crisis management

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that a landmark environmental liability case against Chevron was being judged by "Ecuador's kangaroo courts." Ecuador's Ambassador to the U.S., Luis Gallegos, responded that Chevron had filed 10 affidavits before U.S. federal judges "praising the fairness of Ecuador's court system," in order to get the case out of U.S. courts. "Happily, its PR efforts have been frustrated by the fact that Ecuador no longer has 'banana republic' institutions that can be controlled through extrajudicial pressure," he wrote. When the two Ecuadorians leading the legal case against Chevron were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the company turned to crisis management adviser Sam Singer for advice. Chevron's counter-attack included a San Francisco Chronicle opinion column. Chevron's ham-handed PR inspired cartoonist Mark Fiore to satirize the company's "Human Energy" campaign.

Five days after its military analyst program was exposed by the New York Times, the Pentagon announced that "briefings and all other interactions with the military analysts had been suspended indefinitely pending an internal review." Pentagon spokesperson Robert Hastings "could not say ... how long this review might take. 'We'll take the time to do it right,'" he told Stars and Stripes. Hastings, who just became the principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs last month, also said "he is unaware of the Defense Department's past activities with retired military analysts." The Pentagon's promise to investigate, without clarifying its standards or timeline, is great crisis management. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman later told Reuters the suspension is "temporary" and "he does not think the program violated any laws."

Amy Bennett Williams, following up on her previous article reports, "As the Coalition of Immokalee Workers prepares to deliver more than 60,000 petitions to Burger King headquarters in Miami today, the daughter of Burger King's vice-president Stephen Grover confirmed her father is responsible for online postings vilifying the coalition. The Immokalee-based group is asking Burger King to improve tomato harvesters' working conditions and pay a penny more a pound for tomatoes, which could add about $20 to a daily wage of $50, workers say. ... [O]ften during the past year, when articles or videos about the coalition were posted on YouTube and various Internet news sites, someone using the online names activist2008 or surfxaholic36 would attach comments coalition member Greg Asbed has called 'libelous.' ... [E]arlier this year the alliance had been infiltrated by Cara Schaffer, who said she was a student at Broward Community College interested in organizing campus events in support of farmworkers. In reality, Schaffer owns Diplomatic Tactical Services, a Hollywood, Fla.-based security and investigative firm that advertises its ability to place operatives in the ranks of target groups."

Free Tibet Protest in LondonThe Free Tibet Campaign in the UK has warned that "any PR agency that is trying to assist China in its twisted distortion of the truth would be potentially exposing itself to protests outside its offices." Despite this, PR Week reports that Ogilvy, Burson-Marsteller and Ketchum have "all refused to rule out working for the under-fire regime." Ketchum deputy CEO, Avril Lee stated that "we'd need to consider the brief carefully and speak to our team before making a decision." Last week, the Financial Times reported that the Chinese government was seeking to recruit a public relations firm to advise the government "on strategies to repair its image before the Beijing Olympics."

Olympic Torch Protest in ParisIn the wake of the widespread protests in Tibet and growing protests along the route of the Olympic Torch Relay, the Chinese government is looking to recruit a public relations firm to advise the government "on strategies to repair its image before the Beijing Olympics." Jim Pickard and Richard McGregor report that "several British and U.S. agencies were invited to interviews with Chinese officials to discuss a contract, which includes pre-games PR strategies, media training and market research on western perceptions of China." The new contract would be in addition to Hill & Knowlton's role in advising the Beijing Organizing Committee, which is responsible for organizing the Olympic Games. It would also be separate from "an invitation issued in Beijing several months ago by the State Council Information Office for pitches on how to brand China around the world."

Graphic by Carlos LatuffTwenty Army National Guard public information officers based in Madison, Wisconsin, will soon begin a year-long stint at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Commander Rick Morehouse said their mission would be to "get the current image out. ... The media of the world and families need to know what's going on right now, not what happened six or seven years ago. ... The prisoners are being treated very well." Gene Grabowski of Levick Strategic Communications, a firm that works for the families of some Guantanamo detainees, criticized Morehouse's statement. Saying "prisoners [are] being 'treated very well' is entirely beside the point," he told O'Dwyer's PR blog. "As our clients have said repeatedly over the past few years, it wouldn't matter if the prisoners were being kept in a four-star hotel, their detainment without criminal charges is unjust. And the Supreme Court has said so -- twice."

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at China's information blackout on Tibet, how PR builds, and sells, bridges, and who cheerfully refers to her job as "whore TV." In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we take a closer look at the drug industry's lobby group, PhRMA. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!

Appearing before a parliamentary committee inquiry into the lobbying industry, the head of Bell Pottinger, Peter Bingle, explained that the agency had been approached to represent the Zimbabwe regime headed by Robert Mugabe. "We will turn down clients. We had a call from Zimbabwe asking to advise Zimbabwe. We said thank you very much, but no. It would have been a fairly malign campaign if someone had run it," Bingle said. Bingle explained that when the agency was approached by overseas companies or countries that it would "talk to the foreign office, take a view, look at whether we would want to work for that type of country or company." Some of Bell Pottinger's clients have included DP World, McDonald's, Imperial Tobacco, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

A week ago the Exxon-funded think tank, the Heartland Institute, hosted what it dubbed The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. In his opening remarks, Heartland's President Joseph L. Bast posed the question "Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream?" He insisted they weren't, but his own framing of the question reflects how marginalized and defensive the global warming skeptics have become.

The detailed list of conference speakers and co-sponsors posted by Heartland on the conference website provides a pretty comprehensive guide to the global network of skeptics. (There may be a few of those speaking at the conference who aren't skeptics but the presenters list is dominated by people from the usual collection of free-market think tanks). In all likelihood, the most active global warming skeptics in the years ahead will come from within the ranks of those individuals and groups at the conference.

So our challenge is to ensure that there is at least a 'stub' page in SourceWatch on each of the speakers and sponsoring think tanks as a quick reference resource for interested citizens and journalists. (A stub page need only comprise a sentence or two and some basic formatting, but the more comprehensive it is the better). Once created, the new page will be indexed by Google and other search engines and quickly rise to near the top of search results. If you would like to help, go to the project page and follow the steps set out in the notes. Have fun, and thanks for your help!

An article in the Independent links funding for the "2008 International Conference on Climate Change" held in New York earlier this month to tobacco and oil companies. As an earlier Spin noted, the global warming skeptics conference was organized by the Heartland Institute think tank. Heartland has opposed scientific consensus on both secondhand tobacco smoke and climate change. Heartland claims on its website that no energy industry money was used to support the conference, but did not address tobacco industry funding. Still, a substantial number of conference sponsors -- including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Independent Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, Frontiers of Freedom and Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy -- have received support from energy or tobacco companies, or both. The Heartland Institute itself has received funding from Exxon and Philip Morris.