Public Relations: the Zelig Complex - Part 2

PR in War, the creation of British propaganda operatives, Nazi propganda and the global PR industry

Here is part 2 of the extract from A Century of Spin, I book I co-authored with Will Dinan in 2007. This is the second half of the opening chapter. It’s quite long, but there is lots to get through!

WAR AND PROPAGANDA

When the 1914–18 war came the US government recruited already existing propagandists together with journalists. Along with Bernays were the journalist and PR theorist Walter Lippmann and PR operatives Carl Byoir and Arthur W. Page. Ivy Lee joined President Wilson’s Red Cross War Council in 1917 to direct publicity, though he was keen to leave by 1918. His reasoning was revealed in a telegram to John D. Rockefeller: ‘my service to the Red Cross has not been of great expense directly, but has been the cause of losing considerable business I might have had’.12 Both Lippmann and Bernays were present in Paris when President Wilson was acclaimed by thousands of Parisians as he arrived for the Versailles peace conference. Both were impressed by the power of propaganda in creating mass adulation for Wilson. ‘When I came back to the United States, I decided’, said Bernays, ‘that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.’

Less well known perhaps is the role of British propagandists before, during and after the First World War. In many ways the British were pioneers of propaganda, which is unsurprising given Britain’s colonial history and the close links between propaganda and confl ict. The present day British Ministry of Defence 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, for example, traces its origins back to the Boer War in the late nineteenth century.14 The British government were not averse to using propaganda before the First World War, and many of those who would later work in the War Propaganda Board had already undertaken domestic propaganda for the National Insurance Commission.15 The battle against the Irish republican movement in 1920 saw British intelligence agents pioneering black propaganda efforts.16 In the period after the Great War and the partition of Ireland in 1921, many of these operatives turned up in the PR industry or in other propaganda roles.

Some of the key figures working in propaganda and spin in the UK at this time included Basil Clarke, Sydney Walton and H.B.C. Pollard. Clarke was a former war correspondent for the Daily Mail (1914–18), director of ‘Special Intelligence’ for the Ministry of Reconstruction in 1918, and was appointed to the Ministry of Health on its creation in 1919 with responsibility for ‘stimulating public opinion’ which mainly involved, according to one account, ‘the insertion of articles in the press’.17 In 1920 he was appointed Director of Public Information at Dublin Castle, directing the British propaganda operation against the Irish republican movement, for which he was knighted. It was in this role that Clarke developed his ideas and tactics on ‘propaganda by news’. The key quality of the propaganda was, as Clarke put it, ‘verisimilitude’ – having the air of truth. According to Clarke’s own account, the routine ‘issue of news gives us a hold over the press… [journalists] take our version of the facts… and they believe all I tell them’ (emphasis in original). The service ‘must look true and it must look complete and candid or its “credit” is gone’.18 The British policy was, as Brian Murphy’s detailed research shows, to disseminate lies and half truths which gave the appearance of truth. As Major Street, another of the propagandists in Ireland noted: ‘in order that it may be rendered capable of being swallowed’, propaganda ‘must be dissolved in some fluid which the patient will readily assimilate’.19 In 1924 Clarke left government and set up perhaps the first PR agency in the UK. By the end of the 1920s Editorial Services, as it was called, was a significant operation with 60 staff. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Clarke worked as a PR consultant for the Conservative Party and by 1933 Editorial Services had handled more than 400 accounts.

Among the accounts was work for the beer industry. The brewers were closely involved in the creation of the first class-wide propaganda agency in 1919 (National Propaganda, on which see Chapter 3) and later hired Clarke. Clement Shaw, the chief PR man for the Brewers Society, wrote that in the early days Clarke ‘reigned as undisputed monarch of PR’. Clarke was centrally involved in pushing corporate interests such as those of H.J. Heinz for whom he promoted canned foods, by attacking the non-canned competition; and in extending the concept of home ownership for the Halifax Building Society. He also wrote speeches for King George V. The King reportedly approved of these because they stopped him appearing ‘too bloody pompous’. His son, Alan Clarke – who also went on to become a PR operative and who worked at Editorial Services – testifies that it ‘tended, at one time, to be a clearing house for all kinds of people needing a job’.

