big marketing budgets behind them—has a rich sense of irony.

The telecommunications industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to win new business, and sometimes it seems the large providers are investing just as much to make sure they screw it up after they win it. Columnist Claudia Rossett details a characteristically Kafkaesque experience with AT&T at Opinion Journal today. What's scary about this story is that anyone who has ever dealt with a telephone company can relate... if not to the specifics at least to the baffling illogic of the entire experience. Unfortunately, most people don't have the resources to share their stories with millions of others, and those of us who do don't bother.

Our first Bitburg Cemetry Award for misguided symbolism goes to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York. This week offered the 10th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots, sparked after a motorcade carrying the Lubavitcher grand rebbe ran down and killed a young African-American child. The boy's father met with the brother of a Jewish man who was stabbed in the riots that ensued. Of course, the Mayor had to be there—one of his main claims to fame is that he wasn't the Mayor at the time of the disturbances—and he had to make an offering of largesse. So what did he give the two men as a symbol of peace and understanding? Baseball bats! He then instructed the two men, "Now, fight to the death." (Okay, we're making that last bit up, but still...)

Add Bridgestone-Firestone to the long list of companies to learn the hard way that they are living in the Age of Transparency. Company documents introduced into evidence in a $1 billion suit against the company suggest that Bridgestone-Firestone executives knew that a 90-cent nylon strip could reduce the risk of shredding by three to five times. In this day and age, company executives have to assume that every memo, every e-mail, and every report will one day be exposed to public scrutiny, and that they will be expected to account for their actions (or lack of action). Bridgestone-Firestone executives didn't understand that reality, and it looks as though it's going to cost them $1 billion.

Nikon and its public relations agency, The MWW Group, must have been delighted when Sex in the City star Kim Cattrall agreed to act as a spokeswoman for the company. Nikon had offered contestants in a "funny summer photo contest" the opportunity of a private party with Cattrall, who plays sexy Samantha in the hit HBO series. But when Cattrall was interviewed via satellite this week by MSNBC and Fox News Channel she embarrassed the company with inappropriate plugs for the product, resisting attempts by her interviewers to cut her off or talk about other subjects. Commentary on her poor pitchmanship made it into all three New York newspapers, with the Times accusing her of turning "an interview into an infomercial" and Daily News reporting that "producers at the all-news cable channels [are] rethinking the use of celebrities pitching products." Ironically, Cattrall plays a PR executive on the HBO show, but her interviews—a setback to the use of celebrity endorsements by PR people—show that even celebrities need media training.

Here's a fine example of Orwellian doublespeak from TomPaine.com, where investigative journalist Karen Charman argues that an industry public relations campaign is "stifling the debate over biotechnology." Upon careful reading, it turns out the industry is "stifling the debate" by attempting to participate in it. Charman doesn't like the fact that the Biotechnology Industry Organization has established biotech caucuses in Washington, holds regular briefings for keycommittee members, and stages forums to brief Congressmen on biotech issues. It doesn't sound as though the biotech industry is doing anything beyond using every means at its disposal to make sure its point of view heard—the essence of good debate—but of course critics like Charman aren't interested in genuine debate. In their world, stifling the communications efforts of an industry group is a contribution to more open discussion.

The idea that CNN is seen in some quarters as biased toward the liberal perspective will come as a shock to most liberals—and to many moderates, one suspects. This is, after all, the network that gave us Crossfire, in which a rabid conservative like Pat Buchanan would square off against someone like Michael "I'm-not-a-liberal-but-I-can-play-one-on-TV" Kinsley. This is a network that gives Bob Novak his own show. Now it's reportedly wooing House Republicans and Rush Limbaugh, and columnist Joshua Micah Marshall is the first to point out the absurdity of it all, although calling for Walter Isaacson's head may be a bit extreme. The point is, CNN's rival Fox News Channel features a line-up that ranges all the way from Brit Hume (a contributor to the American Statesman) and David Asman (formerly of The Wall Street Journal editorial page) on the right to Bill O'Reilly and Fred Barnes on the far right. For an analysis of Fox's conservative leanings, check out a report by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Then tell me which of these two organizations needs to court a wider audience.

If you want to understand the inner workings of the anti-globalization movement—and if it hasn't impacted your business yet, it will—Kendra Okonski of the International Policy Network in London provides a fascinating primer in the Opinion Journal section of The Wall Street Journal's site. This isn't the Journal's typical crude anti-populist ranting (although it deteriorates into name calling in the last three paragraphs), but an interesting an analysis of how the protests in Genoa and elsewhere were organized, and where the movement gets its financial support: sources ranging from labor unions to a foundation set up by the founder of the Esprit clothing company to European taxpayers.

Corporate communicators need to understand how disinformation can spread on the Internet, and as Internet hoaxes go, this one has to be counted a major success, spurring water-cooler conversations around the country and even duping a Canadian columnist whose work appears in the U.S. in the Newark Star-Ledger. Gwynne Dyer quoted a study from the Lovenstein Institute in Scranton, Pa., which determined that President George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any American president this century (a 91, compared to President Clinton's 182). The only problem is, the Lovenstein Institute doesn't exist. That ought to provide further fodder for those of us who thought 91 sounded way too high.

3M earned kudos last year when it voluntarily withdrew Scotchgard from the market (paid subscribers to Business Week should check out "3M's Big Cleanup" from last June), but now activists are suggesting that 3M might have known for some time that the product had safety problems. A rather poorly written article at ourstolenfuture.org details the charges against the company and provides a link to an Environmental Protection Agency study that looks at what the company knew when.

