After the southeastern provinces of Nigeria attempted secession as the Republic of Biafra, the Nigerian Civil War began. As Nigerian forces closed in on the rebel Biafrans, a blockade was established, leading to rampant hunger and starvation in the besieged areas. The Biafran government accused Nigeria of using genocide to win the war, and the Nigerian government responded by retaining the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to counter these claims, according to The Guardian.
Kurt Strumpf / AP Photo
In 1965, Ralph Nader wrote the book Unsafe at Any Speed, excoriating the American auto industry over studies that many of the cars they manufactured were unsafe. Large portions of the book are dedicated to GM, singling out their Chevrolet Corvair, which Nader claimed had been involved in accidents and spins. At the time, there were over 100 pending lawsuits against GM concerning the Corvair, and sales of the car fell from 220,000 in 1965 to just 14,800 in 1968, thanks in part to Nader’s campaign. According to Investor’s Business Daily, the automobile manufacturer hired Burson-Marsteller in 1970 to revamp their image. A subsequent 1972 safety commission report conducted by Texas A&M University concluded that the 1960-1963 models of the Corvair exercised the same level of control as their contemporaries in extreme situations.
Paul Sancya / AP Photo
When Ceaușescu assumed power in Romania in 1974, the country was, unlike many of the other Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War, actually on good terms with Europe and the United States. They encouraged an open-door policy with the West, and the Romanian dictator was a key component in bringing then-President Richard Nixon to China. Of course later, Ceaușescu’s relationship with the West—and with reality—deteriorated, and he and his wife were executed in 1989 following their reign at the head of a paranoid and delusional dictatorship. Burson-Marsteller worked diligently "to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu," according to The Guardian.
Keystone / Getty Images
During the Dirty War, a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, Jorge Rafael Videla’s military dictatorship targeted thousands of left-wing activists, with estimates of those killed or “disappeared” reaching the thousands. According to the book A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, Burson-Marsteller worked to soften the dictatorship's image. In 2003, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons estimated that 13,000 people “disappeared” during this time.
Eduardo Di Baia / AP Photo
When the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, experienced a partial meltdown, it became—and remains—the biggest nuclear disaster in U.S. history. The company that designed the failed reactors, Babcock & Wilcox, retained Burson-Marsteller to handle the PR fallout, according to The Street.
Barry Thumma / AP Photo
Burson-Marsteller’s handling of the 1982 Tylenol Crisis is the incident that put BM on the map, and remains, according to CNN, the “gold standard” in crisis control. That year, seven Chicago-area residents died after swallowing Tylenol extra-strength capsules laced with cyanide. Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson hired Burson-Marsteller, according to The New York Times, and the company went on the PR offensive, immediately initiating a nationwide recall of all Tylenol capsules and scheduling a press conference broadcast in 35 markets nationwide that blamed the faulty products not on manufacturing, but rather product tampering on the shelves. Finally, in 1982, Johnson & Johnson became the first company to introduce tamper-proof, triple-sealed packaging, timed to the re-launch of their Tylenol capsules to the public.
AP Photo
It ranks as one of the world’s worst industrial catastrophes in history: A gas leak at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India, killed over 2,000 people and poisoned thousands more. The plant was co-owned by Union Carbide Corporation (now Dow Chemicals) and the Indian government. According to Slate, Burson-Marsteller worked for Union Carbide in the aftermath of the disaster.
Sondeep Shankar / AP Photo
Before last year’s BP oil spill, the largest oil spill in U.S. waters occurred in 1989, when the Exxon-Valdez struck a reef and spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Prince William Sound. In 1994, Theodore J. Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” sent a mailbomb to the offices of Burson-Marsteller, killing employee Thomas Mosser. It was later revealed by The Washington Post that the bomber targeted BM because he believed that the company was hired by Exxon to “clean up its public image” after the spill and was guilty of “manipulating people’s attitudes.” In reality, while Exxon was a past client, Burson-Marsteller had no involvement with the company related to the oil spill. Rather, they were asked by Exxon ex-post facto to critique the way the company handled the case, according to The Washington Post.