Sydney Walton was another key operative in business and government propaganda during this period. Walton, a former undercover agent, ran secret propaganda campaigns for the coalition government of Lloyd George and the organisational network around the British Commonwealth Union (a corporate funded lobby and propaganda group set up in 1916). In 1922 he set himself up in business as a PR consultant, one of the first in Britain. He was hired by the Conservative Party in 1926 to run their ‘information fund’ or propaganda campaign against the General Strike with a budget of £10,000. Walton spent over £25,000 on propaganda during the five months of the 1926 miners’ strike.

Hugh Pollard was another notable figure in the emergence of militant business activism in the UK. He was active in intelligence work during the 1914–18 war as a staff officer in the intelligence section of the War Office (1916–18). He later worked in Ireland as a press officer of the Police Authority’s information section, liaising with Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch in London. Pollard was a racist ideologue. Among his views on those who resisted the British empire in Ireland was the following: ‘there is nothing fine about a group of moral decadents [the IRA] leading a superstitious minority into an epidemic of murder and violent crime… The Irish problem is a problem of the Irish race, and it is rooted in the racial characteristics of the people themselves.’ The Irish he thought were ‘racially disposed to crime’, have ‘two psychical and fundamental abnormalities… moral insensibility and want of foresight’ which ‘are the basic characteristic of criminal psychology’.

Colonel Hugh Pollard, as he later became, turned up again in right wing ‘diehard’ circles in 1936 when he flew from Croydon airport on a Dragon Rapide light aircraft to the Canary Islands. He and his collaborators were on a mission in which they picked up General Francisco Franco in the Canary Islands, and flew him to Spain to launch his murderous coup against the republican government. Accompanying him was Toby O’Brien, a leading lobbyist and Conservative Party spin doctor in the post-1945 period.24 At Central Office O’Brien was involved in lobbying for the introduction of commercial television.

PROPAGANDA AND NAZI GERMANY

Before Hitler and Goebbels confirmed the bad name that propaganda had started to attract with the ‘evil deeds’ of the ‘Hun’ in the First World War, there was little ambivalence amongst corporate activists about the use of the term. They used it regularly and with no embarrassment. After the 1914–18 war some of their most developed thinkers started the process of reconsideration and introduced the term ‘public relations’. Both Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays claimed to be the first to use it, but it is clear that it was from the start a propaganda term.

Since the creation of the term public relations it has been a key part of the work of propaganda to pretend that PR and propaganda are separate with the former largely undertaken by ‘us’ and the latter largely by authorised enemies or in extremis. But contrary to the authorised version of propaganda history, the early activists and writers on PR did not learn their trade from the Germans… it was the other way around.

In 1933 Karl von Wiegand, a foreign correspondent for the US Hearst newspapers visited Goebbels and on being given a tour of his library discovered Bernays’ Crystallizing Public Opinion on the shelves. Bernays’ book was being used by Goebbels ‘as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews’.26 ‘I was shocked’, Bernays later wrote. ‘Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.’27 Bernays was first told of this in 1933 by Wiegand himself, but was ‘savvy enough’ not to repeat the story until the publication of his autobiography in 1965.

Both Hitler and Goebbels (and a variety of other Nazi ministers) were also familiar with the work of Ivy Lee having separately met him in Germany, when he was contracted by I.G. Farben, one of the biggest companies in Germany. Lee’s services were secured at a retainer of $29,000 a year in 1934. Farben wanted Lee to advise on ‘what could be done to improve [German–American] relations… continuously’.29 Lee’s contact at Farben, Managing Director Dr Max Illgner, arranged the introductions. At his ‘half hour or so’ meeting with Hitler, Lee said he would ‘like to understand him better’.30 Goebbels assured Lee that the Nazi government ‘did not want to interfere within the United States’.

