Under authoritarian rule, there exists a country that repeatedly commits large-scale human rights violations domestically, intervenes militarily in the Yemen conflict abroad, and supports assassinations and terrorism, among other things. It is Saudi Arabia. Today, because of a series of conflicts, Yemen is facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The Saudi government also drew global attention for killing journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018.

Even so, Saudi Arabia maintains close and friendly relations with the governments and major corporations of the United States, Japan, and European countries. If the media in these countries repeatedly reported Saudi Arabia’s actions on a large scale, public opposition would likely grow and maintaining those good relations could become difficult; what helps prevent such a situation is the presence of public relations (PR) consulting firms. The Saudi government, which killed Khashoggi, continues to hire numerous PR consulting firms to rehabilitate its image in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere.

Even while suspected of involvement in a journalist’s killing, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman flamboyantly touts tourism in Saudi Arabia (Photo: World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)/Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0])

What exactly are these PR consulting firms? What roles do they play for countries like Saudi Arabia? Let’s take a closer look.

What are PR consulting firms?

PR consulting firms, through various outsourced PR services, work to raise a client’s profile or change and restore images that are already widespread. Depending on the brief, they may also engage in activities that damage the image of a client’s rivals. Their targets include the media, corporations, governments, individuals, and more. When the client belongs to an organization, that organization itself can be the target. While they can be used in many ways, most clients are companies, and firms in the tobacco industry and oil companies are particularly well known for hiring them frequently.

Governments are also frequently clients. Like companies, governments value reputation, image, and branding, and want to present a “good face” to the world. Especially as entities where power and wealth are concentrated, it is no exaggeration to say that scandals, inconvenient facts, and illegal acts—events and phenomena that damage their global reputation—are problems that constantly shadow them. Thus, when there is an image they want to dispel, or one they want to establish instead, they may turn to PR consulting firms. This article focuses on national PR strategies using the media, which are particularly important among the various PR services.

Joint press conference by U.S. and Saudi Arabian militaries (Photo: Roderick L. Jacquote [Public Domain])

Media strategy

So, specifically, what do PR consulting firms that execute a state’s PR strategy do vis-à-vis the media? First, before reaching out directly to media professionals, they research and monitor how the client government, its policies, and the country itself are being covered. Based on that, they tweak the content and methods of the government’s messaging to the media. For example, they advise on how to deal with foreign media, draft press releases, and run social media accounts such as Twitter. They may also produce press materials, or footage that can be used in television news as is, to spread the client government’s positions and perspectives, and distribute them to media outlets free of charge.

After that, they serve to connect the client government with media professionals. For example, they plan and stage press conferences and international conferences by government officials, both domestically and abroad, or parties that bring together people from news organizations. They may also organize individual or group tours for journalists from overseas. They design itineraries that highlight the aspects the state wants to show off, and arrange opportunities for interviews with government officials (in some cases at the head-of-state level). It is generally the government that bears the costs through the PR firm. As a long-term strategy, they may even plan tours for university students studying journalism. In this way, the on-the-ground information environment is controlled to a certain degree, creating more “natural” opportunities for reporting that contains the messages the government wants to send.

From left: representatives of Brown Lloyd James (a PR consulting firm), the Financial Times, and Japan’s Permanent Mission to the UN. At the Financial Times party (Photo: Financial Times/Flickr [CC BY 2.0])

Furthermore, PR consulting firms do not only engage the target media indirectly; they also sometimes intervene more deeply and work directly on the media. For example, they approach individual journalists who are likely to be sympathetic to the client country’s position, provide information, and explain the client’s stance. In some cases they supply parts of the copy, or co-author articles with the journalists. In other cases they have former government officials, celebrities, or scholars deemed to be supportive of the client country write op-eds, and use cooperative relationships with newspapers to get them placed. In extreme cases, there are reports of them fabricating and spreading baseless “news,” or paying bribes to reporters and editors to get articles placed in newspapers.

However, PR consulting firms do not only create “cooperative” relationships between client governments and foreign journalists. They also run negative campaigns against journalists critical of the government. These often involve personal attacks to damage the journalist’s reputation, using a variety of methods such as campaigns on social media or creating blogs and websites made to look like “news.”

People in the news business do not necessarily trust PR consulting firms, but if responding to their outreach increases the chances of interviewing officials of the client government—or even the country’s top leader—that can be a major benefit for the media, making the relationship win–win. And for journalists working against the clock, it is hard to deny the appeal of being handed information or copy they can use as is. PR consulting firms sometimes set up organizations masquerading as “citizens’ movements” or “NGOs” to conceal the source of information; routing information through them lends it an appearance of objectivity and credibility and makes it easier for journalists to use.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, who has frequently used PR consulting firms and invested heavily in image strategy (Photo: World Economic Forum/Flickr [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0])

Efforts to improve their own image

Let us look at several examples of governments that have hired PR consulting firms to try to restore or improve their reputation. Among the many countries that use them, the most frequent clients are authoritarian states that repeatedly commit human rights violations.

