Free Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter

“transitioned” rather than “fired,” and a “lie” may be called a “strategic misinterpretation.”
    7. Bandwagon The overriding bandwagon message is that everyone else is doing or supporting this—and you should, too. Opinion polls can create the impression that a large percentage of people are on the bandwagon, but poll results may reflect only a designated sliver of the population, and they can be shaped in advance by structuring questions to trigger an expected response.
    8. Transfer Similar to testimonials, the transfer approach involves the approval of a respected individual or organization. The IPA described transfer as “a device by which the propagandist carries over the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect and revere to something he would have us accept.” 7
    ETHICS? WELL, SOMETIMES
    As I said, PR has also been used to great and positive effect for deserving individuals, organizations, and causes. When skilled PR professionals do their jobs ethically, society benefits. For example, initiatives to end disease and poverty, to find missing children, to promote literacy, and to reduce violence have benefited from well-designed and well-executed PR campaigns.
    But PR tactics are also used to create subversive front groups, discredit legitimate individuals or organizations, spread false information, distort the truth, and instill fear. In the recent debates on health care reform, we saw PR used to leverage fear so effectively that it convinced a good number of people to take positions contrary to their own best interests.
    While most practitioners adhere to basic standards, there is no law to prevent any of them from violating the ethics of the profession, although scores of PR organizations have adopted guidelines for proper behavior. PRSA points to its own voluntary Code of Ethics as the industry standard. “Ethical practice is the most important obligation of a PRSA member,” states the preamble. To that end, the code itself emphasizes the importance of honesty, expertise, and accountability in conjunction with loyalty to and advocacy on behalf of clients. PRSA members sign a pledge that espouses “truth, accuracy, fairness and responsibility.”
    PRSA boasted more than twenty-one thousand members in 2010 (I’m one of them), plus an additional ten thousand members in its student organization, the Public Relations Student Society of America. 8 Any member can report a violation of the code, and the organization has a process for reviewing and evaluating such reports. But there is no ongoing monitoring of the standards among members, and the concept of ethics can be easily lost in the enthusiasm of working for a high-paying client.
    One of the most notorious examples occurred in 1986, when Anthony Franco, president of PRSA at the time, resigned after the SEC charged him with insider trading of a client’s stock. 9 Today, the group’s board of directors reserves the right to bar or oust individuals who violate the Code of Ethics, but the code’s “emphasis on enforcement” was formally eliminated in 2000.
    Many other practitioners have made headlines when caught carrying out campaigns that were based at least in part on deceptive PR practice. One of the most publicized cases, largely because it involved the nation’s largest PR agency and also its biggest public company, took place in 2006.
    The year was a rough one for Wal-Mart. The gargantuan retailer was being widely criticized for paying workers low wages and not offering health benefits to many of them, so it turned to its PR agency, the industry-leading Edelman, to improve its image. As one of the most media-savvy agencies around, Edelman chose to use the burgeoning niche of social networking as a tool to enhance the public perception of Wal-Mart. Renowned for touting ethics as a touchstone of the PR business, Edelman proceeded to leap over the ethical line by using a practice called “astroturfing.” The term means