‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’ was notoriously exposed as a front organisation created by international public relations firm Hill & Knowlton and funded by the exiled Kuwait monarchy, in a successful effort to seek American support for the first Gulf War.

Priyanka Palit

Cigarette giant Phillip Morris used public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to create the front group ‘National Smokers’ Alliance’ in 1993, building membership to three million and then using the media to send out pro-smoking messages.

Genuine activist groups usually involve a cluster of individuals who have organised to exert pressure on an organisation on behalf of a cause, being characterised as extremely active, motivated and passionate about their cause.

In spite of differences in opinion on the role of activism in democratic society, scholars are unanimous in their view that activism helps democracy by engaging in rhetorical dialogue in the marketplace of ideas, which may eventually help overcome power imbalances to bring about change in society.

On being interviewed on personal experiences or encounters with grassroots activism, a former activist admitted that visiting Israel made him aware of how an entire population has been gathered into a national grassroots campaign and helped him recover from his cynicism towards genuine grassroots movements.

An academic who is deeply engaged in activism says she had observed various organisation-community relationships and how they can be rebuilt after losing trust. The manager of a corporation in the USA who had volunteered for the Obama campaign defends it as an example of a genuine grassroots movement, recounting thousands of volunteers like her who were inspired to take the message door to door, virtually creating an army.

It’s just a PR front

On the other hand, front groups have been explained as deceptive third party bodies set up by public relations agencies on behalf of certain organisations who choose not to reveal their identity, thus the ‘false front’ created to deceive the public into believing that there is considerable publoic support for the cause.

They operate in a very similar way to grassroots activism, and although the similarities in public relations strategies and tactics used in organising these groups are quite striking, the true sources of information are mostly never revealed by front groups while a genuine grassroots movement is one whose public relations techniques include admitting the sources of funding, common in the USA where political advertisements mention ‘paid for by…’, as opposed to campaigns who do not mention this at all.

While genuine grassroots support is based on transparent interests and is mutually beneficial, there are public relations practitioners all over the world who are using similar, although opaque, techniques which ultimately have a negative impact on the organisation that covertly support.

Astroturfing explained

The work of front groups is more commonly known as ‘astroturfing’ in the USA, the metaphor originating from ‘astroturf’, the bright green artificial grass used in sports fields to simulate real turf.

‘Astroturfing’ is first assumed to have been used  in the Washington Post by US Senator Lloyd Bensen in 1985 to name those synthetic grassroots movements created by public relations companies in return for large sums for money.

Journalist William Greider descrbed it as “democracy for hire” and in the Campaigns & Elections magazine as grassroots activism involving the “instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.”

Mintz had reported in 2000 how some of the American utility companies formed two front groups called ‘Citizens for State Power’ and ‘Electric Utility Shareholders Alliance’ to stop Congress from deregulating their industry, describing the activities of the groups in their own words as “discreet, guarded and highly confidential”.

More recent are the much discussed healthcare debates taking place in Washington DC where front groups funded by the healthcare, pharmaceutical and oil industries have been employing public relations firms to write fake letters with fake messages to the public, bearing the appearance of the latest White House messages.

Among the recently discovered front groups in the US are the ‘Conservatives for Patients’ Rights’ led by CRC Public Relations, and the ‘Centre for Medicine in the Public Interest‘ (CMPI), funded by pharmaceutical giants.

Front or affront?

The mastermind behind front groups was, shockingly enough, public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, who used this technique while trying to secure funding for a play called ‘Damaged Goods’. This was described by Bernays himself as a propaganda play that dealt with sex education that was unable to secure sufficient funding owing to its controversial content.

Bernays had described the false front organisation he created as a ‘prestigious sponsoring committee’, which successfully secured the funding through deception. Consequent to its success, Bernays had created a number of front groups such as ‘Trucking Information Service’, ‘Trucking Service Bureau’, and ‘Better Living through Increased Highway Transportation’, which successfully led to Congress sanctioning up to $650 million in 1952 towards the construction of new highways.

Public relations scholar Derina Holtzhausen points out that the concepts of consensus and symmetry in public relations have unfortunately been seriously challenged by the post-modern situations of dissensus and dissymmetry, since a desire for consensus implies seeking an unfair settlement in which the more powerful party gets their way.

The bestseller Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry by Stauber & Rampton, along with websites fuelled by investigative journalism such as PRWatch.org and Spinwatch.org bombard us with revelations suggesting that consensus actually represents an unequal relationship between activists and corporations.

