Last month, news broke that public relations firm Edelman had created a fake blog for Wal-Mart, “Wal-Marting Across America.”
Ultimately, Edelman admitted that it had created other fake blogs, or “flogs,” created by Edelman for Wal-Mart, such as a purported advocacy group (“Working Families for Wal-Mart”) and the appropriately named – albeit not appropriately disclosed – “Paid Critics,” which was devoted to “exposing” links between unions battling Wal-Mart and stories in the news media.
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As the Pew Research Center foretells of a widening tech gap [see following story], two separate studies, one from LexisNexis and another by Universal McCann, together shed light on how the current divide affects the subject of news.
A study from the Pew Center, The Future of the Internet II, has found that greater reliance on the Internet and technology has led to growing concerns that governments and corporations will not embrace policies that maintain the freewheeling nature of the Internet.
While it’s often said that perception is greater than reality, public relations is a tool that can demonstrably affect both.
Case in point: In the third quarter of 2006, venture capitalists poured $381 million into Israeli start-ups, according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center, an independent analyst firm that monitors the country’s high-tech industry sector.