by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
How could someone who benefits from a pandemic ensure that it appears as bad as possible?
And that the world freezes in emergency mode for as long as possible? How does it create such a tremendous mass panic that it carries M.P.s and journalists, judges and prosecutors, teachers and police officers, employers and organizers – worldwide? How does he get billions of people to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of supposed security – and to “protect” their health by jeopardizing them as guinea pigs for experimental genetic engineering? Public relations can do all of this: artistic “management of public communications”, or propaganda for short. Professional scare-mongers are ideal for this: international P.R. agencies that earn huge sums of money from it.
The development of the global corona crisis is like a thriller whose story unfolds with clockwork precision – based on a script that may have been written long before Wuhan.
Anyone who dares to consider something like this must promptly be ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist. There are good reasons for his tremendous guess. He just has to come up with it.
The most likely to be ridiculed is a vague general suspicion of corruption: politicians and the media are all “bought.” This defamatory assumption is quite evident in individual cases. Still, it is generally silly and naive: Who seriously believes that state leaders, heads of authorities and experts, members of the government and members of parliament, as well as the editors of leading media, are constantly receiving bribes to make them compliant? They took care of the hair-raising wrong decisions made by Jens and Angela in terms of the hygiene policy, for the unsuccessful risk assessments and advice from the Robert Koch Institute and the Charité, for the reports and comments in the most influential mass media, for example, bundles of banknotes in thick envelopes or black suitcases, or discrete transfers on numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands? Nonsense.
I prefer a second version. It does not result from free-floating assumptions but knowledge of health economics, lobbying, professional marketing, and public relations. (1)
Almighty propaganda monster
Anyone who only thinks of SARS-CoV-2 as the cause of the corona crisis lacks background knowledge, talent for combination, and imagination. He urgently needs to familiarize himself with the offspring of unleashed capitalism such as Edelman, Weber-Handwick, BCW, FleishmanHillard, and Ketchum stand for. (See table below.) These are P.R. agencies: companies that understand the fine art of public relations – the optimal “communication,” in the broadest sense, with particular target groups, as well as the population in general. For this, they can be rewarded like a prince. None of the top ten earns less than 320 million U.S. dollars annually; the top comes to 892 million.
And you should investigate their parents: gigantic international company networks that direct thousands of employees, in addition to tens of thousands of “free” suppliers, from parliamentary lobbyists to bot programmers to reporters, photographers and filmmakers, influencers, bloggers, and trolls. They generate astronomical sales at hundreds of locations across the globe – above all, the infamous “Big Four”: WPP, Omnicon, IPG, and Publicis. (See table below.) Together, around 52 billion U.S. dollars in annual sales give these holdings a market share of approximately 30% in the global P.R. business.
In the form of these service providers, the 20th century has produced an almost all-powerful propaganda monster that can, on request, provide for wishes, hopes, and fears, for attitudes and convictions, for sympathy and trust, for rejection, contempt, and hatred – resistance is futile. The Internet provides him with concentrated feed that has continued to grow at breathtaking rates since the turn of the millennium. Globally active marketing corporations worth billions, whose names only insiders can relate to, discretely manipulate governments, authorities, media, and the public, if necessary the entire world population. Their market power is limitless, their hustle and bustle concealed, beyond any control.
The “Big 4” of global marketing
WPP including BCW, Hill + Knowlton, Ogilvy
UK Headquarters London, 3000 offices in 112 countries. 203000 employees (2017)
Sales per year: 17.4 billion euros (2019)
What exactly are you doing? Marketing: this is much, much more than just advertising. It includes all measures to create new markets, develop existing ones, expand, and drive towards the saturation limit. Professional marketing has many goals:
· It should win customers and retain them for as long as possible.
· It not only promotes the sale of a specific product but aims to polish up and improve the image of entire product groups – to make them appear valuable, desirable, harmless, beneficial, scientifically approved, excellent, and beautiful.
· It stirs up specific needs, beliefs, attitudes, and fears that positively influence consumption decisions and reduce internal resistance that prevents consumption.