Department of Motor Vehicles / AP Photo
The Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which lasted from 1976 to 1999, was a brutal campaign that resulted in an estimated 102,800 conflict-related deaths, according to a report prepared for the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. One of the turning points that increased international solidarity for the independence of East Timor was the Dili Massacre—an incident in 1991 where at least 250 East Timorese pro-independence demonstrators were shot dead in Dili’s Santa Cruz cemetery. According to PR Watch, just following the massacre, the Indonesian government paid Burson-Marsteller $5 million to “to help improve the country's human rights and environmental image.”
Upali Aturugiri, AFP / Getty Images
In 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report that classified secondhand smoke as a Group A human carcinogen that poses serious health risks. To counter these claims, Philip Morris—a longtime client of Burson-Marsteller’s—hired the firm to organize a campaign to build reasonable doubt among consumers that the EPA’s findings were legitimate. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, BM hired a Washington D.C. media and political consultant, Richard Hines, to plant “a number of articles that have appeared in major news publications regarding EPA and ETS [environmental tobacco smoke]” that questioned the validity of the EPA report. Burson-Marsteller also established a smoker’s rights group, the National Smoker’s Alliance, to further their agenda. Of course, we now know that even brief exposure to secondhand smoke can damage your DNA in a way that leads to cancer.
Chris Kasson / AP Photo
In the early 1990s,
Egyptian terror attacks were on the rise, many of which targeted tourists and the country's Christian minority. In 1993 alone, over 1,000 people were killed or wounded from terrorist attacks in
Egypt. Concerned about their image, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism took action, launching a $1.3 million international PR campaign in 1993. Burson-Marsteller/Intermarkets and Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising were tasked with handling the publicity blitz, most of which was focused on western Europe and the United States, according to the March 22, 1993, issue of Advertising Age. “We acknowledge that there is a problem and we need to counteract the problem scientifically with people who know better than us how to handle it,'' Elhamy El Zayat, chairman of the tourism committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, told Advertising Age. The campaign included a 25-minute documentary infomercial, as well as TV advertisements in the West that hoped to bolster tourism, which was then the country’s largest producer of foreign currency revenues, bringing in $3.2 billion a year.
One of The Daily Beast’s Most Hated Companies, Monsanto is an agricultural biotech corporation that has been sued for everything from spilling 19,000 gallons of poisonous chemicals in a Missouri lake, to producing Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, according to The New York Times, the company retained Burson-Marsteller to help them brand genetically modified crops in the U.S., which, at the time, were seen by many to be harmful to the environment.
James A. Finley / AP Photo
Just eight days after the attacks of September 11, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia went into spin mode, contracting a handful of the top PR firms in the country. One of them was Burson-Marsteller, which was paid $2.5 million by the Saudis to purchase national newspaper ads across the U.S. expressing condolences for the al Qaeda terrorist attacks, according to the New York Post. Eight days after that, on September 27, it was revealed that 15 of the 19 airplane hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia.
Hasan Jamali / AP Photo
Now known as Xe Services LLC, Blackwater USA was founded by Erik Prince and Al Clark in 1997 as a private military and security contracting firm. The company proved particularly in demand during the Iraq War and in Afghanistan, where many Blackwater employees provided diplomatic security. When the Iraq War Logs were released by WikiLeaks in October 2010, they alleged that Blackwater employees committed numerous crimes, including killing several Iraqi civilians. One of the biggest controversies was an incident that occurred on September 17, 2007, in which Blackwater contractors allegedly shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, while working security detail for the U.S. State Department. When co-founder Prince was called to participate in congressional hearings for the incident, Blackwater hired none other than Burson-Marsteller to help with their testimony, according to Wired.
Scott Snow / AP Photo
After insurer American International Group (AIG) was hit by a liquidity crisis when its credit rating was downgraded, the company was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $85 billion. Then, the news broke that many of the company’s executives had shelled out money for lavish trips just prior to the bailout. In order to control the media frenzy, AIG hired Burson-Marsteller at $100,000 to $200,000 per month, according to The New York Post. The firm was hired to respond to various requests from employees, customers, and the media concerning the aforementioned liquidity crisis and subsequent bailout.
Shizuo Kambayashi / AP Photo
