Obviously, though, it is easy to get lost in the Pentagon, for why else would the Unated States Defense Department's Inspector General clear The Lincoln Group of illegal activity if not totally confused by all those corridors and office doors.
Okay, "illegal" is probably too strong
a word to put on the American version of "Yellow Press", that term we hear so much about in Russia and Ukraine and think that our colleagues in the United States are above such shenanigans.
They are not. I am not even sure they are any better at it than public relations firms in Eastern Europe. They are amateurs because they brought embarrassment on an entire industry while such practices are quite normal in the former Soviet Union.
As reported in O'Dwyer's PR Daily, "the Inspector General report states The Lincoln Group did not engage in 'covert action' by buying media space to extol the success of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. By U.S. law, only intelligence operatives are allowed to engage in undercover activities designed to influence political opinion overseas."
From what I have read, they paid editors in the region to produce and place articles favorable to the Iraqi War, and these articles were not clearly marked as commercial messages or advertisements. They hoped not to get caught. They were.
This is a case of the Inspector General seeing what waddled like a duck, looked like a duck and quacked like a duck and clearly concluding it was a pink giraffe. If it is not 'covert action' then I have a slightly leaking nuclear plant at Chernobyl to sell you.
If this were the only bruised apple in the bunch, then one could call it an aberration. It is not. Public relations in America is black and blue from the pummeling it has taken over the last couple of years for misbehavior.
And the biggest of names have been involved: Ketchum, Fleishman-Hillard and, most recently, Edelman.
To restate the tiresome rap sheet:
Ketchum, in PR's version of payola, paid broadcaster Armstrong Williams to plug the administration's "No Child Left Behind Act of 2005" in video news releases as if he really gave a damn. Ketchum called its part in the ruse a "lapse in judgment."
Executives of Fleishman-Hillard's Los Angeles office fraudulently charged the city for thousands of dollars of work not done. F-H quickly distanced itself from the head of its LA office, returned some money, and then went on to win another award in true Machiavellian fashion.
Edelman, it has come to light, put two bloggers on the road to travel around the United States and visit Wal-Marts. They praised Wal-Mart as, what one colleague described, "a workers' paradise". Richard Edelman apologized when it came to light that the bloggers were, in fact, Edelman hires, and Edelman's client Wal-Mart.
(A note of irony here: Just last week I gave a speech at a public relations conference in Tallinn, Estonia. I praised Edelman as not only talking the talk but walking the walk when it comes to PR ethics. I suggested this was because it was an independent firm, not always racing to the next stock market filing. Silly me.)
One has to wonder if any of these firms received contracts from the United States Agency for International Development to teach journalism or public relations ethics in countries such as Russia and Ukraine. There have been many such activities.
My suggestion is that the United States needs to get its own PR house in order first.
As for The Lincoln Group, they just received another $6 million contract from the U.S. Defense Department. It's nice to have friends in high places, even if they can't even find the water fountain in the Pentagon.
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