Consider their headline: “public relations wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phoney ‘grassroots’ front groups, spy on citizens, and conspire with lobbyists and politicians to thwart democracy”.

The P word

We may hold the growing importance of consumer, citizen and the environmental movements responsible for such malpractices, and also the tremendous increase in the power of public interest groups, and as articulated by Megalli & Friedman:

“every day, groups with deceptive names, groups that represent major U.S. corporate powers, seek to dupe journalists and citizens into believing that the reports they produce and the positions they advocate are something other than the usual corporate propaganda”.

The operation of astroturfing or front groups violates a very significant code of the CIPR, which states that “protecting and advancing the free flow of accurate and truthful information is essential to serving the public interest and contribute to informed decision making in a democratic society”.

The issue of diversity in public relations has plagued the business and has been the subject of several academic studies. It’s also a subject that’s close to home for me, especially after I blogged about regional accents and their place in the world of PR.

I decided to delve deeper into the subject and find out the views of those in the field on regional accents and the other controversial diversity issues such as sexism and ethnicity.

PR is known to be dominated by white, middle class females – but with the top positions being held my white, middle class men.

Lack of diversity

The lack of diversity has not gone unnoticed, with much research going into the subject. I’ve had my own experience with the issue when I began doing work experience at PR firms. I noted how some colleagues would put on southern accents when dealing with clients and I asked why they used this phone voice. The reason given was that clients preferred this to listening to our Yorkshire accents, which they found hard to understand. While I agree some accents are harder to comprehend then others, I’d never found the Leeds accent particularly perplexing.

I’ll never forget the first time I spoke to a client on the phone in an office of particularly well spoken individuals. I felt all heads turn towards me and felt incredibly embarrassed at not sounding as articulate as my colleagues.

Clare Siobhan Callery

But soon putting on a ‘phone voice’ became the norm, although it was evident I would need more practice to perfect the southern-friendly northern accent.

My experiences made me read more into the issue and I found some news articles that revealed the discrimination against some regional accents. A Guardian newspaper article stated that 46% of company directors believe a strong regional accent will be a disadvantage to those seeking success in business – not good news for those of us going into PR, where public speaking and presenting go with the territory.

The article featured a lawyer from Yorkshire (my home turf) who felt she needed to take speech classes to change her accent in order to be taken seriously and that her decision has already helped her career. She is quoted as saying: “Every accent has a stigma attached to it. I don’t want people to think about my accent. I want them to focus on what I am actually saying.”

A social psychologist, Albert Mehrabian, is quoted in the article saying “38% of a first impression is based on the way we sound, compared to just 7% on what we say” – another scary fact for the regional PR practitioner. Surely, if so much focus goes on how we speak we should improve our accents to make sure our message doesn’t get lost in the “yeas and ‘nays” of a regional twang.

Going native

To further my research I contacted Anne Gregory, currently a Pro-Vice Chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University and Director of The Centre for Public Relations Studies.

Anne Gregory

I was expecting Anne’s Yorkshire accent to be incredibly thick, so I was a little surprised when the voice on the other end of the phone was no broader then my own. I learned that Anne originally came from Huddersfield and studied at Leeds University. Before becoming an academic, she had a range of PR related jobs from the BBC to Bradford and Bingley. She explained that there is little stigma attached to accents in the academic world, but it was sometimes an issue during her PR career.

Anne was a director at Weber Shandwick. The PR firm has a Leeds office but the headquarters were in London. She said that people expected the London workers to be better PR practitioners, but from her experience those in the north were just as competent.

Anne thought it sad that the majority of PR jobs are still London-based, when regional cities like Leeds have developed such vibrant PR scenes. She believes that at some stage people may have to move to London to further their career as that’s were the best jobs, biggest consultancies and biggest clients  are situated, but that places like Leeds are beginning to catch up. However, certain sectors like political and financial PR still have very little presence outside the capital.

When Anne worked in Bradford, both at Bradford and Bingley and at the University of Bradford, she experienced the same disdain when it came to dealing with southern agencies. Over-confident PR consultancies believed they were dealing with less well trained and less able staff at Bradford University and were often patronising.

She believed there was a negative preconception of Bradford. However, once they had met Anne in person or read any of her papers their attitude soon changed.