Lee’s view on Hitler, as confided to John D. Rockefeller, was apparently that ‘Hitler would do much to restore German confidence, and that a confident and successful Germany was a prerequisite to a healthy Western economy’.32 Lee ‘conceded that the advice he had offered his client was ultimately intended to guide the German government in its public relations in the United States’.33 Amongst Lee’s advice was the suggestion that Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop (later hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg) ‘should visit the US to explain Germany’s position’ to the president and ‘also to enlighten the Foreign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Relations’.34 This would help, wrote Lee, to gain American understanding that Germany wanted to re-arm only because the ‘government is left with no choice except to demand an equality of armament’.35 He went further, advising the Nazis to claim that their storm troops were ‘well trained and disciplined, but not armed, not prepared for war, and organised only for the purpose of preventing for all time the return of the communist peril’.36 Lee was so deeply implicated in PR advice for the Third Reich that the US ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, on meeting him declared him ‘an advocate of fascism’.

Lee’s meeting with Goebbels was longer than that with the Fuhrer. Lee reported his meeting to the US ambassador who recorded in his diary that Lee ‘warned Goebbels to cease propaganda in the United States, urged him to see the foreign press people often and learn how to get along with them’. Goebbels met with foreign diplomats (including Ambassador Dodd) a month later. ‘At an appropriate moment’, wrote Dodd, ‘Goebbels arose and read a somewhat conciliatory speech to the diplomats and the foreign press.’ ‘It was plain’, Dodd wrote in his diary, ‘he was trying to apply the advice which Ivy Lee urged upon him a month ago.’

In 1933 another PR pioneer, Carl Byoir, took on the account of the German Tourist Information Office, landing it with the help of the well known Nazi sympathiser, George Sylvester Viereck. Byoir employee Carl Dickey travelled to Germany with Viereck and reportedly interviewed ‘Hitler, Goering, Goebbels… and most of the other Nazi dignitaries’. Byoir then opened an office in Berlin and their contract was increased to $6,000 per month.

In 1934 both Lee and Dickey were called before the House Un- American Activities Committee to explain their relations with the Nazis. Lee claimed – in a classic spin manoeuvre – that he had not engaged in any propaganda in the US. But he had of course advised the Nazi government how to conduct its propaganda and had, as he conceded to the committee, briefed US journalists in Berlin on behalf of the Nazis. The committee concluded that both companies had ‘sold their services for express propaganda purposes’. Lee’s reputation was compromised by the Un-American Activities Committee, shortly after which, in November 1934, he died.

Worse was to come. After the war Lee was named in an indictment at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Lee was ‘retained’, stated the indictment, ‘to devise methods for countering the boycotts and organising pro-German propaganda’. ‘The propaganda was’, said Deputy Chief Counsel Josiah Du Bois, Jr., ‘indispensable to German preparation for, and waging of, aggressive war.’ Aggressive war as determined at Nuremberg was the supreme war crime, containing within it all the other war crimes.

Historians of PR bend over backwards to convince themselves that Lee was only giving ‘standard public relations advice’, ‘along the same lines’ as his US clients and that he was at worst naïve. They, and the industry for which they are apologists, prefer not to face the fact that there are more similarities between ‘standard PR’ and Nazi ‘propaganda’ than they would like to admit.

ZELIG THE FAKER

Taking a lead from Bernays’ stunt to promote smoking amongst women, was PR pioneer Carl Byoir. Byoir, whose eponymous company became a leading PR firm before the 1939–45 war, made extended use of front groups a trademark of his style of spin. In the 1930s chain stores were spreading across the US, often driving local and independent traders out of business. At the time a New Deal proposal meant that new legislation to tax chain stores was in the offing.

