Company has a history of 'shaping the debate' around some of the world's most important controversies
Public relations is about reputation management. Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest PR firms, has a bit of work to do managing its own reputation right now.
The US-based company has been rumbled for being hired by Facebook to pitch anti-Google stories to the media ? although it said the two former journalists planting the negative stories were not following "standard operating procedure" and the assignment had been terminated.
Burson-Marsteller has "shaped the debate" around some of the world's most important controversies: it worked for Coca-Cola when the fizzy drinks industry threatened to go flat. It worked for British Nuclear Fuels post-Chernobyl. It was behind Monsanto's failed bid to get people to love genetically-engineered foods. It even helped out the Saudi government after 9/11.
John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor, charted the movements of the now WPP-owned PR firm back in 2002:
"The world's biggest PR company was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family.
"Its corporate clients have included the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, Union Carbide after the Bhopal gas leak killed up to 15,000 people in India, BP after the sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker in 1967 and the British government after BSE emerged.
"In the past few years it has acted for big tobacco companies and the European biotechnology industry to challenge the green lobby and counter Greenpeace arguments on GM food."
More recently, Burson-Marsteller has been no stranger to the anti-Google message. In 2007, Microsoft admitted that it had an "ongoing relationship" with the firm, after it was uncovered lobbying a number of top UK businesses to raise anti-competition issues in relation to Google search.
Burson-Marsteller confirmed to the Observer at the time that it worked with Microsoft to launch a new organisation ? the Initiative for Competitive Online Marketplaces ? that made a series of issues about Google's search dominance.
In this case, too, Burson-Marsteller was criticised for not disclosing which company it was working for.
But the company's links with Google's rivals stretch back to 1996 ? when Larry Page, then 23, and Sergey Brin, then 22, had only just begun collaborating on the search engine.
Yep, in 1996 Apple brought Burson-Marsteller on-board to clean up its own PR mess, one year before re-hiring indefatigable founder Steve Jobs. Now, who does Burson-Marsteller hire?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/12/burson-masteller-pr-firm-facebook-row
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