· It polishes up the client’s image: He should appear serious, helpful, innovative, aligned with the noblest moral principles – and in the event of a scandal appear insightful, remorseful, purified. (“Of course we cooperate fully with the investigating authorities.”)
· It is supposed to damage the reputation of competing products and their providers.
· It acts on relevant persons, organizations, government institutions of all kinds so that business is facilitated; requirements are relaxed, obstacles are removed.
· It instrumentalizes everyone and everything that could serve the profit – currently, in the medium term or the long term. The choice of means, including corruption, is determined solely by the ROI, “Return on Investment”: Do they pay off?
The aim is to determine the public discourse, set priorities, draw attention, define needs and emergencies, stifle unfavorable topics, generate and reinforce prejudices and fears, arouse expectations and hopes, and make opinions.
· If necessary, it poisons the spiritual climate – charges it with emotions in such a way that factual discussions that could harm specific interests do not even arise.
· With lateral thinkers, it proceeds freely according to Macchiavelli: If you have nothing to object to criticism objectively: Eliminate the critic. As long as murder is a criminal offense, try character assassination. Discredit him, ridicule him, and mark him as a muddlehead, an outsider, a psychopath, a danger.
Any fines and compensation payments if legal violations are exposed and become expensive can be taken into account from the outset when pricing the advertised products. They are part of calculable business risks.
Marketing is nothing less than all of that – it includes the fine art of mass propaganda. P.R., public relations, is just another word for it.
Is this monster possibly behind the corona crisis – on behalf of those for whom pandemics are opening up gold mines?
The “Big 4” of global marketing
Omnicon Germany, Frankfurt/Main Europaviertel Tower 185
Omnicom, including FleischmannHillard Ketchum
USA headquarters in New York
79500 employees (2017)
Annual revenue $13.5 billion (2018)
Customers with inexhaustible financial strength
Who hires such service providers? Understandably, they guard their customer lists like treasure. The names are generally considered to be strictly confidential, especially since most clients place great value on discretion. However, information about individual clients leaks out from time to time. They include governments, the military, secret services, banks, and insurance companies, and financially highly potent companies in telecommunications, armaments, automotive, food, and agricultural sectors. Some of the most lucrative orders come from the largest companies in the pharmaceutical, biotech, medical technology, and healthcare sectors, their interest groups, and foundations. (See tables above.)
The budgets for this are staggering. Hardly any other branch of industry generates higher sales than the pharmaceutical industry: it is now around 1.5 trillion dollars per year. And none enjoys higher profit margins: the industry sizes create 25 to 40%. What is happening to it? A maximum of 10 to 15% goes into the research and development of pharmaceuticals. The lion’s share, 40 to 55%, fills the marketing pot. Curious: Because marketing expenses are tax-deductible as advertising expenses, the working population ultimately pays for being seduced and fooled.
The “Big 4” of global marketing
IPG
Interpublic group of companies including Edelman
USA Headquarters New York, 54,000 employees (2018)
Revenue per year $9.71 billion (2018)
The monster’s means
What would happen if we could force the world’s largest marketing agencies by court order to submit a complete list of their current customers – and provide detailed information: What have they been hired to do recently? How did they accomplish these assignments? Which activities were related to the corona crisis?
For such contract awards to even make sense, three questions must be answered: Does a pandemic crisis have aspects that could be useful to drug manufacturers? Can these aspects be influenced? With what means would it be possible?
From an economic point of view, pandemics are a godsend; they open gold mines, as we saw in the previous chapter. There is no question that an epidemic serves business interests admirably. But how do marketing professionals manage to push the pharmaceutical business accordingly? Do they even have the power to do so? How should agencies manage to get their lavish fees worthwhile in pandemic times? That depends on which instruments they can use – and what budget is available to them. For large orders, the amount can be in the two to three-digit million range.
The “Big 4” of global marketing
Public groups, including MSL
F. Headquarters Paris
77,000 employees (2019) Annual revenue: $9.6 billion (2018)
On the one hand, they can offer a concentrated workforce. The very best – and the best paid – work in P.R. It is no coincidence that only one in three talented writers in Germany decides to study journalism with the prospect of earning an average gross salary of € 3800 as an editor (2). Or as a more or less involuntarily “freelance” author with an average of 2000 € to gnaw on the hunger cloth. (3) Two-thirds would instead become “public relations” specialists; With professional experience, their average salaries are between € 4,000 and € 5,600, the senior P.R. manager waving over € 6,000. (4) There are just as few upper limits for the income of leading P.R. strategists as there are for top managers in the private sector.