Every company that was ever subjected to a boycott has insisted that the impact on sales is minimal, yet Time magazine reports that "savvy CEOs are listening to protestors." The magazine cites protests against companies such as Home Depot and Starbucks, and quotes PR industry experts such as Richard Edelman and Kathy Bloomgarden, who warns that the Internet allows activist groups to "organize a global community around a certain issue in a split second."

Pharmaceutical companies should brace themselves for increased attacks on the Food & Drug Administration following the news that Bayer is withdrawing its cholesterol-lowering drug Baycol because of reports linking it to 31 deaths. It's the lead story in the Los Angeles Times, which also points out that Baycol is the 12th prescription drug withdrawn in the U.S. on safety grounds in the past four years. Activists claim the drug industry has pressured regulators into cutting corners on safety reviews, and that it doesn't have the staff to monitor safety concerns post-approval. Those charges are likely to get more attention over the next few weeks. (The Wall Street Journal, charmingly, has the same story but its headline focuses on the impact on Bayer profits rather than the apparently tangetial fact that 31 people are dead.)

It's about time. This week's US News & World Report announces that generational marketing is "a concept way past its prime." Those of us who had to sit around listening to marketers tell us what we were supposed to be like—they were never even close to being right—can take some gratification from the fact that academics and researchers are coming to the conclusion that "too often... the term generation is used to impose the experiences and attitudes of a relatively small group upon a whole generational cohort, regardless of significant regional, class, ethnic, and other differences within it."

When you want to sway public opinion, which works best: anecdotal evidence or cold hard data? Consider all the stories about outrageous jury awards to people who place cups of steaming hot coffee between their legs while driving, and then consider new research from a study scheduled for publication in Cornell Law Review—and reported in The New York Times—that found little difference between the attitudes of juries and judges toward punitive damages in more than 9,000 actual cases. Advocates of tort reform clearly understand that a good story is more compelling than a scientific study, and have popularized their cause by focusing on extreme examples. Whether this new study will be enough to persuade lawmakers not to tamper with the civil justice system remains to be seen.

Ari Fleischer may be the most visible PR person in the country (or he would be, if President Bush ever held a press conference) but he's a long way from being the best paid. The Washington Post provides a breakdown of White House salaries that reveals Fleischer is taking home just $140,000—the maximum for senior staff in the Bush administration. The deputy press secretaries take home from $40,000 to $100,000 a year, and a press assistant is expected to survive on $30,000. On the other hand, they can all look forward to lucrative private sector positions when the incumbent's four years are up.

With all the doom and gloom about the job situation in the PR industry, it's nice to hear one story of someone who's making it in the field. The Los Angeles Times reports the story of Avi Sharon, a former professor of classical literature who is now an account supervisor at Golin/Harris. Sharon admits he knew next to nothing about PR before he made his career switch, but says, "This is a field of opportunity. If you can demonstrate you've got an expert view on something, based on your life experience, there's a place for you." The article makes the broader point that PR is attracting more and more non-traditional hires.

Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane gained quite a reputation for their work on the Gore for President campaign, despite the fact that their candidate won the election but lost the office. They were called in to handle the earnings debacle at Critical Path, and to advise Governor Gray Davis on his public relations battle with President Bush over the California energy crisis—taking a combative approach that not everyone considered advisable. There was plenty of controversy about the decision to hire the partisan duo, and now there's further controversy, according to William Bradley at Salon, because Fabiani and Lehane were counseling Southern California Edison at the same time they were receiving $30,000 a month from the Governor. Lehane says "the governor and Edison have the same energy policy; there's no conflict in working for both." Not everyone is buying it.

Consistently the funniest satirical site on the Internet, The Onion has taken an occasional sideswipe at the PR industry over the years, but it really goes to town in its latest issue, which features a mock interview with an unemployed Porter Novelli executive who is putting a positive spin on being laid off. Josh Wallace calls his job hunt "an exciting, much-needed opportunity to reassess my direction in life." In a fine example of corporate-speak, Wallace explains that "I wasn't fired so much as my job was one of the positions phased out through the outsourcing of certain activities and the restructured insourcing of others."

Is Gary Condit getting a raw deal? The California congressman hasn't done much to help his own cause, but an intriguing column at Slate makes a pretty good case that the media has been a little unfair, at least when it comes to retracting allegations that were blated all over the front pages and later proved false. (For consistently interesting interpretation of developlments in the Condit-Chandra Levy case, check out the website of columnist Joshua Micah Marshall, or his occasional pieces for Salon.)

Left-leaning newspaper The Guardian maintains the best marketing and public relations coverage of any U.K. website, and supplements its comprehensive coverage with a new survey of the 100 most influential people in the British media. Martin Sorrell, king of WPP, is the highest ranking honoree with any connection to the PR industry, at number 5 on the list, with Alastair Campbell, chief communications strategist for the Labour Party at number 41 and Max Clifford (a U.K. version of the late John Scanlon, without the charm) at number 59. The partners in Hobsbawm McCauley Communications make the list at #67, but that's because one is married to chancellor Gordon Brown and the other is the daughter of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Alan Parker, senior partner at Brunswick Group, is the most mainstream of the PR people on the list, and he's #79. Among the notable absentees: Lord Tim Bell, head of Chime Communications, the nation's largest communications firm; and Lord Peter Chadlington, founder of Shandwick and now head of Huntsworth.

A new report at Essential.org, claims that issues of corporate power are being excluded from the Sunday morning talkshows that set the discussion agenda for many opinion leaders. The report claims that "topics related to corporate power—the environment, corporate crime, labor, mergers, consumer rights, corporate welfare, national health care, free trade agreements, redlining, blockbusting, multinational capital flight, tort reform, renewable energy, the commercialization of children, etc.—make up less than 4 percent of the shows’ discussion topics." One story that didn't appear, the price-fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland, which happens to be one of the biggest advertisers on the Sunday morning talkshow circuit.