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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Let’s kill the front group

Let’s kill the front group

Let's kill the front group (image of fingers crossed behind back)Public relations practitioners have, for decades, wearily accepted cynicism about our industry. We are spinmeisters. We help companies get away with doing the wrong thing. We put lipstick on pigs, deflect attention from problems, we piss off the journalists we rely on, we spam the web with non-news…

The criticisms and complaints aimed at PR are endless.

Part of the problem is visibility. Bad PR gets called out. Good PR is invisible. There is far more good PR going on than bad, but nobody is aware that what they’re seeing was conceived and crafted by a public relations specialist. But much of the negative perception people have of PR is self-inflicted. The industry has an age-old box of practices that needs to be culled of those that routinely blow up in its face. At the top of the list: funding front groups.

Front groups go all the way back to Edward Bernays, the revered father of modern public relations. An actor hired Bernays in 1913 to vanquish public resistance to his controversial play. Bernays created a group under the banner of “Medical Review of Reviews,” which he edited, called the Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund. He invited some prominent medical experts and social commentators to join under the charter of raising awareness of venereal diseases. The actual purpose, though, was to reduce objections and build acceptance of the play.

Bernays’ efforts paid off, paving the way for the explosion of the practice.

The most egregious uses of front groups by PR agencies emerged in the 1950s when the tobacco industry turned to a global public relations agency to (among other things) create a front group that instilled confusion and doubt in the public’s mind about the settled science proving the link between smoking and cancer. The same tactics (skillfully documented in the brilliant book, “Merchants of Doubt”) were employed to stall government action on acid rain, pesticides, the ozone layer, and (currently) global warming.

Another big agency was caught creating an ersatz grass roots organization, Working Families for Walmart, designed to dampen criticism of the retailer’s employment practices.

Keeping a company’s (and its agencies’) role in these groups secret is increasingly a fool’s errand. With the Internet and social media, deception is becoming increasingly hard to conceal. Podcasting pioneer and one-time MTV veejay Adam Curry famously said, “There are no secrets; there’s only information we don’t have yet.” Given the staggering number of public revelations of corporate and PR misdeeds, one could be excused for thinking the front-group tactic would be relegated to the dustbin of communication history.

Excused, but wrong.

Today, Coca-Cola is struggling to cope with fallout from the revelation that it spent $1.5 million on a group called the Global Energy Balance Network, which is known for rejecting the idea that soft drinks contribute to obesity, shifting the blame to parents who don’t get their kids outside to burn off those calories. When the charge was first leveled, the group denied that the donation bought any influence, but now company emails reveal that there was influence aplenty.

As noted in a Forbes article (which attributes the information to AP), Coca-Cola “had a hand in choose GEBN’s leader, helping to shape its mission statement, and recommending articles and videos to post on its website.” In fact, according to Business Insider, the GEBN website lists Coca-Cola as its administrator; it’s registered to the company’s headquarters in Atlanta. (GEBN claims Coca-Cola registered the site because nobody at GEBN knew how.)

Remember what I said about secrets in an increasingly transparent world?

Coca-Cola’s responses are, at best, inconsistent. CEO Muhtar Kent told Associated Press there “was not a sufficient level of transparency with regard to the company’s involvement with the Global Energy Balance Network.” Meanwhile, Chief Technical Officer Ed Hays wrote in a USA Today column that it’s wrong to think the company wanted people to think diet doesn’t matter. “We have always operated under the fact that a healthy, balanced diet and regular exercise are key ingredients for a healthy lifestyle.”

All of that may be true. I have done some work with Coca-Cola and have been impressed with its integrity, among other things. So how did a big, rich, smart company get caught in such an awkward situation? Simple: The front group tactic has just become a given. Nobody wonders what could possibly go wrong.

The reality is that a lot could—and does—go wrong.

Still, I have no doubt at all that another revelation of a company or PR agency sinking money into a front group—either buying influence or creating the group from whole cloth—will be forthcoming, if not tomorrow, then next week, next month…

It’s easy to simply point to the many PR and communication codes of ethics that reject front groups, arguing that it’s just the unethical practitioners who are to blame. PRSA’s code, for example, clearly lists front groups as an example of improper conduct under its “Disclosure of Information” provision. The website Ethics in PR says…

It could be argued that front groups can still be utilized as an ethical public relations technique if principles of honesty and full disclosure are considered. However, the undeniable reality that front groups rely heavily on the tactics of dishonesty and concealment implies that this strategy often crosses the line into deception and manipulation.

Still front groups continue to find their way into PR proposals and strategies.

The use of front groups is at (or at least near) the top of the list of reasons the public distrusts PR. Front groups need to be banished from the practice of public relations. Sadly, as long as anybody can hang out a shingle and call themselves a PR professional with no credentials of any kind, it’s unlikely we’ve seen the last of them.

12/28/15 | 2 Comments | Let’s kill the front group

Comments
  • 1.I called Coke out in a letter when I was a grade 12 student in 1979. I thought it was not the company to be sponsoring a 10 km run in Toronto, given the detrimental health effects of pop/soda in the diet of young ones. The response was virtually the same as Hays, quoted above: “We have always operated under the fact that a healthy, balanced diet and regular exercise are key ingredients for a healthy lifestyle.”

    This is obfuscation of the highest order, confusing a true statement with Coke's product, which cannot be part of a healthy, balanced diet. If you want to promote Coke, promote it for what it is: a fun candy drink. And cut the b.s.

    Thanks for your post Shel!

    Scott Fotheringham | January 2016

  • 2.If PR agencies would take some lessons from organized crime, getting outed for being a front probably wouldn't happen. Phone calls instead of emails, meetings instead of phone calls, facial expressions instead of words. It takes money to move opinions so channeling the money through two or three non-profits makes it difficult to prove the true source.

    In a paper I wrote entitled "Black Operations as part of a Communication Strategy," I discuss how effective they can be. Ideally, there are only two people who know what's really going on; the lead and the back-up. These people direct and handle the underlings working at the advocacy groups. It's not a hard process to manage; the hardest bit is selling the major donor on the capabilities of doing it this way. .

    I know, I know, the message of your article is to end the practice. As you point out, the simple fact is that plenty of PR people just don't have the instincts or skills to perform covert work. I know there are ethical questions that one runs into when participating in such a practice. However, I'd be willing to bet money that the same people who wrote that ethical guideline also put presents under a Christmas tree and told their children they were form Santa.

    I contend that people are free to agree or not agree with whatever information or points of view they are exposed to. I believe there should be a marketplace of ideas and the more ideas and information we have available to us, the better choices we are able to make as consumers, voters, and human beings.

    Brian Massie | January 2016 | Waynesboro, VA

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