Byoir’s firm, working for the chain store company A&P, created a raft of fake groups to pretend that the public supported the chain stores. The fake groups included the National Consumers’ Tax Council, the Emergency Consumers’ Tax Council and the Property Owners Inc., a group so well camoufl aged that even Byoir’s clients were unaware it was a fake. The proposed federal tax was defeated in 1940. Byoir crowed in 1949: ‘From that time until today we have opposed 247 anti-chain store bills, introduced in the state legislatures. Only six passed. In the past eight years not a single anti-chain bill has become law.’ Both Byoir and A&P were indicted for using fake front groups or what the judge called ‘devious manipulations’.43 Byoir’s firm was fined $5,000, but gained more clients as a result of the publicity around the case.

Front groups are a classic strategy for keeping PR in the dark, for pretending to the media, the public, politicians and regulators that corporate interests are popular. They are extensively used today by the biggest PR firms. Byoir’s firm itself is still in existence, now owned by communications giant WPP. Disguising the source of information, masking and carefully ‘positioning’ the corporate interest have been perennial practices of PR since its inception. Ivy Lee recognised the spin and lobbying advantages of forming trade associations to speak on behalf of business interests to both the government and the public. Lee was instrumental in the creation of the American Petroleum Institute (1919), copying the success of the American Iron and Steel Institute (1908). Trade and industry associations, which on the surface appear dull and unimportant, are now key players in political lobbying and advocacy across the globe. They function to coordinate policy positions, maintain the discipline of member companies and to represent them in the corridors of power and the court of public opinion.

PR operatives managed the transition from war to peace in 1945 with relative ease. Many of those employed in propaganda and intelligence activities during the war moved seamlessly into professional public relations in the post-war period, including several of the luminaries of the industry who lend their names to the major PR company brands of today. Dan Edelman, founder of Edelman PR, now the biggest independent PR firm in the world, worked in the US Psychological Warfare Division writing a nightly analysis of German propaganda.4Alfred Fleishman (of Fleishman Hillard, now owned by communications conglomerate Omnicom) was a Pentagon-based public information officer, and Harold Burson did a stint as an Army reporter for American Forces Network, covering the Nuremberg trial, before returning to civilian life and co-founding Burson-Marsteller, now one of the biggest PR firms in the world, a subsidiary of WPP.

Burson notes that ‘World War II was the second great catalyst for forming public relations firms. Scores of demobilized public information officers, many former newsmen, started their own firms.’ This growth in the PR industry is refl ected also in the foundation of both the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute of Public Relations (in the UK) in 1948.

POST-WAR PROSPERITY: PR GOES GLOBAL

Soon PR people developed more of a taste for travel, popping up all over the world. Marion Nestle cites the example of the banana company Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit, which ‘has an exceptionally rich history of infl uence over the US government’. Perhaps its most famous lobbying effort was its persuasion of the CIA to support a coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala. In 1954, the Arbenz administration expropriated land owned by United Fruit for redistribution to the poor. Bernays persuaded his employers, United Fruit, that the government should be subverted, since it threatened the interests of the company. This was done by a campaign of propaganda in the US which resulted in the CIA backed military coup in Guatemala, described by Bernays as an ‘army of liberation’. The company became the American government’s de facto beachhead against communism in Latin America. As Boston Globe journalist Larry Tye puts it: ‘most analysts agree that United Fruit was the most important force in toppling Arbenz and that Bernays was the fruit company’s most effective propagandist’.50 This lobbying adventure cost around 150,000 Guatemalan lives.

But Bernays was not the only influencer working the political channels for United Fruit. They engaged a range of movers and shakers in Washington to press their case. Perhaps the most significant was Thomas ‘The Cork’ Corcoran, a former New Deal adviser in Roosevelt’s ‘brains trust’, who left government to become a highly influential commercial lobbyist. The scale and strategy of the political campaign to effect regime change in Guatemala anticipates what would perhaps now be recognised as ‘best practice’ in contemporary lobbying. All the critical decision makers and audiences were catered for. While

