PR SHOPS

SEE TWO

NO MERRI

This category is for lobbying, PR, and campaign strategy companies, as they overlap (even opposition research pvt intel)

See also legal.

see also public relations PR

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https://www.desmog.com/2021/11/30/pr-industry-major-overlooked-influence-climate-politics-brulle/

from coining “clean coal” to “carbon footprint,” public relations firms have been instrumental in shaping the public discourse around climate and energy policy, and as a new study underlines, their powerful efforts have flown under the radar for too long.

PR firms have played a key role in obstructing action on climate change over the past 30 years, engaging in PR campaigns on behalf of the fossil fuel industry to not only downplay the seriousness of climate change, but also to position industry-favored solutions as the preferred course of action.

A new peer-reviewed study, published in *Climatic Change* on November 30 by Robert J. Brulle and Carter Werthman of Brown University, analyzes the role that PR firms have played in the climate misinformation ecosystem between 1988 and 2020. The study looked at 214 organizations across five major sectors — coal/steel/rail, oil & gas, utilities, renewable energy, and the environmental movement — and found that electric utilities hired and used PR firms the most out of any other sector analyzed, followed by oil and gas.

At the same time, those organizations used a very small number of big names in the PR world, including Edelman, Glover Park Group, Cerrell, and Ogilvy. Of more than 600 PR firms analyzed, the top 25 accounted for nearly a third of the engagement on climate work with companies and nonprofits.

“The fossil fuel industry’s obstruction of climate action goes beyond misinformation and climate denial. A major part of the effort to obstruct climate action involves enhancing the positive public reputation for the fossil fuel companies and emphasizing the benefits of continued fossil fuel use,” said Robert Brulle, visiting professor at Brown University and co-author on the article. “From the severity of climate impacts to policies to address the problem, PR firms are a big part of the corporate propaganda machinery that guides the way Americans think about the issue.”

The authors wrote that while much has been written about the role of right-wing think tanks, dark money, and corporate power in misleading the public on climate change, very little is understood about how PR firms fit into the story. They are often viewed as passive players in climate obfuscation, rather than active agents, which ignores the influential role they play in “conceptualization, design, and execution of communications and political campaigns,” the study said. PR firms intentionally try to remain invisible.

The study aims to shine a light on some of the most prominent companies, the role of which the authors say is “on par with conservative think tanks or environmental groups” in terms of influence over public climate discussions. The PR firms “remain unexamined, and not held to account for their activities.”

“This study adds a new cast of characters to our understanding of the key actors in climate change politics,” the study states. “Along with ExxonMobil, Koch Enterprises, Greenpeace, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, we need to add in PR firms such as Edelman, Glover Park, Cerrell, and Ogilvy.”

Edelman stood out with the most PR “engagements,” and also accounted for most of the PR work from the oil and gas industry. The researchers found that Edelman was the only PR firm that worked across all five sectors identified in the study. It is relatively rare for PR companies to do work for both the oil industry and an environmental group, for example. Edelman could not be reached for comment in time for publication.

While most sectors that encompass the fossil fuel industry and its affiliates long-ago eschewed outright climate denial as an overarching strategy to derail climate action, corporate entities have deployed a range of other strategies to slow or block threatening policies. The most common PR tactic is “corporate image promotion,” or greenwashing, while explicit climate denial itself was rarely used, according to the analysis.

This study finds that PR firms are responsible for phrases that have become commonplace, such as “clean coal,” “renewable natural gas,” “coal country,” and “carbon footprint.” These concepts have become “taken-for-granted discourse regarding climate change, and subsequently shaped the public debate about the issue,” the authors note.

Once such phrases catch on, they become a conventional way of framing the topic. For instance, U.S. Presidents from Barack Obama to Donald Trump have all used the phrase “clean coal” when discussing their approaches to energy policy.

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The tactics used by PR firms include paid media campaigns, earned media placements, so-called grassroots events (or astroturfing), and social media campaigns. DeSmog and others in climate journalism have long been working to expose how corporate interests employ these PR industry techniques to manipulate public opinion on climate and energy, from Edelman’s 2014 work on behalf of a TransCanada tar sands pipeline to FTI Consulting’s recent efforts to sell hydrogen and natural gas as climate solutions.