In addition, there are whole armies of support workers. The Munich marketing agency “SeedingUp” alone, a small light on a global scale, offers solvent customers the opportunity to hire over 25,000 (!) Bloggers. Hundreds of thousands of trolls tap their fingers sore for fees in the minimum wage range to dump verbal rubbish all over the Internet, stir up a mood against competitors, and sow hatred and contempt against critics. Many “influencers” get rich as surreptitious workers in industrial services.
The marketing giants have long been showing off with office towers full of copywriters, advertising experts, graphic designers, web designers, and I.T. specialists. Through decades of clever mergers and acquisitions, they have incorporated publishers, radio and television stations, film studios and software companies, market research institutes, and management consultancies. So you can offer an all-round service that leaves nothing to be desired.
Equipped in this way, a lot can be moved:
– Send out lobbyists who besiege, ensnare and impress all politically responsible persons with perfect, Powerpoint-based presentations and demo films: from ministers to senior ministerial officials to M.P.s and committee members;
– The opinion leaders of conventional medicine set out with lavish fees to appear in the industry’s interests, be it as reviewers, in expert committees, on boards of relevant specialist societies, on editorial boards of specialist journals, at interviews and press conferences.
– Provide editorial offices with perfectly prefabricated text and image material via freelancers; to put professionals in news agencies, radio, and print media who secretly serve two masters. Infiltrate the administration of Wikipedia; set off an army of bloggers and trolls; Put pressure on social media to stop annoying criticism. Tenor: The pandemic is much more dangerous than expected, affects more risk groups, takes longer, has unforeseen long-term consequences, and leads to terrible individual fates. The number of those infected and the “victims” WITH the virus must be in the foreground. Only a vaccine can end the crisis. If necessary, vaccination is required. For the population to maintain and grow the willingness to do so, state restrictions must continue to exist until then; a sense of threat must be maintained.
And this is exactly what has been happening since the beginning of 2020 – wherever global pharmaceutical marketing is present and effective.
In doing so, he benefits from the pharmaceutical industry’s experience from previous pandemics – especially with the “swine flu” in 2009. Even then, the following worked perfectly: influencing the WHO to trigger a false alarm; fueling and controlling a media hype; the intensive use of lobbyists in all capitals; Agreements with governments regarding the guaranteed purchase of medicines and vaccines as well as indemnification; frightening the population.
The fact that this did not result in a bomb business was due to three shortcomings at the time. On the one hand, to the disappointment of alarmists, the H1N1 virus turned out to be comparatively harmless all too quickly – only a few hundred deaths could reasonably be attributed to it. In this respect, SARS-CoV-2 “works” considerably better. It is of secondary importance whether it actually originated in an animal body through spontaneous mutation and jumped over to a human or purely accidentally escaped a laboratory in which it was previously genetically engineered. SARS-CoV-2 has many effects that are undoubtedly of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. Even if the virus wasn’t deliberately engineered and released for that purpose, at least it looks like it.
On the other hand, in the course of 2009, the feeling that it was a matter of life and death disappeared all too quickly. And although the federal and state governments ordered vaccination doses that would have sufficed for at least half of the German population, forced vaccinations were not an option.
Third, well-known dissenting voices quickly made themselves heard. There has not yet been a campaign that uses fighting terms such as “conspiracy theory,” “fake news,” and “fact check” to eliminate annoying criticism by denouncing the critics. There has not yet been an alliance between WHO and national health authorities with the most powerful infotech corporations to censor away anti-mainstream opinions.
Marketing has now made significant improvements in all three respects, as is currently evident.
Isn’t a pandemic unpredictable?
Marketing concepts are not created overnight by a flash of inspiration. It takes many months to work it out, coordinate it with the client, and instruct everyone who is supposed to implement the specifications accordingly. Didn’t agencies and their clients not have the time to react to the disaster reports that came in from Wuhan in the second half of January?
