PR Watch, Second Quarter 2002, Volume 9, No. 2

The public relations industry was born at war, and it bears the imprint of its origins. Early PR pioneers including Edward Bernays, Ivy Lee and Carl Byoir got their start with the Committee for Public Information (also known as the Creel Committee), which organized publicity on behalf of U.S. objectives during World War I. The Second World War also saw a proliferation of propaganda agencies, which in the U.S. alone included the Office of Facts and Figures, the Office of War Information (which worked closely with Hollywood, sometimes going so far as to write movie scenes and dialogue), the Office of Censorship, and the Office of the Coordinator of Information (a forerunner of today's Central Intelligence Agency).

by Eveline Lubbers

For years, activist groups in Europe thought that Manfred Schlickenrieder was a leftist sympathizer and filmmaker. He traveled around Europe, interviewing a broad spectrum of activists, and even produced a documentary video, titled Business As Usual: The Arrogance of Power, about human rights groups and environmentalists campaigning against the Shell oil company.

In reality, Schlickenrieder was a spy, and Shell was one of his clients. His film and his activist pretensions were merely cover designed to win the confidence of activists so that he could infiltrate their organizations and collect "inside information" about their goals and activities.

by Eveline Lubbers

Going through your opponent's garbage to collect information--in detective slang, "garbology"--is a particularly dirty kind of research. A Dutch information broker developed a new cover for the collection of wastepaper: its collector said he wanted it so he could sell it to recyclers to raise money for charity.

Activists and advocacy groups in the Netherlands knew their garbage was being gathered, but not what it was being "recycled" into: intelligence files for companies those groups were boycotting.

by Sharon Beder

PR Watch first reported in 1999 on the activities of the Ecos Corporation, an "environmental PR" firm founded in 1995 by former Greenpeace International executive director Paul Gilding. The 1999 article described how Gilding kick-started his fledgling company by recruiting Ben Woodhouse, a former PR executive and vice president at Dow Chemical. In 1999 Ecos only had a modest staff of six others operating from an old church in a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Although Woodhouse has since left, Ecos now boasts a staff of 15 and has expanded its operations into the United States.

Book Review by John Stauber

When I first picked up Denise Deegan's book, Managing Activism: A Guide to Dealing with Activists and Pressure Groups, I imagined a roomful of uniformed pest applicators at the Orkin company, sitting on benches like military aviators before a bombing mission, being briefed on the best tools available for eradicating cockroaches.