For example, the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, long at odds with major powers led by the West, sought to escape isolation and economic sanctions by declaring in 2003 that it would no longer engage in terrorism and the like, attempting to return to the so-called “international community.” The U.S. PR consulting firm Monitor Group, hired by the regime, organized visits to Libya by prominent scholars and journalists to highlight this “return.” Unfettered reporting was not possible, but the regime’s image improved.

In the chain of revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East known as the “Arab Spring,” the Gaddafi regime fell in 2011, and at the same time the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was shaken. Amid escalating protests and repression, a public relations strategy by Brown Lloyd James (Brown Lloyd James), retained by the Assad regime, bore fruit: the fashion magazine Vogue ran an article praising the first lady of Syria under the title “A Rose in the Desert,” with no mention of the clashes. However, as the regime’s severe repression led to an armed conflict, the piece backfired and was promptly removed from Vogue’s website.

“A Rose in the Desert.” The now-vanished Vogue article on the Syrian first lady

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, who rules with a heavy hand, has also deployed a meticulous PR strategy over many years with the help of PR consulting firms. Because Rwanda has historically been associated with the keyword and image of “genocide,” they sought to dispel that by shifting media attention to the country’s economic growth and its developing tourism and IT sectors. Thanks largely to activities led by Racepoint, by 2010 Rwanda’s media coverage on tourism, the economy, and democracy had increased by 55 percent, while reporting on the genocide decreased by 11 percent.

In addition, countries notorious for their human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, Egypt, and Nigeria, pour vast sums into PR consulting firms to “launder” their image globally. Even in established democracies, governments sometimes hire PR firms for specific issues. For example, in 1997 the Swiss government retained a PR firm in response to harsh criticism of Switzerland’s role during World War II. The Japanese government is also said to have used a New Zealand PR firm to disseminate its position on whaling.

Seeking to tarnish other countries’ images

On the other hand, governments also use PR consulting firms to damage the reputations of other countries. A well-known example is the work of Hill and Knowlton hired by Kuwait prior to the Gulf War. After Iraq’s 1990 invasion, the Kuwaiti regime became a government-in-exile and strongly sought U.S. military intervention to expel Iraq. To turn around U.S. public opinion, where support for intervention was thin, the PR firm executed a broad media strategy. As part of it, to inflame anti-Iraq sentiment, they fabricated the “incident” that Iraqi soldiers had removed many infants from incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die. It later emerged that this was baseless and that the woman who gave the testimony was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, but it is said to have had more than enough impact to sway American public opinion.

Qatar weathering the Gulf states’ blockade with natural gas and oil revenues (Photo: Max Pixel [Public Domain])

Elsewhere in the Middle East, during the Qatar diplomatic crisis that began in 2017, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which sought together with Saudi Arabia and others to isolate Qatar, hired the UK-based firm Quiller to lobby journalists to place Qatar-critical articles in British newspapers. In 2015, Japan’s embassy in the UK is also said to have engaged the think tank the Henry Jackson Society to encourage criticism of China in the British media and elsewhere.

Moreover, it is not only other countries whose reputations get targeted; other organizations are attacked as well. For example, the “Syria Campaign,” behind which several PR firms stand, has run negative campaigns against the United Nations since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict. After the United States invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, it later commissioned a PR firm to fabricate and disseminate propaganda videos that looked as if they had been made by al-Qaeda.

Any improvement?

Using PR firms to brand a country and communicate a government’s posture and positions is not necessarily negative. But it is necessary to expose the reality that they are being used to conceal large-scale human rights abuses and conduct in armed conflicts, or to run negative campaigns against other countries. Above all, it is a serious problem that the media—on which people rely to obtain information about the world—are being influenced by such PR strategies.

In recent years, PR firms that take on dubious contracts have increasingly become targets of criticism. For example, Monitor Group, whose reputation suffered in part because of its work in Libya, was driven into bankruptcy. Bell Pottinger, a major firm that had laundered the images of numerous authoritarian states, also collapsed after its negative campaign in South Africa was exposed. In 2019, the Hong Kong government sought to restore its image, which had been damaged by months of protests and government repression, by approaching eight PR firms; out of concern for their own reputations, all eight declined.

Bell Pottinger’s collapse was tied to its involvement in the political scandal involving former South African President Jacob Zuma and the billionaire Gupta family (Photo: Discott/Wikimedia [CC BY-SA 4.0])

Even so, the PR consulting industry remains highly popular. In both the UK and the US, the number of people working in PR exceeds the number of journalists. In the United States the gap is widening; the PR workforce is now 4.6 times the size of the journalism workforce. Pay is higher in PR, and many people switch over from the media industry.

Going forward, how far will the media be able to keep the influence of PR firms in check? As globalization advances, the media must reaffirm their role in the world, provide highly credible information, and fulfill their watchdog function.

Writer: Virgil Hawkins

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