Countering corporate power PDF Print E-mail
Andy Rowell, 17 October 2004

Address to the European Social Forum seminar on countering corporate power.

Countering corporate power

I am going to talk briefly about the need to expose corporate public relations as a way of countering corporate power. Its all very well saying we are going to take on corporations, dismantle them, regulate them, counter them, but very often we do this from a position of weakness rather than strength. We do not understand our opposition, its tactics and the way its operates.
We do not understand the way the news agenda is manipulated. For example, studies have found that forty to fifty per cent of news content is PR generated. Globally some 60,000 journalists are registered to receive PR Newswire feeds.
We do not routinely track the way that corporations manipulate events for their own ends.
We do not track the hidden persuaders and what they get up to.
So what is the public relations industry? How big is it? Who are the main players?
Who are the three main global PR companies?

Interpublic – a group of various companies including one of the worlds largest PR companies Weber Shandwick –Interpublic employs 50,000 people in 130 countries;

WPP – includes leading PR companies such as Burson-Marsteller; Chime Communications; Hill and Knowlton; Ogilvy and Mather – it serves some 320 of the Fortune 500.

Omnicom - which itself includes some 100 companies, including three of the top seven PR companies in the world – Fleishman Hillard; Ketchum; and Porter Novelli.

In the UK there are over 55,000 people who work in PR with an estimated turnover of over £1 billion. It is the second largest PR industry after the US.

So what is Public Relations: Is it a force for good - an inherent and essential part of democracy, or an industry that spins the truth whatever the cost?

It is an industry that encompasses many things: marketing; media relations; crisis management; lobbying; investor relations; community relations; CSR and other tactics we will hear about.

Some argue it is an art form of subtle manipulation. One executive says it is the art of getting people to behave in the way you hope they will behave by persuading them that it is ultimately in their interest to do so.

We should not underestimate the power of corporate PR. It is the cutting edge of corporate power.– Indeed some people argue that corporate propaganda threatens democracy itself. As Australian scholar Alex Carey said:

"The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance; the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

To look at the roots of modern contemporary corporate PR, we need to go back a decade, to 1993 and move thousands of miles to Nigeria and Ogoniland.

After decades of increasing desperation, in January 1993, over 300,000 Ogoni protested against the ecological destruction of their homeland by oil giant Shell and to ask for a greater share of the oil wealth that had been drilled from under their land. The campaign would bring them against one of the world’s largest oil companies and, at the time, one of the world’s most brutal military regimes.

The backlash wrought on Ogoni was intense: over 2000 were killed, tens of thousands made homeless, countless others were tortured. Children as young as ten were raped. It led to the death in 1995 of Ken Saro-Wiwa, framed by Shell and military.

1995 was a bad year for Shell – as it faced international condemnation over Nigeria, it was attacked by Greenpeace for its proposal to dump the Brent Spar oil storage platform in the Atlantic. Suddenly Shell was on the front-pages for all the wrong reasons. It was every company’s PR nightmare.

1995 re-wrote the rules of corporate public relations. Nigeria and Brent Spar changed forever the way Shell and companies in general see problems and deal with them, and it caused the growth of corporate social and environmental responsibility that we see today.

The last eight years have seen a flurry of glossy brochures, cosy conferences, and bold statements about how companies have become ethical, how they are now transparent and accountable. How they have become sustainable.

It has seen the word "greenwash" enter into the English dictionary, as companies try to paint a green veneer around their polluting products and practices.

It has seen companies invent a new PR tactic – one of dialogue – where they hope to coopt their critics by sitting down with them. Shell pioneered the process, and the biotech, mining, tobacco, and nuclear industries have all followed.

All these strategies are devised by PR gurus. One has outlined a three step divide and conquer strategy on how corporations can defeat public interest activists who apparently fall into four distinct categories: "radicals", "opportunists", "idealists" and "realists".

The goal is to isolate the radicals, "cultivate" the idealists and "educate" them into becoming realists, then co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry.

In the UK, the Institute of Public Relations published a book on "Managing Activism" and how companies can "deal" with activists and pressure groups.

The way forward, argues the author is "proactive dialogue, negotiation and conflict resolution" or in PR jargon "two-way symmetrical communications."

Part of this communication has not only been dialogue but also through another classic PR technique – the third party technique – and in the UK we have seen the growth in corporate front groups over the last few years.

Why do you need a corporate front organisation?

To bridge the credibility gap. Getting others with more credibility than you to speak on your behalf is a classic PR tactic. The so-called third party technique has been called the heart of PR, and is simply putting you words in someone else mouth.

So all the unsuspecting public sees is a scientist or a think tank dismissing climate change, not Exxon. A nice sounding group saying that biotech is good for you, not Monsanto.

The last decade has seen the growth of corporate front groups in the UK working mainly on biotech; science and climate. So we have the European Science and Environment Forum; the International Policy Network; Agricultural Biotechnology Council; Cropgen; Scientific Alliance; Science Media Centre and Sense about Science to name a few.

Over the last few years, we have also seen the growth in the Internet as the cutting edge PR weapon. We now have companies using dialogue on-line to coopt their critics. We now have companies such as Monsanto and its PR company actually inventing virtual people to direct key internet discussion groups. At the same time they set up front organisations designed to denigrate critics that only existed online, without any true organisation.

We have also seen the growth in corporate social responsibility – We have seen glossy brochures from all sorts of industries, oil, mining, even tobacco. Both BAT and Imperial Tobacco have issued reports on CSR, a fact that has fooled the city with BAT being included in Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

The industry’s critics, say "hang on a minute". They argue that tobacco is the only legal product that kills you when it is used normally, so how can a tobacco company say they are responsible when an estimated one million people a year die prematurely from using their products.

But the production of reports continues. Even Exxon now argues it is a responsible company. But have companies such as BAT, BP and Exxon really changed or is it just one big PR ploy?

In the city BP and Shell are seen as socially responsible, although Shell’s reputation took a battering earlier this year over its reserves fiasco.

Next Month, the consultancy Sustainability launches something called Global Reporting 2004, the "world’s largest premier benchmark of corporate social responsibility". Speaking at the launch will be BP. According to Sustainability the report "finds stronger corporate governance, board leadership and integrity as the central challenge for corporate responsibility to move from the comfortable realm of spin to the hard world of material insight".

No one is routinely tracking the comfortable world of spin in the UK.

No one is routinely trying to expose the deception of the PR industry.

That is why we are setting up an organisation called SpinWatch whose job is to monitor PR and spin in the public interest. Its aim is to monitor political and corporate PR, the tactics being used and the companies behind them. To expose the front groups and pseudo-scientists.

Our aim is to shine a light on the murky world of PR – To counter corporate power we need to expose companies, their dirty laundry, and the people who try to keep it clean.

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