In particular, the use of PR by the oil and gas industry spiked a few times over the last three decades, the study found, most notably in 1989 and 1996. Those years coincide with two notable events: the Congressional testimony of climate scientist James Hansen in 1989 about the threat of climate change and the mid- to late-1990s push for the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. However, the authors cautioned that they cannot empirically draw a causal link between those events and the use of PR on climate change.

Brulle and Werthman noted that the study is not comprehensive; they only looked at national PR campaigns, not state or local engagement on climate and energy. The research also does not include in-house PR created by companies themselves, only those done by external PR firms. And, importantly, many relationships between corporate entities and PR firms are private and not publicly disclosed, so this study likely underestimates the role of the PR industry.

The advocacy group Clean Creatives, launched last year, has been pushing for the PR and advertising industries to break ties with fossil fuel companies. Duncan Meisel, director of Clean Creatives, welcomed this study’s efforts to highlight those ties.

“Agencies like Edelman, Ogilvy, and WeberShandwick named in this report need to recognize that work for fossil fuel companies is doing significant damage to their reputation and legacy. The hard truth is that advertising and public relations agencies are essential to the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda machine, and work for fossil clients has stopped the world from adequately responding to the climate emergency,” Meisel told DeSmog in an email. “The best time to stop working for fossil fuel clients was 20 years ago, when we had much more time to stop the climate emergency, the second best time is now.”

https://link-springer-com.oca.ucsc.edu/content/pdf/10.1007/s10584-021-03244-4.pdf

Table 5 PR frm engagements by sector, 1989–2020

Oil/Gas Coal/Steel/

Rail

Environmental Movement

Utilities Renewable

Energy

Edelman 40 47% 20 23% 1 1% 23 27% 1 1%

Burson Cohn & Wolfe 37 56% 4 6% 1 1% 24 36% 0 0%

Weber Shandwick 21 32% 0 0% 0 0% 44 67% 0 0%

Cerrell 33 79% 3 7% 0 0% 6 14% 0 0%

Dittus Communications/Story Partners 15 50% 2 6% 0 0% 13 43% 0 0%

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/russia-hired-edelman/

FLYNN former national security adviser was paid more than $500,000 last fall by a group linked with the Turkish government to discredit exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen, an enemy of the Turkish president. An Egyptian intelligence agency hired public relations firms Weber Shandwick and Cassidy & Associates to improve its image.Iraq sent letters to top Trump officials such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis requesting meetings in the wake of the new president’s first travel ban, which included Iraq. The second iteration of the ban took Iraq off the list.

These stories could not have been told without the help of filings required by FARA, or the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Passed in 1938 in response to secret Nazi propaganda efforts in the U.S., the law requires anyone representing a foreign government or quasi-governmental agency (as well as individual citizens of other countries and sometimes foreign companies) to file extensive reports with the Justice Department. The filings must disclose who they’re representing, how much they’re being paid, what they’ve been hired to do, the meetings and other contacts they’re having, the content of materials they’re distributing and more. But the data is normally locked in PDFs with limited search functions.

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, theCenter for Responsive Politics today releases a tool that makes looking through FARA filings a whole lot easier: Foreign Lobby Watch.We standardized registrants, foreign principals and locations, and parsed the PDF text to allow for full-text searching. (We inherited this project from the Sunlight Foundation, which previously hosted a tool called Foreign Influence Explorer.)

For example, a quick search of “Russia” in our database found 77 firms represented 170 governmental or pseudo-governmental entities, pulling up 274 records since 1950. The last Russian lobbying registration shows that a group created by the Russian Federation hired the PR firm Edelman last year to help influence U.S. opinion on a massive court verdict involving the oil giant Yukos.

That ruling was the latest twist in a complicated set of events that started in the early 2000s, when the Russian government dismantled and sold off Yukos, Russia’s largest fully privatized oil company after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin jailed two high-ranking Yukos executives, including its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an act that was seen as retribution for Khodorkovsky’s political opposition to Vladimir Putin. (Khodorkovsky was freed and pardoned in 2013 and lives in exile.)