But maybe we will get closer to the truth if we start differently. What happened after Wuhan looks so amazingly similar to a global marketing campaign that industry insiders would be surprised if it weren’t.
However, this assumes that the origin of the novel coronavirus was not an unforeseeable whim of fate – a random mutation that jumped from a wild animal at an animal market to humans – but a genetic engineering construct that was deliberately released. There are increasing indications for this, as was shown in the previous chapters.
Anyone who wanted to trigger the pandemic in a systematic manner only needed four things: Knowledge of the fact that viruses can be genetically “sharpened” beyond the already known spectrum of activity of the SARS-Corona type; the information that relevant research is taking place in Wuhan – possibly even corresponding assignments; a viable contact person there, or a collaborator who can be smuggled in; smuggling out and exposing a virus sample.
Doesn’t a pandemic bring more disaster than profit?
Doesn’t an industry that creates a global epidemic ultimately cut itself into its own flesh? The month-long lockdown with which governments around the world responded to the corona pandemic has already brought the global economy a crisis of historic proportions. When economies collapse – where are the profits of the pharmaceutical industry supposed to come from? If billions may die or become seriously ill, who should generate the gross national product from which medical care is to be paid for?
True, there is nothing to be earned from the dead. But just as little in healthy people. Those in between are lucrative: the chronically ill. The more of them there are, the longer they stay, the better for business. The perfect pandemic virus would therefore be one that (1.) does not stop killing to preserve the image of the “killer germ,” but (2.) leaves the majority alive; that (3.) allows as many infected people as possible to remain ill for as long as possible – which is why they (4.) are dependent on repeated vaccinations and constant medication, ideally for life; whereby the majority of them (5.) still remain able to work. Countless symptoms can make people permanent customers of the medical industry, but at the same time, largely maintain their productivity.
The United States is demonstrating how extremely successful a country can be in which chronic illness has almost become the norm. Furthermore, they are the world’s leading economic nation, which affords by far the most expensive healthcare system on the planet. Nevertheless, the proportion of physical and psychological long-term patients is nowhere higher. If the steadily increasing expenses for drugs and medical aids, for diagnostics, treatment and care are at some point barely affordable, then finance ministers will have to save elsewhere. What does a pharmaceutical manager care if the budgets for armaments, education, and nature conservation shrink?
Incidentally, despite the ongoing pandemic, a strict lockdown does not have to remain permanent, as has been shown around the corona-infested globe since the end of April. As soon as quarantine regulations are relaxed under increasing public pressure, the economy can recover, even if it will take a year or two to do so.
Business ethics as hypocrisy for image cultivation
Don’t pharmaceutical managers also share a basic social consensus with us on inalienable moral principles? Are they not ultimately working to deliver humanity from the scourge of illness?
Psychological tests and experiments unanimously confirm that the higher the expected profit, the more willing you are to violate laws, break the rules and norms, and reveal your own moral principles. How much more pronounced does this willingness, have to be from the outset in managers, whose requirement profile includes putting profit above everything, and who are lavishly rewarded for this?
How naive the illusion of the capitalist do-gooder is is apparent to every non-dyslexic capable of thinking who delves into the revelations of “whistleblowers” and relevant litigation files and court judgments. Throughout the process, a detached caste of power and money-hungry businessmen comes to the fore, who, for the sake of their salaries and bonuses, their investors and shareholders, go over corpses in an emotionless and unscrupulous manner, unencumbered by any empathy, decency, and awareness of injustice. Remorse is one thing above all: a brake on sales. “If you think the pharmaceutical industry is about to cure you: Forget it!” Warns John Virapen, long-time managing director of the industry giant Eli Lilly. (5)
The list of pharmaceutical companies that have been sentenced to fines and billions in damages for corruption by doctors, scientists, and authorities, for fraudulent misrepresentation of consumers, for falsifying and suppressing study data reads like a who’s who of the industry. Anyone who builds on their goodwill and swallows their products without hesitation trusts legally convicted criminals. They are “worse than the mafia,” says Danish medicine professor Peter Gøtzsche, co-founder of the Cochrane Science Network and author of a compulsory civic reading titled Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime that easily outshines any thriller. (6)
In this respect, the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies and marketing agencies seem to be a perfect match in terms of character. The world’s largest P.R. agencies have long since gambled away their reputation – without exception. To put it bluntly: prostitution doesn’t just happen on the line. There are propaganda whores too. They sell to anyone who pays for them.
