How the World’s Biggest PR Firm Helps Legitimize Repressive Regimes
How the World’s Biggest PR Firm Helps Legitimize Repressive Regimes
Edelman’s trust barometer claims that authoritarian governments are among the most trusted in the world—a finding those regimes are happy to endorse.
On Friday, The Guardian published my latest story: “Revealed: how top PR firm uses ‘trust barometer’ to promote world’s autocrats.”
The article shows how Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, portrays authoritarian regimes as some of the most trusted governments in the world—while at the same time being paid millions of dollars by some of those same regimes to burnish their reputations in the United States and around the world.
Edelman’s “trust barometer” is the company’s flagship publication. It claims to measure whether people across more than two dozen countries trust governments, businesses, the media, and other institutions.1
One February morning earlier this year, Edelman CEO Richard Edelman arrived at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC think tank, to discuss the results of the latest trust barometer.2
As the event neared its end, Edelman took a question from the audience. The trust barometer included a chart showing that authoritarian states—including China, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia—were not as politically polarized as many of the world’s democracies. For years, moreover, Edelman had reported that citizens of these authoritarian countries tended to trust their governments far more than people living in democracies did. Why did the CEO think that was?
“There’s one hypothesis: that the difference in information issued by government and by media in those countries is very small, whereas here, you know, media is doing its job. It’s saying, ‘What they say on Capitol Hill is not true,’” Edelman replied. “There’s much higher trust in those countries that are single party than there is in democracies, maybe because there’s one line.”
Edelman continued: “I’m not a fan of authoritarian government. I’m a kid who grew up in democracies. But the system works in terms of trust, and that’s all I can tell you.”
What the CEO declined to tell the audience, however, and what his company’s annual trust surveys rarely disclose, is that some of the “single party” autocracies featured in the trust barometer have also been his firm’s clients. Pushing this “one line” on its clients’ behalf has proven to be a lucrative source of business for Edelman. Moreover, as the story explains,
polling experts have found that public opinion surveys tend to overstate the favorability of authoritarian regimes because many respondents fear government reprisal. That hasn’t stopped these same governments from exploiting Edelman’s findings to burnish their reputations and legitimize their holds on power.
Edelman’s trust barometer is “quoted everywhere as if this is some credible, objective research from a thinktank, whereas there is a fairly obvious commercial background, and it’s fairly obviously a sales tool,” said Alison Taylor, a professor at New York University’s business school. “At minimum, the firm should be disclosing these financial relationships as part of the study. But they’re not doing that.”
You can read the full story here: “Revealed: how top PR firm uses ‘trust barometer’ to promote world’s autocrats.”
Thanks to Dominic Rushe and the team at The Guardian for editing and publishing this story (and for creating the great illustration that I’ve borrowed for this newsletter).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/15/edelman-pr-firm-davos-trust
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/edelman-trust-barometer-2023