Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

The pace of branding by powerful forces in digital and social media has evolved so fast that most of us barely have time to consider where the “information” cited comes from or the context in which it was crafted, let alone the implications. So much for the golden age of transparency.

A politician or influencer who didn’t have a Twitter feed these days would be seen as a relic or an eccentric—if he even existed.

How might the digital media look these days if there had been no reduction in the old media? A former executive editor of the Washington Post speculates that the digital landscape would be mushrooming even if the old media were still intact. “There still would be growth in the ability of public relations people to directly reach the public,” he assessed. “They are filling a space that has been created digitally.” 95

The digital age has lent new qualities and possibilities to branding and enabled it to push its message (and burnish its reputation) in ways never before possible, such as reputational rebranding and “search-engine optimization.” Unlike the old microfiche, the digital record can be manipulated if you have enough cash.

Branding used to be confined to the corporate world. Now it is also used by political message-makers, aiming to create a look and feel that consumers identify with intuitively. False intimacy is the hallmark of the game. When power brokers (or their paid staff) tweet with emoticons or tell their “followers” that it’s their kid’s birthday, they’re really selling their brand—and the narratives and “facts” attached to the brand.

Armed with more financial resources, power brokers can spread their self-serving messages easily by gaming search results on Internet searches. They can hire firms to engage in search-engine optimization, meaning their message will come up very high when people search their name or company. Getting good placement in what might look like so-called “organic search” is far more insidious than simply placing an ad that looks like, well, an ad.

Consider that, in the old days, an influence group might purchase a full-page newspaper ad. To a reader, it would be clear that this was put out by a group with an agenda. But it’s much less clear if you, a citizen of today, are Googling something, and an influencer’s message just happens to appear on the very top of the screen, or close to it.

While the Internet is frequently touted as democratizing, that enthusiasm should be tempered by the fact that what we see and read online is often manipulated by those with the cash and the power. Amid such lack of transparency, where can the accountability be?

DARK ARTS

It’s not just that the new media create new openings: it’s that PR operatives actively work the openings.

How does a state-of-the-art PR firm use novel tools and venues to launder, say, the reputation of a client, without the public suspecting that there might be anything amiss? As we saw in Chapter 3, shadow lobbyists working on behalf of foreign governments that seek to press their case in the United States focus their ingenuity on the media, thereby eliding problems of access to policymakers posed by legal and other restrictions.

Journalist Ken Silverstein pulled off a sting against two foreign lobbying shops in 2007 when he exposed company operatives intent on burnishing the image of Turkmenistan. According to Silverstein, they promised to “. . . plant opinion pieces in newspapers under the names of academics and think-tank experts they would recruit. They even offered to set up supposedly ‘independent’ media events in Washington that would promote Turkmenistan (the agenda and speakers would actually be determined by the lobbyists).” 96

Two other PR firms—Washington-based Qorvis and U.K.-based Bell Pottinger—excel at laundering influence to make the system all but unaccountable. From gaming search results, to posting third-party blogs that appear independent, to setting up mouthpieces for dictators cloaked in benevolent-sounding organizations, all are designed to deceive. Of course, these are only two such firms in a much larger universe.

First, take Qorvis, founded in 2000 and staffed by some of Washington’s finest who not only know the name of the game but have written its rules: a former member of the Bush White House communications team; several former journalists and veteran PR hands; a former senior Capitol Hill legislative assistant; a former top senatorial policy and communications adviser; and a former State Department official touted by Washington Life as one of D.C.’s most influential people under the age of forty. 97Another Qorvis partner was the subject of an Atlantic piece that called him “the Jedi Master to television pundits” for training his clients on their TV appearances. 98The Atlantic made only a cursory mention eight paragraphs in that Qorvis represents Saudi Arabia, side by side with the likes of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, and Disney On Ice. Yet Qorvis represents some very unsavory regimes. And the Saudi Kingdom is just one of the questionable regimes Qorvis represents.

Qorvis itself makes a show on its website of listing the repressive governments on its client list as if the firm is transparent. 99And, in an obvious simulacrum, the descriptions of what it does read more as if it were in the business of democracy-promotion than state-of-the-art spinning. Here’s how the company describes its work for Bahrain, which began cracking down on opposition protestors in 2011: 100

Qorvis’ ultimate responsibility is to assist Bahrain with the peaceful resolution of its domestic challenges and bringing economic prosperity, development and stability for all citizens through positive and proactive communications.

Or Fiji, which has been the target of human-rights activists since the 2006 military coup: 101

The Government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, is currently in the process of drafting a new constitution, one that will enable the country’s first-ever truly democratic elections: one person, one vote, one value.

What Qorvis has done in both cases is to harness the supposedly democratizing power of the Internet to help whitewash the repressive activities of its cash-flush clients. More on that in a moment, but first let’s take a look back at the beginnings of “rogue”-regime PR.

“The Saudis were the first to get this new era of P.R.,” says the editor of the top trade magazine O’Dwyer’s Public Relations. 102Saudi nationals played an outsized role in the September 11, 2001 attack—fifteen out of nineteen hijackers were Saudis and, of course, bin Laden himself was part of a sprawling family with a construction business and close ties to the House of Saud. The Kingdom sought PR help after the attack, and one firm it turned to was Qorvis. The reported $14 million contract and an ensuing radio-ad campaign apparently led at least one partner to leave the firm. 103

Qorvis took on other clients, sometimes in association with Bell Pottinger, including Mubarak’s Egypt, Yemen and its then dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Equatorial Guinea under despot Teodoro Obiang. 104Equatorial Guinea is no longer listed as a Qorvis client, but Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Fiji, and Bahrain still are.

Stealth programs, this time on behalf of the Bahrainis, include use of the Internet and social media. In one incident, Bahraini opposition protestor Maryam al-Khawaja appeared at the Oslo Freedom Forum to decry the alleged torture and disappearance of fellow activists. The president of the Human Rights Foundation described what happened next: 105

Within minutes of Maryam’s speech (streamed live online) the global Bahraini P.R. machine went into dramatic overdrive. A tightly organized ring of Twitter accounts began to unleash hundreds of tweets accusing Maryam of being an extremist, a liar, and a servant of Iran.