Eddie Bernays would later fix the press and public opinion in the US, Tommy the Cork had for a number of years been lobbying to fix the politics. Corcoran was retained by United Fruit in 1949 as a lobbyist and legal adviser. He facilitated United Fruit’s access to business and political elites in America, soliciting campaign contributions for Roosevelt and introducing the company president Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray to business luminaries like Nelson Rockefeller. Even before Arbenz was elected in 1950, Corcoran had suggested to the US State Department that they should assist a US friendly moderate to come to power in Guatemala. He also brought in the newly formed CIA, who were prepared to help. Corcoran coordinated the campaign to overthrow Arbenz between United Fruit, the CIA, and the State Department. Importantly, Corcoran also had a strategy for the post-coup scenario. He advised United Fruit to donate 100,000 acres of land to Guatemalan peasants, thereby ensuring that the return of the remainder of expropriated lands to the company was made more palatable for the Guatemalan people. He also placed former director of the CIA Walter Bedell Smith on the company board, over-ruling reservations about Smith’s business knowledge: ‘For Chrissakes,’ he argued, ‘your problem is not bananas… you’ve got to handle your political problem.’ Likewise, Bernays did not neglect the post-conflict scenario. He advised a concerted effort to build goodwill with the people of Guatemala through the creation of a tourist information office, a letter writing campaign by American students learning Spanish to pen-pals in Guatemala, and using private American foundations to sponsor medical aid and training programmes for Guatemalan doctors.

Throughout the next decades Zelig-like PR operatives were on hand at the confl icts and controversies that defined the age, supporting and promoting the interests of corporations and governments. The international PR firm Hill & Knowlton was to prove a very useful front for the CIA. Robert T. Crowley, who spent much of his career soliciting cover from American businesses for CIA activities across the globe, remarked ‘Hill & Knowlton’s overseas offices were the perfect “cover” for the… CIA. Unlike other cover jobs being a public relations specialist did not require technical training for CIA officers.’ Leading Washington PR operator Robert Gray, who was with Hill & Knowlton for 20 years, also had close links with intelligence circles. He was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair though his associations with William Casey, then Director of Central Intelligence. Gray and Casey had worked together on the Reagan campaign in 1979–80. Gray’s colourful and controversial career is meticulously documented by Susan Trento, who links him and his firm Gray & Company to a variety of espionage and clandestine activities, including Korean spying and lobbying in Washington (using US funds!), representing Haitian dictator ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, as well as infl uencing democratic deliberation in Spain on membership of NATO, while nominally working for the Spanish nuclear industry. ‘Fighting communism was their idealistic cover. The chance to make money was their reward’, notes Trento. ‘The conservative movement that helped elect Ronald Reagan and George Bush went worldwide in the 1980s.’

As conflicts broke out across Africa in the post-colonial reordering of that ravaged continent, Zelig was again on hand. In the 1960s the case of oil rich Nigeria is notable. Several established PR agencies represented one side or the other in the civil war, seeking to influence international sentiment on the conflict. Burson-Marsteller for example was retained to discredit claims of genocide by the Nigerian government. These PR firms opened doors in Washington and London to politicians, business elites and editors, or they managed to attract favourable publicity for their clients. They did little to resolve the war, or promote mutual understanding. Rather, PR becomes an adjunct to and in some ways an enabler of conflict: ‘under most competitive conditions’, notes Morris Davis, the author of a study of this episode, ‘the introduction of public relations skills is more likely to increase strife than diminish it… Nigerian/Biafran use of overseas public relations cannot be said to have improved prospects of an early settlement… the techniques merely enhanced both sides’ politico-military capabilities’.

PR stalks conflicts. The apologist use of PR techniques to disguise or ‘soften’ torture and human rights abuses is a damning indictment of the business of public relations. The image of the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s was actively polished by global PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M). During this period, an estimated 35,000 people ‘disappeared’. Some of the torture techniques used included el submarino (holding a person’s head under water or excrement until near drowning), la picana (an electric prod applied to the most sensitive parts of the body), or rape. Little wonder the junta of General Videla needed some perception management magic from B-M, who themselves benefited from a steady stream of business working for various dictators and authoritarian regimes. Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaucescu was a client and the agency was also credited with representing the CIA/Apartheid backed UNITA during the Angolan civil war, white-washing South Korea’s deplorable human rights record and working with Indonesia at the time when it was accused of genocide in East Timor.56 This kind of work is not simply done by a ‘few bad apples’. The publication of The Torturers’ Lobby in 1992 illustrated how widespread such practices were. Leading PR firms, lobbyists and lawyers – many closely connected with government – were earning $30 million per annum representing serial human rights abusers.

