issue management

A leaked draft PR plan by the Clean Coal Council, a Queensland state government partnership with the coal industry, stated that a "key outcome" would be to "turn around attitudes that clean coal is an unproven and unsafe technology." While the PR plan noted that "stakeholders" wanted investment directed to "emissions-free renewable energy technologies, not clean coal," the Council has other ideas. It ridiculed renewable energy technologies by claiming that they would only cater for "certain niche markets" and are still in the "development stages." Environmentalists dismissed the plan as government propaganda. "The Queensland Government is spending taxpayer money to fund a campaign to deceive the next generation of voters," said Simon Roz from Greenpeace Australia. Mines and Energy Minister Geoff Wilson conceded the draft plan was misleading. "I don't agree with the description of renewable energy," he said. Queensland and the neighboring state of New South Wales produce 97 percent of Australian coal production.

The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has announced that it will begin reporting its payments to doctors in late 2009, using an online database. But the disclosure is limited to payments of more than $500 made for giving talks or advice to the company; payments for other services or gifts will not be included. Payments made before 2009 will also not be disclosed. Eli Lilly president and CEO John Lechleiter explained the move by stating, "We've learned that letting people see for themselves what we're doing is the best way to build trust." In mid-2007, as the U.S. Senate Finance Committee was investigating drug company grants to patient groups, Eli Lilly began disclosing its grants to U.S. nonprofit groups and educational institutions. Its new registry of payments to doctors comes as Congress considers the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. The bill would require disclosure of any drug company payment to doctors of more than $25, whether the payment was for food, travel, entertainment, gifts, consulting fees or any other purpose.

The UK Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, a group hosted by the University of Cambridge's Programme for Industry, has written to British political leaders requesting a meeting to discuss the development of a "comprehensive package of policy measures to change every major sector of the economy" to combat climate change. The group argues that there is a need for a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which may be negotiated at the COP14 meeting in Poland in December 2008, and the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009. Among the signatories of the letter were the CEOs of the power company E.ON UK and airport owner BAA. Greenpeace communications director Ben Stewart responded, "This is hypocrisy of the purest strain. ... If the executives of these companies want action on climate change they should immediately lock themselves in their boardrooms and not come out until the Kingsnorth [coal-fired power station] and Heathrow [airport] expansion have been dropped," he told the Guardian.

According to a recent Gallup poll, the public has "a dimmer view of the pharmaceutical industry than they do of the advertising / public relations sector, if you can imagine such a thing," writes Mark Dolliver. "When a top-selling pain reliever like Vioxx is pulled off the market for increasing patients' risk of heart attack or stroke, consumers take note." Loreen Babcock, who heads Omnicom Group's "relationship-marketing agency" Unit 7, says drug companies should use social media to improve their public image. She notes Johnson & Johnson's use of YouTube, and Novartis' contest for the best consumer-generated flu vaccine video, also on YouTube. "This effort leverages the fact that consumers trust other consumers more than company spokespersons," explains Babcock. In PR parlance, that's called the third party technique. Another trend is "an increasing emphasis on conveying [drug] information to the people who want it, as opposed to the public en masse." Marketer Lynn Day predicts that drug companies are "going to be providing much more targeted and educational approaches" than traditional direct-to-consumer advertising.

MoveOn, Media Matters and liberal blogs have launched a campaign against Associated Press Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, "for what they consider light treatment of John McCain at the expense of other candidates -- especially Barack Obama." In response, AP vice president for corporate communications Ellen Hale sent "elections coverage talking points" to AP managers. Hale suggests pointing to AP's ethics policies, which require reporters to "avoid any political activity, whether they cover politics or not." The talking points cover Fournier's experience and his statement expressing "regret" at "the breezy nature" of a 2004 email to Republican strategist Karl Rove in which Fournier wrote, "Keep up the fight." The talking points also stress when Fournier held different roles at AP and when he worked for the political website HOTSOUP.com. "Later this week," Hale adds, AP "Corporate Communications will go live with a robust new Elections page ... that will provide some real estate to deal with these issues. ... Some of the blogs now are also picking up the drumbeat of dissatisfaction with AP that some members have been voicing with the roll-out of Member choice," a new pricing system for AP content.

"I think this proves the only method that works is enforcement," concluded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Jim Hayes. He was referring to "Scheduled Departure," a controversial ICE program that encouraged undocumented immigrants to deport themselves. Only eight people participated in the three-week, five-city program. As the Center for Media and Democracy reported previously, immigrant rights activists blasted "Scheduled Departure" as a PR stunt. ICE has since admitted that the program was designed in part "to quell criticism by immigrant advocates that its enforcement efforts were disruptive to families." Hayes said of immigrant rights activists, "They want a more vulnerable America." Immigration lawyer Lisa Ramirez is concerned that ICE may now use the failure of "Scheduled Departure" to "fuel their enforcement even further."

Reviewing the continued campaign by climate change skeptics, David McKnight, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales (Australia), notes that there several reasons why companies such as Exxon have had some success playing the global warming denial card. "First, the implications of the science are frightening. Shifting to renewable energy will be costly and disruptive. Second, doubt is an easy product to sell. Climate denial tells us what we all secretly want to hear. Third, science is portrayed as political orthodoxy rather than objective knowledge, a curiously postmodern argument," he writes. While the tobacco industry is often referred to as the template for the fossil fuel industry's campaign, McKnight argues that there is an important distinction. "There are no 'smoke-free areas' on the planet. Climate denial may turn out to be the world's most deadly PR campaign," he concludes.

Protesters outside Edelman's London officeOver the next week, campaigners from around the United Kingdom will converge on the site of a proposed expansion of the coal-fired Kingsnorth Power Station and participate in civil disobedience protests. The company behind the proposal, E.ON UK, a subsidiary of the German energy company E.ON, is so worried by the prospect of the planned civil disobedience campaign that it has hired the PR firm Edelman, to see if it can help ensure that the company's proposal retains government support.

Like so many companies, E.ON UK gushes about its corporate social responsibility program and proclaims that it is "working towards low carbon energy" and that "climate change is an important issue for society." It sounds reassuring, but the reality is much more disturbing.

Zoriah Miller, a freelance photojournalist who published images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack in Iraq, has been forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country and may be barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. His case "has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war," write Michael Kamber and Tim Arango. "News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent count, only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged." Miller, who took the photos while embedded with a Marine unit, explains that "the extreme dangers of working in Iraq" make embedding necessary because "it is impossible to for a independent journalist to move freely from place to place without an incredible amount of security and financial resources. ... Without the option to embed, journalists would have to pay literally thousands of dollars a day for security and transportation. To lose the ability to embed is the equivalent of losing your ability to report from Iraq. This is the reason it is important to fight for the rights of embedded journalists to document freely."

On parliament's last day before its summer break, the British government publicly released thirty ministerial statements, including one listing the salaries of "special advisers," one detailing the siting criteria for new nuclear power stations and another detailing the guests entertained at Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official residence, Chequers. The document dump was dubbed by some as "take out the trash day," after an episode of the fictional television series on the White House, the West Wing. Mike Granatt, a former head of the British government's Government Information and Communications Service and now a partner in the PR firm Luther Pendragon, explained to PR Week, "You shove everything out on one day and you hope the volume of it means there's only a certain amount of room in the papers and on TV and radio, so that squeezes it. And, secondly, you take the hit at once."