PR Watch, First Quarter 2002, Volume 9, No. 1

During the boom times of the dot-com 1990s, the Internet was hyped as a technology that would have profound and positive effects on human communication. The sobering effects of the current economic downturn have dulled the luster of this rhetoric, but the Internet remains an important terrain for both corporations and their activist critics.

This issue of PR Watch looks at the perspectives of both sides as they continue to innovate new cyber-techniques for activism and for combatting activism.

On December 13, the same day that several committees of Congress and the U.S. Senate began investigating the accounting gimmicks that Enron used to defraud investors and mislead the public about its collapsing financial empire, the Wall Street Journal breathlessly heralded the launch of a new website that promises to expose hidden financial secrets--not the secrets of Wall Street, but of activist groups such as Action on Smoking and Health, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Full page advertisements in Newsweek magazine are expensive, so who footed the bill for an attack ad aimed at Greenpeace that ran in the January 28 issue? The Center for Consumer Freedom, which produced the ad, isn't saying.

At first glance, with its photo of a diving whale in the ocean, the ad looked like it might have been placed by Greenpeace itself--until, that is, you read the nasty quote from Patrick Moore, identified as a "Greenpeace Co-Founder," calling his former colleagues "a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics."

The advertisement featured a web address, www.ConsumerFreedom.com, which belongs to the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF). Like the advertisement itself, the name is misleading. CCF doesn't represent consumers. It's just the new name for lobbyist Rick Berman's latest front group.

At the same time that corporations fret about the threat of Internet activism, they have become Internet activists themselves. Jack Bonner, one of the gurus of corporate "grassroots" PR, now offers his own website design service to assist clients such as the Western Fuels Association, which represents the coal industry and coal-burning electric utilities. To generate e-mail opposing a global warming treaty, Bonner designed www.globalwarmingcost.org. Between its launch in September 1997 and its discontinuation in May 2001, Bonner said, the website "generated literally tens of thousands of e-mails in support of our client's position."

"Lord Melchett .