The summer after college, I worked as a temp in DC. My most interesting and informative gig was at Burson-Marsteller, the PR firm currently headed by Hillary's chief political strategist, Mark Penn. It's hard to conceive of a a corporation--indeed, an industry--more destructive to democracy.
Many Kossacks have drawn attention to some of B-M's roster of unsavory clients, such as the union-busting uniform company, Cintas. I think that's missing the forest for the trees. Let me tell you something about my adventures in the forest.
My first assignment at B-M was working for an account exec for, of all clients, my own temp agency. They figured that I'd find it interesting. It was. My task was to assemble a portfolio of clippings of the press "placements" B-M had made for the company. This included a column by a VERY well-known syndicated columnist on personal finance who just happened to publish a piece on the growing phenomenon of temping--using my agency as an example. Burson-Marsteller wrote every word of the article that carried this respected columnist's byline. The only involvement she had with it was cashing B-M's check.
The next account I worked on was more interesting. My supervisor gave me a list of cities with nuclear power plants and an Information Please almanac, and asked me to find the addresses of the major newspaper in each city. Then he had me type a letter to the editor of each. "You don't have to worry about a few typos," he said. "They would just make the letters look more authentic."
The letter I was assigned to type purported to come from a city councilwoman of Aiken, South Carolina, home of the Savannah River nuclear power plant complex (where bomb-grade plutonium was produced). In the letter, said city councilwoman rhapsodized over what good neighbors the nuclear plants were: keeping taxes low, very civic minded, and, of course, very safe.
I was to put the letters, along with stamped envelopes addressed to each of the newspapers, in a large manila envelope, which was sent to the city councilwoman. She would sign them, drop them in her mailbox, and then, like the finance columnist, collect her check. Burson-Marsteller would put the expense on the tab of the client, the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness.
Across the hall from my cubicle, B-M had an impressive, if not quite state-of-the-art, television studio. On one of the days I worked there, technicians were producing a report on new life-saving technology aboard
ambulances. It looked exactly like a news report, but was in fact created for the company that made the defibrillator--an advertisement. This was an example of the technique made famous by the Bush administration of packaging blatant propaganda as news spots on local station broadcasts; when they were caught doing it, the Bushies protested that it was a standard practice that had been going on for years. Right enough; and Burson-Marsteller pioneered it.
On another day, editors took footage of Brigit Neilsen (Sly Stallone's Danish ex), answering questions about her book on surviving breast cancer, and spliced in local TV news reporters "asking" the questions and "responding" to Neilsen's answers--gazing intently, nodding enthusiastically, even though they were not in the same room with her--not even in the same city, not even in the same week. The viewer would think a real interview was taking place, but the reality was as phony as a FEMA press conference.
Not every client was as innocuous as Brigit Neilsen (or her publisher), or even the nuclear power industry. B-M developed a great reputation as the p.r. firm of choice for genocidal dictators. It was an amazing experience to actually participate in the workings of a massive disinformation factory. As Nick Mamatas notes,
Burson-Marsteller, the world's largest PR firm, has a rogue's gallery of despotic clients. The firm worked with the Nigerian government to obscure evidence of genocide in Biafra. The company also set up smoke screens for the Argentinian government to continue "disappearing" people, and worked with South Korea's military government in order to prepare the world for the 1988 Olympics, which occurred just a year after the "People's Power" movement finally ousted the dictators. And while some dictators are called red, their money is still green. B-M also represented Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's mini-Stalin, until the Christmas revolution broke the back of that regime.
How can you live with yourself if you work for such a company? Only by convincing yourself that everyone does it; that there is no such thing as a grass-roots movement, everything is really "astroturf"; that public opinion is not something to be gauged and attended to, but manipulated and/or created. In other words, that democracy is a hypocritical farce.
This is why political leaders like Barack Obama--and for that matter, Mike Huckabee--are so feared and hated by the p.r. hacks and their clients. They not only undermine their profession, they call into question their entire world view--and so doing, threaten to force themselves to see themselves for the cynical destroyers of democracy that they really are.