WE PREVIOUSLY wrote here about Berman [1, 2, 3], who is quite the destroyer of society. Competing with the likes of Berman there's Edelman, which is working on behalf of clients when it is crashing workers' unions (they are organising unions, then the employer allegedly hires Edelman to break them), bribing bloggers, lobbying for policies that lead to deaths of people, and so on. But hey, some thousands of dead patients here and there are not a big deal when there's a big PR contract on the table, right? That's where Richard Edelman comes in. Mercilessly he would tell any lie he needs to and never mind the consequences. That's just how a lot of the PR industry basically works. It operates closely and often in alignment with lobbying, which is a form of legalised corruption of the system. Edelman has already faced boycotts or was threatened with boycotts. It's one's own action which simply begs for this type of treatment.
On November 22, Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman, "the leading independent global PR firm," posted a blog criticizing Wendell Potter for his tell-all book, Deadly Spin, about deceptive corporate public relations techniques that are hurting this country so badly and costing Americans their health, and in some cases even their lives.
Edelman portrayed his firm as being on the side of truth. He took exception to Potter's portrayal of big PR firms as engaging in public deception.
Over Thanksgiving week, the head of the global PR firm, Edelman, publicly complained about my tough critique of the damage the PR industry has done through campaigns that deceive consumers.
On the one hand, I was a bit surpised by Edelman's rather absurd claim that I had "no right to say" that big PR firms have a reputation for deceiving people, and that I should not have called into question the (profit) motive of PR practitioners who are really just "interested in the truth and in educating stakeholders about the issues of our time." After 30 years in the PR industry, I most certainly do have a right to call out the deceptive campaigns PR firms have orchestrated to obscure the truth and deceive the American public in the debate over health care reform and beyond. I detail these campaigns at length in my book, Deadly Spin, which is based on my own participation in just these practices.
In response to an article in Der Spiegel reviewing the work of the PR industry, including examples of the work of Burson-Marsteller, Edelman and other major companies, Edelman let fly. [4] "This article is basically a conflation of cinema-induced fantasy, anti-Americanism, anti President Bush, anti-capitalism, and fear of propaganda stemming from World War II," he claimed.