Tony Evans covered the Dalai Lama’s address on compassion at the Wood River High School in Sun Valley. His Holiness discussed the probability that global warming was implicated in the increase in natural disasters. The next day, Evans used Google to see how the event had been covered and found 23 stories from as far away as Russia and Italy. None mentioned the global warming angle.
In these stories the Dalai Lama was cast as an affable monk, as a jokester, even as a thoughtful military analyst. Nothing about his “contingencies,” which link us together as human beings, the provincial attitudes of Islamic extremists, or the pointlessness of revenge.
Many of these stories had near identical phrases describing the event, as though they had been prepared from a single source. Could this have been Burson Marsteller, the multi-billion-dollar global public relations firm that handled press for the event?
Evans points out that B-M has worked for the major oil companies for decades, and helped defeat Clinton-era legislation that would have controlled greenhouse gas emissions. And he asks, “Was BM’s client the Dalai Lama, or the U.S. State Department, which handled security for his visit?”
I’ve worked with a lot of public relations people and firms over the years—most of my career was in advertising and marketing communications—and I never got comfortable with the concept. When you produced an ad campaign, at least, the client—the money behind the story—was identified. With PR, it was too easy to slip one over on an unsuspecting public, to get a story out that kept the storyteller concealed behind the curtain, to dissemble. And that process has come to control so much of our public discourse that it’s difficult for anyone to speak sincerely and directly without being spun, especially when that person is speaking truth to power.
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