(Back after another inadvertent blogging break...summertime and the living is easy - plus I've been playing as a day trader in the stock market. More on that later.)
CNET's Declan McCullagh has this illuminating investigative article about a "secret" DC lobbying organization called the Law and Media Group (LMG), which, among other things, has been active in placing op-eds in various publications on behalf of its clients, most notably Comcast and Microsoft.
It's not illuminating that either company would hire a "public affairs" firm to help it sway opinion with ghost-written editorials placed by seemingly non-affiliated individuals (a pro-Comcast editorial published in the Harvard Crimson and ostensibly written by a Boston area community organizer was probably penned by an LMG staffer) or form a phony coalition (the Corn Growers Association suddenly opposed a Yahoo-Google ad pact).
What's interesting is how successful LMG was (and surely won't be now) in keeping its fingerprints off of clients' work. Declan notes that "even by Washington standards, the LawMedia Group is highly secretive" and that has been the key to its success, I suspect.
Even more interesting is how dogged McCullagh has been in uncovering LMG's efforts. He, like me and I suspect many other writers and bloggers, probably received dozens of emails, phone calls and friendly political pitches from LMG over the past few years. This is nothing new in the political game -- I can name a half dozen firms that have done the same thing on behalf of (mostly corporate) clients.
The Corn Growers alliance with Microsoft seemed to have pushed him over the edge. Back in June Declan wrote a post that traced an anti-Google Corn Growers Association letter back to LMG through metadata contained in a PDF sent to reporters, which raises the most interesting aspect of the article: a sophisticated lobbying firm hoping to leave no traces of its behind-the-scenes manuever left a giant digital thumbprint on an article mailed to the press.
As any first-year litigator now knows, if you don't scrub a electronic document of its metadata, you risk handing an adversary a boatload of potentially damaging information, including who wrote it, when they wrote it, on what machine they wrote it and much more. It's ironic that a deft political organization working on behalf of high-tech clients got tripped up by something so technologically simple.
Aside from this digital discovery object lesson for everybody involved in politics, McCullagh's piece is a fascinating, albeit unsurprising, examination of the stealth employed when companies try to shape public opinion about political matters.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:30 AM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
