PR Watch, Third Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 3

Propaganda is the art of persuading people to accept ideas that are not necessarily in their own best interests. This is why propagandists often look for ways to conceal the identity and motives of their client from the people they are trying to influence. This also explains why public relations firms sometimes find themselves enmeshed in conflicts of interest.

Past issues of PR Watch have reported on firms that specialize in working simultaneously for nonprofit organizations, governments and corporate clients, often for the express purpose of achieving what the Porter/Novelli PR firm describes as "cross-pollination" - which helped it persuade the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute to sign letters supporting the position of P/N's paying clients, including produce growers and pesticide makers.

Something similar happens, as Sharon Beder illustrates in her articles for this issue, when utility companies like Enron are able to recruit environmentalists to support their self-serving positions in favor of electricity deregulation.

by Sharon Beder

Electricity deregulation was supposed to bring cheaper electricity prices and more choice of suppliers to householders. Instead it has brought wildly volatile wholesale prices and undermined the reliability of the electricity supply. The rising electricity prices and blackouts in California and the northeastern states of the US are consequences of the changes engineered by vested interests; changes that were accomplished through a massive PR campaign to deceive politicians and opinion leaders about their benefits.

Despite efforts to manufacture an appearance of grassroots support, deregulation was primarily driven by large industrial users, who thought they could save money, and energy companies, who thought they could make money out of it.

by Sharon Beder

A key component of the PR campaign by private power companies consisted of efforts to target key environmentalists, enrolling them to their cause while attacking environmentalists who were not so easily persuaded.

During the 1970s, environmentalists criticized the expansionist mindset of the power companies and the rating structure which rewarded high electricity consumption and provided no incentives for conservation and efficiency.

by Sharon Beder

During the early twentieth century, private electricity companies and their trade associations developed the arsenal of public relations techniques that enabled them to survive and grow through the 20th century, with very little government interference, despite growing evidence of their extortionist practices and despite popular movements for public control and ownership.

The utilities ran a massive nation-wide propaganda campaign to persuade the public that government ownership of electricity utilities threatened the American Way of Life.

by Paul Goldberg, editor, The Cancer Letter

The American Cancer Society (ACS) had a problem: it wasn't a major player in cancer politics in Washington.

To move to center stage, the Atlanta-based charity turned to two PR firms, Shandwick International and, later, Edelman. To develop an overarching cancer agenda, Shandwick and ACS constructed a political structure called the National Dialogue on Cancer, and convinced former President George Bush and the California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein to lead it.

The Dialogue is a dream opportunity for a PR firm to tap into a pack of multi-billion-dollar industries, including health care, pharmaceuticals and food.