Despite this, Anne doesn’t believe that her accent has held her back in here career progression, but admits that she hasn’t really worked outside Yorkshire. She has felt conscious of her accent at times when other people have picked up on it, but adds that she is still proud of being from Yorkshire.

In terms of advice for others, Anne says that it does depend on where you work, and if you do choose to work for a southern firm then you may end up failing victim to the ‘southernising’ tendency of the big London firms. If you are working for a company you represent them which means that your strong regional accent is also representing them and this may not be something the firm wants. If changing your accent is not something you want to do, then you may have to be more selective about where you choose to work.

Diversity and discrimination

Anne pointed out that in terms of a lack of a diversity and discrimination in PR and business, region and accent are not the biggest issue. Other factors do come into play, such as sexism and racism. As a high-flying female, has she experienced any sexism in her long and successful career? As the president of the CIPR in 2004, she felt that on a couple of a occasions she was treated differently and there were some situations where she felt things would have been different if she were a man. She didn’t feel there was prejudice, but felt that as a Yorkshire woman she was a rarity in the male-dominated business world.

One of the biggest issues in PR diversity is actually the background of the practitioner. Anne Gregory believes that coming from a working class background can actually have more of a detrimental affect then any of the usual forms of discrimination.

Many PR practitioners come from affluent backgrounds  and are less accepting of those from lower down the social scale. Coming from Huddersfield, class is an issue that Anne has had more problems with then sexism or her Yorkshire accent. But as a working class Yorkshire woman, she feels comfortable in her own skin. When it comes to issues of prejudice she takes them very seriously, but does not take herself too seriously and feels this is the best way to approach it.

For another perspective on diversity in PR, I decided to get in touch with one of my journalist-come-practitioner contacts, Paul Rayment. Hearing how journalists – the people we in PR will be dealing with most of the time – perceive different accents would give me a greater understanding and help me see the issue from another point of view.

Paul, originally from the south, worked in consumer journalism for six years on the northern lifestyle publication ‘The Leeds Guide’. There he liaised with PR practitioners up and down the country working on various sections of the magazine. He found that whilst dealing with southern practitioners in the entertainment sector, though efficient, they often came over as pushy and not very personable. Though Paul can’t say if this impression was solely from their accent, it is an impression that has stuck.

Most of Paul’s journalism work was in the property sector working with Yorkshire agencies. Here he said the Yorkshire accent was actually advantageous, as Paul felt he had more faith in the practitioners because they sounded local and had local knowledge. Though they were under the same pressure as their southern entertainment counterparts, they were not as forceful and were more pleasant to talk to.

Paul has since moved from journalism to PR, working in both the B2B and B2C sectors.  He says that professionals in the northern agencies do have watered-down accents. Whether this was intentional or just a by-product of working in the PR industry is unclear. However, the southern practitioners also shifted they way they spoke towards Received Pronunciation. Paul said it seems that northerners and southerners both try to upgrade their accents.

PR chameleons

Most PR practitioners will tend to mirror the accent of the person they are dealing with and in PR you will always be most comfortable when in conversation with those with a similar accent. Being  from Essex he felt he had more banter and more trust when talking to people from the same area.

When it comes to sexism, Paul has worked with women in positions of authority who have overcompensated for being female, while he knows of others that have used their sexuality to advance in their career. He also knows that some men, whether clients or journalists, prefer working with pretty, young blondes.

Paul’s words of wisdom were that race, gender and accent do differ from person to person, but from a PR point of view we should be looking at how to make the most of this rather then drawing negatives from it. As PR students we should adopt this way of thinking and we should seek ways in which to make our identity work in PR.

For those of us unwilling to change our accents, this could mean a successful regional career. For female students worried about how sexism could affect them in the workplace, we should try and follow Anne Gregory’s footsteps. We are fortunate to be entering a working environment more diverse then it ever has been.

Clare Siobhan Callery blogs at PR Student

The annual Communication Monitor survey was conducted by academic researchers from 11 universities based on a sample of more than 1,850 communications professionals from 34 countries.

The European Communication Monitor 2009 analyses impacts of the recession and media crisis on communication departments and agencies. It identifies strategic issues, fields of practice and instruments and how they gain or lose importance. Specific topics such as internal communication, online communities, measurement and evaluation or salaries are questioned and discussed in detail. Methods of empirical social research and statistical computation have been used to analyse the huge amount of data that had been collected this spring. Findings are available at European Communication Monitor 2009.