Yukos went bankrupt after the Russian government charged it with tax evasion, embezzlement and money laundering. Its former stakeholders sued the government, winning a $50 million verdict in 2014 at The Hague, the largest arbitration penalty ever. But a higher court overturned the award two years later.

Yukos stakeholders are appealing the ruling and have pending enforcement lawsuits in a half-dozen countries, including the U.S., in efforts to collect Russian assets. The D.C. case in the district court of appeals has been put on pause until 2019, as the Netherlands case will impact what happens in the U.S. proceedings.

Amid the wrangling, the Russian Federation created a task force, the International Centre for Legal Protection, headed by a former director in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andrey Kondakov, to help coordinate the various ministries involved in the case. And the task force hired Edelman to help turn the tide of public opinion — often suspicious of anything Russia — in their favor. Kondakov did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

Signing the contract on Edelman’s side was Randall Corley, the firm’s global compliance officer.

Filings can fall short

FARA filings are only as good as the filer, of course. We see Edelman was hired for public relations work, including drafting press releases, media outreach, helping build a website and “strategic counsel.” However, it’s not clear from the reports alone how much Edelman did. According to the FARA file, ICLP issued just one press release, on Aug. 8, which also appeared on PR Newswire: “Key Yukos Insider Reveals Billion-Dollar Bribery Scheme.”

The release describes a filing in the D.C. case from a Yukos insider, Dmitry Gololobov, who “learned firsthand how the Oligarchs rigged the Russian government’s ‘loans-for-shares’ auctions in 1995 and 1996 to illegally acquire ownership of Yukos.”

“Mr. Gololobov’s testimony represents another step forward,” said Kondakov in the press release. “It confirms the corruption, fraud and bribery perpetrated by the Oligarchs at the expense of the Russian people and it validates the position that the Russian Federation has maintained throughout the Yukoscase – that the Oligarchs’ arguments are just lies about lies.”

As for media outreach, Kondakov is quoted in a New York Times piece reporting the overturning of the arbitration fine, but that was published before ICLP hired Edelman in June 2016. Filings and the press release show at least nine people at Edelman were affiliated with the project, and the agreement was terminated on September 30, 2016.

An Edelman representative said that they do not comment on clients, and that they filed all the necessary paperwork with FARA.

The original filing said “Work for client has begun and the contract is still being negotiated. This filing will be amended to included the contract once a signed copy is executed.” Yet OpenSecrets Blog found no amendment or contract in the filings that followed. And an August filing that lists receipts and disbursements for other clients showed no line items for ICLP from Feb. 1 through July 31, 2016. It’s unclear, without the inclusion of the required contract, how much Edelman was paid.

“If you comply with FARA, the information is very extensive and does tell the public and the press most of what they would want to know,” said Joseph Sandler, Democratic attorney and FARA expert. “But there could be holes with what they actually include, or could include filings from nonprofit front groups and think tanks that are hard to immediately understand who is backing them.”

A history of Russian lobbying

There are plenty of other Russia-related nuggets in the FARA files. For instance, billionaire Oleg V. Deripaska paid Endeavor Group a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2009 and 2010 to provide “general legal advice involving his U.S. visa, as well as commercial transactions.” The State Department had revoked Deripaska’s visa in 2006 due to concerns about his possible links to organized crime ties, which Deripaska has denied.

“Endeavor Group expects to engage with the U.S. government regarding the status of the foreign principal’s visa application; interact with the United States Trade Representative office to encourage U.S. participation in the intra-governmental global aluminum discussions; and engage with the Department of Treasury’s Auto Task Force regarding the prospective acquisition of General Motor’s European operations,” the FARA filing says.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, also wrote a letter to Adam Waldman, the founder of Endeavor Group, asking for updates on the case and saying he appreciates the work the firm is doing.

“[O]ver the past several years, there has been certain ambiguity upon his visa status in the United States,” Lavrov wrote. “A persistent state of limbo regarding Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel freely between our two countries has become an impediment to the promotion of mutually advantageous contacts between the business communities of the two countries.”