But this rogues gallery isn’t simply confined to governments and despots. Corporate clients provide most of the work and money for the PR industry. So, not only did a company like B-M work for the worst offenders against democracy and human dignity in this period, they also actively represented the worst polluters and offenders against the environment and public safety too. B-M did public relations for Babcock & Wilcox after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and continued their dubious work on environmental issues during the 1980s and 1990s by helping to manage the Bhopal crisis for Union Carbide. Other clients with image and regulatory problems include Philip Morris and the tobacco industry, biotech firms like Monsanto, and clients across the energy sector. Like many of their leading competitors, B-M have a notable track record in discrediting the environmental movement on behalf of industry, creating deceptive front groups to promote pro-corporate messages on environmental and public health issues,59 and managing the threats to business profiability posed by environmental regulation. Burson-Marsteller worked on behalf of the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) in the lead up to the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The key achievement of the BCSD was to keep regulation of the environmental impact of corporations off the agenda, thereby ensuring that important decisions about pollution and energy consumption were delayed. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) repeated this trick at the second Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 Needless to say the PR industry is deeply ambivalent about this historical sketch. On the one hand it will deny and divert and dissemble. On the other, sometimes PR people will blurt out the truth. Often this will be in convivial settings where they imagine they are among friends. But sometimes purveyors of the corporate line seem to have a constitutional need to tell the truth about what they do and then to try to justify it.

MONEY TALKS

Picture the scene, in the small Swiss town of Lucerne, overlooking the lake around which the town was constructed. The ancient tower which rises up out of the lake was used in times gone by to incarcerate ‘witches’ – those whose messages were unwelcome to the powers that be. The tower is now a pretty tourist attraction. Inside the town’s arts centre the Swiss School of Journalism has convened a conference, ‘A Complicated, Antagonistic and Symbiotic Affair’, to which one of us delivers an account of PR rehearsing some of the material in this chapter on Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. The audience contains a number of PR executives, some of whom shift nervously in their seats but don’t ask any questions, polite or otherwise. Instead, the view of PR as a conspiracy against democracy is challenged by James Grunig from the University of Maryland. Grunig is the leading academic apologist for the PR industry. He along with the other official historians of PR likes to pretend that PR might have been a bit rough around the edges when it started but that it is better now. One recent example is the case of a book on international PR with the title Towards the Common Good.61 It is hard to imagine a less appropriate description for the PR industry.

Grunig made the response that, although he wasn’t an expert on Lee, he thought some historians had a different version of Lee’s role. Indeed this is true. Furthermore he noted that the list of Lippmann, Lee, Bernays and Byoir, left out some of the ethical pioneers – in particular he mentioned Earl Newsom and Arthur W. Page.62 So let’s have a look at them. Among Earl Newsom’s clients in the 1940s and 1950s were Ford, Standard Oil, CBS, Eli Lilly, Campbell Soup and Macy’s. He is credited with transforming the reputation of Henry Ford II from a ‘rather inconsequential young man’ associated with Nazism and anti-Semitism (by virtue of accepting an honour from Hitler’s government), to an industrial ‘“statesman” of undeniable appeal’. He is said to have accomplished the same for Standard Oil in relation to its links with the German corporation I.G. Farben in 1929. He crafted a ‘long and cleverly written presentation’ to Congress, which argued that the links with I.G. Farben ‘were of great help’ to the US war effort. Needless to say, this was at best a distortion, but as a result, ‘Standard was off the hook’.