Would you like some examples?
Edelman, the most successful P.R. agency in the world, helped the chemical company, Hoffmann-La Roche. In 1976, clouds of dioxin escaped from its factory in Seveso, Italy, poisoning thousands of residents. She defended Nestlé against consumer advocates who denounced the group for its aggressive advertising of ready-made baby food in the developing world. It polished up the image of Pennsylvania State University after an abuse affair that had been covered up for decades was exposed. She helped media magnate Rupert Murdoch when it was discovered that his British tabloid, News of the World, had cell phones tapped by celebrities and ordinary citizens for years to obtain exclusive information. To this day, the agency works for the American Petroleum Institute (API), the main interest group for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Although the API has known how fossil fuel burning is related to global warming since the 1950s, it has deliberately undermined climate research and policy to this day to safeguard its member firms’ business goals. Among other things, the API sponsors skeptical scientists, conservative think tanks who denied the existence of global warming, and various front organizations for organized denial of climate change, including the Global Climate Coalition. (7)
The agency WeberShandwick, number two in the P.R. industry in terms of sales, had to put up with the accusation in 2010 that it was doing camouflaged lobbying for manufacturers of medical aids by making the P.R. construct. “My Choice” appears as a spontaneous citizens’ initiative. (8th)
The worldwide number three, Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) – a merger of the traditional companies Burson-Marsteller (B-M) and Cohn & Wolfe – “does not stop at anything”, as the “Lobbycontrol” initiative states. BCW took on public relations work for the Argentine military junta (1976-1983) for a U.S. $ 1.1 million fees after it became known that 35,000 civilians had been abducted and murdered. The PR mandate was to “promote the promotion of trust in and goodwill towards the country and government”. (9) In the course of this image cultivation, B-M provided “extensive support” for foreign journalists during the football World Cup in 1978. (10)
BCW’s clientele also included the regime of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and the Saudi royal family (11), and since 2017 the Turkish autocrat Erdogan. (12) During the 1967-1970 Biafra War, B-M assisted the Nigerian government in discrediting credible reports of genocide. (13) B-M collected five million U.S. dollars from the Indonesian government to polish up the country’s battered image in terms of human rights and environmental protection. This was preceded by a massacre by the Indonesian military of hundreds of civilians who demonstrated in 1991 for the independence of the East Timor region. In 1996 another P.R. contract for the U.S. $ 5 million was signed. (14)
BCW uses privileged access to E.U. governments to ensure that the controversial fracking is not regulated but promoted across Europe; a BCW customer, the oil company ExxonMobil, also operates it in Europe. (15) Like Edelman, environmentalists often have targeted BCW; They accuse the company of carrying out propaganda for environmentally destructive and unhealthy projects and techniques on behalf of large companies. (16) The agency helped set up the Global Climate Coalition, an interest group that seeks to prevent government measures to reduce CO2 emissions. (17) Also, on behalf of Exxon, Texaco, Chevron, Ford, and General Motors, B-M sold climate change as a wives’ fairy tale. (18)
B-M also looked after the chemical company Union Carbide after several thousand people died in an accident in its Indian plant in Bhopal in 1984 – estimates range between 3,800 and 25,000 dead – and hundreds of thousands of people were seriously injured. (19)
Equally controversial is B-M’s use of a P.R. strategy called “Astroturfing,” which simulates a spontaneous grassroots movement. Among other things, in 1999 Burson-Marsteller hired a group of demonstrators who were supposed to take to the streets for the use of genetic manipulation on behalf of the biotech company Monsanto. The scandal exposed the New York Times, which interviewed some hired demonstrators. (20) BCW acted similarly in 2012 for Fraport, Lufthansa and Condor Flugdienst. The agency launched a counter-demonstration against aircraft noise protests at Frankfurt Airport under the motto “Yes to FRA!”. (21)