State-owned banks also hired up in an effort to ease sanctions levied in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea. One of them, VTB Group, a financial services firm owned by the Russian government, brought on board Emaunuel Manatos (a lobbyist who bundled almost $40,000 for Hillary Clinton this election) in May 2016 for $17,500 a month to “lobby Congress and Executive that affect imposition of US sanctions on Russian-affiliated banks.”

And the name that crops up again and again is that of the PR firm Ketchum Inc., which has earned more than $60 million working for Russia over the past decade or so, according to a POLITICO analysis of FARA filings.

The Russians first enlisted Ketchum’s help for “communications support” when it hosted the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in 2006, paying the company $2 million. (The country was in need of a media revamp after Russia’s energy company Gazprom cut off natural gas to Ukraine.)

Ketchum also works with subcontractors such as Alston & Bird to monitor foreign policy legislation, and Clark & Weinstock and Venable LLP to lobby on behalf of Gazprom and keep an eye on energy policy.

ProPublica reported in 2012 that the Huffington Post and CNBC published pro-Russia op-eds linked to Ketchum without noting the connection to the Russian government in the pieces. A year later, Ketchum placed an op-ed by Putin in the New York Times.

Categories: Influence & Lobbying

who rules:

leftist experts can be marginalized

public opinion: ppl make up minds based on life experience (friends?), and idea do not jive with UC, and has no effect on policy unless big mobilization 119 many ppl do not form opinions on pending legistlation even when in news. a number of prez have just ignored , as in iraq war however, UC fear possibility of bad PR, so spend lavishly on it 120. tend to portray crisis (eg Comm on Pres Danger in 70's for defense 121

best to build on whatever passes for Americanism

PR industry 125--

shop usually does not try to change minds in gen'l, just protrect image of co. doubt good tool se also 135 on GW gb BM Nat'l Smoker Alliance

Nichols-Dezenhall attacks critics (some co's still infiltrate (Rules for Corp Warrriors) bk

1/3 of 175K former jrnlists 125; one co keeps files on jrnlists to discredit

pr often women and minorities, the velvet ghetto

co's w/ bad eco record and tobacco give most to sport, art and pbs 126

good works like cargil liitle sis pgm make ppl reluctant to go after co in home town 128

ad council WWII war advertising c, keep am beaut, indian (indiv)

annenberg TV guide

NCEE ed kids, Harold Burson a leader 133

faith based bk kuo 2006

russell 2005 trace $ Funding the C wars

MEDIA dep on corps (chomsky)

jrnlists agree w/ left on green; rt tries to narrow gap w/ incubators 140; newsmakers have more infl than reporter 141 eg pol plan network in 70's on defense $.

aud for TV (esp serious TV) declines, so ppl go elsewhere , and co's try to make tv news more entertaining.

reformers can use media effectively if skillful and good timing 143

2.2 Large PR companies

The Top Ten PR companies in 2001 were the following, ranked by revenues [13]

1 Weber Shandwick Worldwide	$426,572,018
2 Fleishman-Hillard Inc.	$345,098,241
3 Hill and Knowlton, Inc.	$325,119,000
4 Incepta (Citigate)	$266,018,371
5 Burson Marsteller	$259,112,000
6 Edelman Public Relations Worldwide	$223,708,535
7 Ketchum, Inc.	$185,221,000
8 Porter Novelli	$179,294,000
9 GCI Group/APCO Worldwide	$151,081,645
10 Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide	$145,949,285

interesting subset: crisis management to defuse public outrage: http://www.dezenhall.com/pub_damage.htm

bs: Called a "master of disaster" by the Chicago Tribune and "one of the PR industry's premier practitioners of 'crisis management'" by The Washington Post, Eric Dezenhall, and his colleague John Weber, have helped countless companies and politicians get out of trouble with a controversial strategy that breaks all the rules of crisis management. Their book DAMAGE CONTROL: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management is Wrong (Portfolio; April 2007; $24.95) exposes the harsh reality of what it takes to come out alive and on top in today's era of scandal. With a shrewd and contrarian understanding of human nature, Dezenhall and Weber

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Lobbying firms are specialist companies that primarily represent clients to politicians and government regulators. While there are no clear boundaries between what is lobbying and what is PR, lobbying firms often play specific roles within a broader campaign plan. Some lobbying firms are subsidiaries of public relations firms while some law firms also fulfill a lobbying function for their clients.