Or we can look at the career of Arthur W. Page. Page served as a propagandist in the US military during the 1914–18 war and became the first PR vice-president of AT&T in 1927. Even if we depend on the account given in the hagiographical biography written by Noel Griese, a less than wholesome portrait emerges. Page wrote the press statement announcing the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima for President Truman in 1945. He was also involved in subverting trade union demands for improved conditions in Chile in 1946. From 1946 to 1960 Page became strongly involved in anti-communist propaganda and played a major role in developing the CIA’s Radio Free Europe. His crusade for freedom was, in the 1950s, run with the support of the Heritage Foundation and the Advertising Council, both corporate funded free market think tanks, which feature later in this book.65 The truth is that the phrase ‘ethical PR’ is an oxymoron.

Some defenders of the industry are less guarded. Later that morning in Lucerne the conference heard from PR man Klaus Kocks. ‘As a spin doctor,’ he said, ‘I’m strongly opposed to discriminating against lying.’ Kocks stated his view that ‘the development of capitalism needed a “doppelmoral” – double standards – right from the beginning’.66 It is only, says Kocks, ‘a neurotic obsession of Calvinistic witch hunters’ to ‘discriminate against’ and ‘delegitimise’ lying. Perhaps Kocks was imagining spin doctors being consigned to the tower in the middle of Lucerne’s lake. Kocks is former spin doctor for Volkswagen and for the Herstelle und Betriebs der Atomkraftwerke in Deutschland, the body responsible for building and running all Germany’s 19 nuclear power plants.

Kocks pushes a relativist case arguing that ‘spin doctoring is a privately financed public service provided by communication professionals to support markets that are in need of storytelling to enhance somebody’s business or the economy as a whole’. There is, he says, ‘no such thing as story-free markets’. If you don’t believe him you are possibly a victim of the ‘facts and figures myth’ which is ‘quite popular with scholars’. In reality, says Kocks, there are only varying stories. Of course his whole relativist house of cards starts to shake, if we ask whether the view that there are really only stories is true, or just another story.

For Kocks, corporate governance is simply a case of ‘keeping up appearances’. The most important rule is ‘don’t get caught’. The PR industry has trouble with shoot from the lip practitioners like Kocks and often tries to find ways to show that they are an unethical minority. One of Britain’s most colourful PR men is Max Clifford, who has often acknowledged that he lies on behalf of his celebrity and political clients. He happily admits: ‘I’ve been telling lies on behalf of people, businessmen, politicians and countries for 40 years. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is. I’d rather be honest, but I cannot be all the time... All PROs at all levels lie through their teeth.’

His insouciance riles some elements in the PR industry. Simon Cohen, founder of allegedly ‘ethical’ PR agency Global Tolerance, says Clifford’s views are ‘deeply worrying... It’s bad PR to say you’re in PR now.’69 Clifford has been challenged to debate his views in public on more than one occasion. In 1994 he debated with Quentin Bell of the Quentin Bell Organisation (now owned by Chime Communications) and in early 2007 Clifford was called upon to debate the motion that ‘PR has a duty to tell the truth’, against PR industry stalwarts.70 On both occasions Clifford won the vote at the end of the debate. Most spin doctors are more reticent than Kocks or Clifford. They dissemble, they pretend, they act concerned. They will say and do anything if it will serve the interests of their clients and they think they can get away with it. They will even act ethical if needed – they are the chameleons of the business world. But the response of the trade journal PR Week to the debate on truth in early 2007 was noteworthy because the paper editorialised in favour of deception as a sign of integrity. ‘The fact that PR people admit they need to lie occasionally is a sign of growing honesty and confidence in what they do’, wrote the editor.

From the very beginning of the PR industry, public relations practitioners have engaged in deception, trickery and other techniques designed to foster vested private interests. There is no company that the industry as a whole will not represent. There is no dictator or war criminal considered beyond the pale. The Zeligs of PR flit from page to page of the history books trying to leave no trace and trying to ensure that the interests of their clients prevail against the interests of humanity and the planet.

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