In the late 1990s, B-M hired seed and pesticide giant Monsanto to address concerns about G.M. food. Among other things, B-M organized an apparently spontaneous demonstration at the end of 1999, the participants of which received 25 euros, free food, and bus transfer. (22) On behalf of the world’s four largest manufacturers of brominated flame retardants, B-M set up the so-called “Bromine Science and Environment Forum” (BSEF) in 1997; it practiced massive lobbying to prevent a threatened ban on environmentally harmful substances that increase fire safety in electrical and electronic equipment, textiles or building products. (23)
FleishmanHillard was also in Monsanto’s service. For the biotech giant, the agency kept lists of around 200 people, mostly journalists, who rated and assigned to various categories depending on their attitude and influence. Monsanto critics were divided into the categories “to educate” and “to supervise” – including the former French environment minister Ségolène Royal. (24)
Between August 2008 and January 2009, Ketchum Pleon carried out a large-scale advertising campaign for the Russian government to enable it to “tell its story of economic growth and opportunity for its citizens”. Order volume: 2.9 million U.S. dollars Among other things, Ketchum ensured that the military invasion of Georgia (2008) was seen in a more favorable light. (25)
In the fifties and sixties, Hill + Knowlton (H + K) took over several tobacco companies’ “crisis management” to prevent cigarette sales from falling further. To this end, the agency cast doubts on scientific studies that showed links between smoking and lung cancer.
In 2014 Ogilvy & Mather had to apologize for the racist content of an advertisement they hatched for the South African charity “Feed a Child”. The ad depicted a black boy being fed like a dog by a white woman. (28)
In 2019, Ogilvy worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, implementing Trump’s heartless order to tear up families of illegal immigrants, keeping even young children away from their parents. (29) The online news service Buzzfeed released the minutes of an internal meeting in which a government official told Ogilvy CEO John Seifert: “We are ready to work with companies that do oil spills, sell lots of tobacco, contribute to obesity rates. Well, We are likely to be said to be willing to work with companies that let children die and run concentration camps. “(30)
I ask for a refutation.
A substantial empirical hypothesis differs from a free-floating “conspiracy theory” in that it can fail due to experience. Circumstances quickly occur to me under which I would feel refuted, leading me to withdraw and delete this book chapter on the spot. Let me look at the order books, appointment lists, meeting minutes, strategy papers, and business accounts of all the major marketing agencies that currently serve pharmaceutical customers and connect their CEOs to polygraphs. Should there be no evidence of the monstrous activities that I accuse them of, I would immediately deny – and be ashamed of my baseless suspicions.
Translated with permission Klartext
This article is taken from the book Corona-Rätsel (2020) by Harald Wiesendanger.
See also > Vandana Shiva on the Taking Down of Bill Gates’ Empires
Remarks
1 I go into this in more detail in my book Das Gesundheitsunwesen – Wie wir es durchschauen, überleben und verwandeln, Schönbrunn 2019, Kap. 11: „Vergiftete Quellen“.
2 https://www.stepstone.de/gehalt/Redakteur-in.html
3 https://www.alphajump.de/karriereguide/gehalt/gehalt-journalist
4 https://www.alphajump.de/karriereguide/gehalt/gehalt-pr-manager
5 John Virapen: Nebenwirkung Tod. Korruption in der Pharma-Industrie. Ein Ex-Manager packt aus (2008)
6 Peter C. Gøtzsche: Tödliche Medizin und organisierte Kriminalität: Wie die Pharmaindustrie unser Gesundheitswesen korrumpiert (2014).
7 https://www.brandeins.de/magazine/brand-eins-thema/agenturen-2015-hoer-zu/nie-wieder-zweite-liga
8 Zeit Online, 6.5.2010: „Fast echt betroffen. Medizinkonzerne benutzen für getarnte Lobbyaktionen leidende Patienten, um ihre Produkte geschickt zu vermarkten“
9 William Michael Schmidli: “The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina”, Cornell University Press 2013.
