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

The president of the foundation pinned the blame on Qorvis. Journalist Tom Squitieri played a role: he penned three pro-government pieces in the Huffington Post over a nearly three-week period in 2011, noting vaguely that he was “ working with the Bahrain government on media awareness.” 106There was no mention of Squitieri’s employment by Qorvis. Salon pointed out that similar posts appeared on Squitieri’s blog (which was active as of the end of 2013) on the Foreign Policy Association website. Links to these pieces could still be found on his Twitter feed as of May 2014 (again, no mention of his Qorvis connection). But now when you click on these links, they no longer work. Various other pro-Bahrain tweets were still visible as of that date. 107

Squitieri’s name also surfaced in an ugly spat between Qorvis and Wikipedia in 2013. According to the Daily Dot, which covers online communities: 108

Wikipedians accuse Qorvis of employing a small crew of sockpuppets—multiple accounts owned by the same user to deceptively orchestrate an editing bloc—to fan out across the free encyclopedia and attempt to whitewash the pages of its clients. . . . Wikipedia user “Sacoca” allegedly runs a string of five accounts that remove negative information and add PR fluff. . . . The Sacoca account is almost certainly run by Tom Squitieri. One of the alleged Sacoca sockpuppets, Harriet888 only edits the Qorvis page, adding information about current staff and awards and honors—and allegedly scrubbing it of any negative information, like hiding negative information about Bahrain. . . . This seems a strange obsession for someone to have, if they indeed have nothing to do with Qorvis.

A Qorvis partner later told the Daily Dot: “[Qorvis] employees may edit Wikipedia and they may not, but we have no corporate policy or interest in making this some kind of profit making venture.” 109

Qorvis’s sometime collaborator, Bell Pottinger, also employs “all sorts of dark arts” (their words) on the Internet. These include editing Wikipedia entries deemed damaging; setting up third-party blogs that also appear independent and use words that would come up high in Google searches; and a general gaming of search results to “. . . drown out that negative content and make sure that you have positive content out there online.” 110

Because it operates in the United States, Qorvis is required to identify its foreign clients and certain activities to the Justice Department. And yet disclosure requirements hardly guarantee transparency. Are the documents filed with Justice a true disclosure, or only a performance of disclosure? Qorvis, and other firms like them, can perform the checklist and be done with it, following the letter of the law. Meanwhile, the time lag between activities and filing make disclosure and lobbying very hard for potential overseers or the public to parse.

When you look at Qorvis’s Justice Department disclosures, you can see a continuous flow of press releases itemized and billed to Bahrain. An unnamed lobbyist tells Silverstein about a blizzard of such releases:

Qorvis’ releases are pure propaganda and it doesn’t even bother flogging them to journalists. . . . They just trot the stuff out so there’s something else to read on Google when one of their clients fucks up.

The Qorvis blizzard isn’t about persuasion, Silverstein assesses: it is about plain old digital obfuscation: 111

Such releases are not aimed directly at public opinion so much as at Google and other search engines. A steady stream of press releases serves to push news stories lower in search engine returns; when it comes to Qorvis’ clients, the news is almost invariably bad so burying it makes sense.

Qorvis has also used cyber-trickery in its work for Fiji. After spotting a piece in the Huffington Post written by the country’s repressive military leader, a journalist noticed what she called an “exploding internet and social media presence” for Fiji that included what appeared to be “flogging” (fake blogging), tweeting, and another blizzard of press releases. 112

Not everyone in the PR world has accepted this kind of business. In 2011, one unnamed former Qorvis insider said this to a Huffington Post writer: “I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people. . . . These scumbags will pay whatever you want.” 113It does raise the question: How do the employees of firms representing so-called “black hat” clients justify their work? Obviously some, like this former staffer, cannot.

Still, once again, the firms’ first line of defense is the claim that they are enlightening their clients. One lobbyist told Newsweek that he helped “move the ball forward on human rights” when he was in charge of the Equatorial Guinea account for Cassidy & Associates, one of the firms that were the targets of the Silverstein sting. 114This was the argument made many times by the organization, as well as by the high-flying players it (in most cases) hired to serve as stealth persuaders.

In any event, these PR campaigns are designed to obfuscate, confuse, and launder influence. How can we, the public, evaluate where the truth lies?

THE LIMITATIONS OF DIY

As methods often beyond our ken are at work, we are swayed by influence-laundering and downright deception subtly masquerading as something else. Meanwhile, as we assemble our own (sometimes “truthy”) realities, we can scarcely compete with the onslaught because we can scarcely recognize it. Our act of choosing “Like” or “Share” may give us a feeling of control and even of taking action, a temporary boost of self-satisfaction, perhaps not unlike that of the headless housewife (of the do-it-yourself porn business) offering up her (heretofore) private moments.

And, with DIY all the rage and a cultural perennial—especially in the United States, the land of choice, can-do-ism, and conviction that every public-policy problem has a technological solution—it is easy to be overconfident in our own ease and ability to sort things out. 115It is hard not to be swayed by the folks who pioneer noble experiments and exemplify the DIY cream of the media crop.

Take, for instance, Matthew Yglesias, previously of Slate, a blogger and sometime think-tanker. After Pew released its generally grim 2012 report, Yglesias took the opposite view: that we are in fact in the “glory days” of American journalism for consumers. Here’s his tour of the bountiful offerings now just a click away: 116

You don’t need to take my analysis of the Cyprus bank bailout crisis as the last word on the matter: You can quickly and easily find coverage from the New York Times , Wall Street Journal , Financial Times , and the Economist . Or if you don’t want to see your Cyprus news filtered through an America/British lens, you can check out the take of distinguished Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on his blog. Reuters created an interactive feature that lets you try out different formulae for making the Cypriot haircut work. A pseudonymous London-based fund manager using the name Paweł Morski has offered vital, deeply informed coverage on Twitter and his WordPress site. You can watch a Bloomberg TV interview on the situation with native Cypriot and former Federal Reserve adviser Athanasios Orphanides at your leisure.

Best of all, today’s media ecology lets you add depth and context to the news. Several sources on Twitter recommended to me a 2008 Perry Anderson article in the London Review of Books about the broader sweep of post-independence Cypriot history. Paul Krugman reminds us of the larger issue of small island nations serving as offshore banking hubs and the dilemmas this poses for global financial regulation. He also offers a link to a lengthy IMF report on Cyprus’ economy.