Contents[hide]

Lobbying firms

The following is a list of lobbying firms:

Political Lobbying Organizations

Lobbying Industry Lobby Groups

American League of Lobbyists

Political Action Committees

Other Political Entities

SourceWatch Resources

External links

Websites

Articles & Commentary

"Star Rainmakers: The Hill's list of top lobbyists," The Hill, March 26, 2003.
"Anderson and Pitts Named Top Lobbyists by The Hill Newspaper," The Hill, March 31, 2004.
Ted McKenna, "Lobbyists try to shake scandalous image", PR Week, October 25, 2006. (Sub req'd)
Tory Newmyer, "Lobbying Firms Preparing for Major Hill Realignment," Roll Call, November 9, 2006.

Categories: Lists | Lobbyists | Lobbying firms | Lobbying

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Derivatives Lobby Has U.S. Regulators on the Run

By Roger Lowenstein Apr 17, 2012 4:01 PM PT

"The 1930s and then the 1960s were periods in which the challenge to the business system became widespread. If you want to see the flowering of corporate public relations strategies look at the decade following those periods. After World War Two a kind of gung-ho corporate public-relations strategy tries to present the private business system as the quintessence of the American Way – a kind of commercialistic rendition of democracy. This became almost a national ideology used to roll back policies and ideas that came out of the 1930s New Deal – for example, the very idea that government might compete with business by providing public housing. In the 1960s people began to wonder if democracy was being violated by a destabilized business system. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the triumph of Reagan and Thatcherism, there comes to fruition a set of national public relations strategies catalyzed by the political issues of the Sixties." Stuart Ewen

ad co's

http://www.nndb.com/lists/451/000124079/

The Reagan Tuesday team, which was part of the Reagan campaign, was formed in 1984 at the suggestion of Jerry Della Femina and was directed by Sig Rogich, a Las Vegas ad agency exec who now heads Rogich Communications Group, and James Travis. Roger Ailes, then a top GOP consultant and now a top executive of Fox News, acted as media consultant.

Phil Dusenberry of BBDO, Edward N. Ney of Young & Rubicam

http://www.nndb.com/people/098/000130705/Barrick gold

http://www.nndb.com/company/611/000059434/

and Kenneth Roman of Ogilvy & Mather headed an advisory committee overseeing creative. Also on the board was Tom Messner.

The Tuesday Team's ads included "Bear in the Woods," narrated by Hal Riney, and "Morning Again in America," ranked by Advertising Age as one of the 100 greatest campaigns of the century.

Employment About this section

Advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations, and sales managers held about 623,800 jobs in 2008. The following tabulation shows the distribution of jobs by occupational specialty:

Sales managers	346,900
Marketing managers	175,600
Public relations managers	56,700
Advertising and promotions managers	44,600

These managers were found in virtually every industry. Sales managers held about 56 percent of the jobs; about 62 percent of sales managers were employed in wholesale trade, retail trade, manufacturing, and the finance and insurance industries. Marketing managers held approximately 28 percent of the jobs; the professional, scientific, and technical services, and the finance and insurance industries employed around 32 percent of marketing managers. About 27 percent of advertising and promotions managers worked in the professional, scientific, and technical services industries and wholesale trade. Around 48 percent of public relations managers were employed in service-providing industries, such as professional, scientific, and technical services; public and private educational services; finance and insurance; and healthcare and social assistance.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos020.htm

advertising and business-to-business electronic commerce. The advertising industry represents a $190 billion industry and is expected to grow at 5.7% compound annual growth. The radio advertising market is a $17.7 billion sector of represented by more than 12,275 radio stations in 268 major markets.¹ Approximately 75% of radio advertising is purchased at the local level.² Although there has been consolidation in the radio industry since the Telecommunication Act of 1996, the industry is still highly fragmented and growing at an 8.5% annual rate.³

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The US public relations industry includes about 6,500 companies with combined annual revenue of about $9 billion. Major companies include divisions of Omnicom, Interpublic, and WPP. The industry is fragmented: the top 50 companies account