Free Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter Page A

creating a false grassroots movement so that a carefully crafted campaign or event seems to be happening spontaneously.
    In March 2006, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported that Edelman was recruiting bloggers to publish pro-Wal-Mart information. Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor with Edelman at the time, provided regular e-mails to the bloggers, who used the material at their own discretion, with or without attribution. 10
    In October of that year, Edelman (a firm I once hired to do some work for CIGNA) took another public hit on behalf of Wal-Mart when BusinessWeek.com exposed an ostensibly independent blog titled Wal-Marting Across America as an Edelman project. This fake blog (or “flog”) was presented as a middle-class adventure, with a couple—Laura and Jim—chronicling their cross-country RV trip by stopping in Wal-Mart parking lots along the way. Many of the people Laura and Jim encountered (and interviewed) were Wal-Mart employees, uniformly happy with their job and their employer. BusinessWeek.com blew the cover by outing the two as freelancers. Money for the RV, the gas, and fees for Laura and Jim came from a Wal-Mart-funded group called Working Families for Wal-Mart.
    Edelman’s CEO, Richard Edelman, confessed in his own blog that the agency had violated its stated ethical standards by setting up the “Laura and Jim” road show. However, he stressed that he was not personally involved in the project, which lasted only a few weeks before being busted. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, disavowed any connection to the debacle. 11
    Although there was speculation at the time that Edelman might suffer because of the bad publicity, there has been little, if any, negative long-term consequence. In fact, Adweek named Edelman the 2009 PR Agency of the Year, and Advertising Age declared the agency to be the top PR firm of the decade. The Advertising Age announcement, issued on December 14, 2009, included this statement: “The only major hiccup these past 10 years was the Wal-Mart Across America blog snafu back in 2006.” 12
    PR also crosses the line when trying to repress or create doubt about information that could be harmful to a client. In 1994, for example, a whistle-blower from Ketchum PR disclosed that the firm had attempted to discredit a book called Diet for a Poisoned Planet . Because the book contained information about the dangers in some foods and might damage Ketchum’s clients in the food industry, the agency took extreme steps to undermine the author’s book tour. Ketchum, the sixth-largest PR firm in the United States at the time, obtained a copy of the author’s schedule and arranged for someone to follow his itinerary and counteract his statements at every stop. In addition to spreading negative information about the author, Ketchum also used its influence to have as many of his major interviews canceled as possible. 13
    Edward Bernays, the master manipulator himself, was also forced to face the potentially horrific consequences of his own PR tactics. In 1928, he wrote in Propaganda , perhaps the most famous of his books, about the necessity of manipulating public opinion: “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.” 14
    In 1933, according to his autobiography, a foreign correspondent who had just returned from Germany dined at Bernays’s home. The guest told Bernays, the son of Jewish parents, that he had recently been in the home of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Reich minister of propaganda in the rising Nazi regime, and had noticed at least one of Bernays’s books in Goebbels’s library. The guest told Bernays that Goebbels was using the book as a foundation for a campaign against Jews. 15
    Even