10 Focus Online: Es war auch mal anders: Die WM 1978 in Argentinien, vom 2.5.2012, https://www.focus.de/sport/fussball/justiz-es-war-auch-mal-anders-die-wm-1978-in-argentinien_aid_746093.html, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
11 The Guardian: „Anti-GM warrior Melchett joins P.R. firm that advised Monsanto“, 8.1.2002, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2002/jan/08/gm.activists, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
12 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burson_Cohn_%26_Wolfe
13 The Guardian: „Burson-Marsteller: PR firm at centre of Facebook row“, 12.5.2011, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/may/12/burson-masteller-pr-firm-facebook-row, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
14 prwatch.org: „How Indonesia Wins Friends and Influences U.S. Foreign Policy, prwatch.org, abgerufen am 17.07.2015, https://www.prwatch.org/news/2005/02/3250/how-indonesia-wins-friends-and-influences-us-foreign-policy, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
15 RTL: “Die schrecken vor nichts zurück” – Wie Lobbyisten in der EU mitmischen“, 3.1.2013.
16 BUND: „Burson Marsteller wäscht sich selber grün / Greenwash“, http://www.bund-rvso.de/burson-marsteller-waescht-sich-selber-gruen.html.
17 BUND: „Burson Marsteller – Klimawandel kein Problem?“, 2.8.2001, http://www.bund-rvso.de/klimawandel-werbemethoden-burson-marsteller.html
18 https://lobbypedia.de/wiki/Burson-Marsteller
19 https://www.fr.de/rhein-main/wikipedia-org28015/fra-beauftragt-umstrittene-pr-agentur-11342466.html
20 The Guardian: „Anti-GM warrior Melchett joins PR firm that advised Monsanto“, 8.1.2002, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2002/jan/08/gm.activists; Der Spiegel: „Saatgutkonzern Monsanto: Aggressivität in den Genen“, 31.5.2013, https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/saatgutkonzern-monsanto-kommentar-zum-abschied-von-europa-a-903162.html; Greenpeace Magazin: „Gehirnwäsche“, nach https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burson_Cohn_%26_Wolfe, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
21 Frankfurter Rundschau Online: “Ja zu FRA” beauftragt umstrittene PR-Agentur, 21.2.2012, https://www.fr.de/rhein-main/wikipedia-org28015/fra-beauftragt-umstrittene-pr-agentur-11342466.html.
22 https://lobbypedia.de/wiki/Burson-Marsteller
23 Burson-Marsteller Brussels lobbying for the bromine industry, Corporate Europe Observatory vom Januar 2005, http://archive.corporateeurope.org/lobbycracy/houseofmirrors.html, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
24 https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/dienstleister/clement-leonarduzzi-liste-mit-monsanto-kritikern-bringt-chef-der-pr-agentur-publicis-consultans-in-erklaerungsnot-/24334394.html?ticket=ST-838295-vqUvzgMDgiPymwNbmNse-ap2; https://meedia.de/2019/05/14/das-ist-medienmanipulation-djv-verlangt-von-bayer-aufarbeitung-in-sachen-journalisten-listen/
25 PRWatch: „Consultants Rush in to Help Russia“, 11.2.2009, https://www.prwatch.org/spin/2009/02/8208/consultants-rush-help-russia, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
26 https://lobbypedia.de/wiki/Hill%2BKnowlton_Strategies; Health and Morality – Tobacco’s Counter Campaign, UCSF Library, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=lthf0128, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
27 Karen S. Miller: The Voice of Business. Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations, 1999, S. 121 ff.
28 CNN: “Ad showing a black boy being fed like dog faces no action,” 11.7.2014, rev. 4.9.2015, https://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/11/world/africa/south-africa-feed-a-child/index.html, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
29 Sludge: “Who is making money from CBP in your state “, 27.6.2019,. https://readsludge.com/2019/06/27/who-is-making-money-from-cbp-in-your-state/, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.
30 Buzzfeed: “This Transcript Shows How Trump’s Border Camps Have Thrown A Top Advertising Firm Into Internal Crisis “, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lamvo/ogilvy-transcript-meeting-customs-border-seifert-immigration/, 21.7.2019, abgerufen am 12.5.2020.