Columnist Robert B. Reich reports General Motors tried to pay him to praise the company in an editorial. “A few weeks ago a public-relations firm working for General Motors phoned to ask if I’d say on the media that the buy-back GM was offering its employees was a good deal for them,” wrote Reich. “GM’s public-relations firm said they’d offer me money if I did this, as a show of respect.” Reich said he declined the offer, and said he’d look at the discounts objectively.
“The White House goes around paying columnists like Armstrong Williams for favorable coverage. That’s bad enough,” Reich wrote in an article. “But if we’ve got to the point in this country when big corporations feel free to offer what are essentially bribes to columnists and commentators, we’re really in trouble. We no longer have a free press, we no longer have experts you can trust, and the opinions you read or hear every day are worth absolutely zilch.”
The Leftlane Perspective: We’re certainly not anti-GM here at LLN. In fact, we’re very excited the Zeta and Kappa platform vehicles in particular. That said, we think GM needs to reconsider this type of promotional strategy going forward. Now, it may not be fair to directly attribute these tactics to GM. It could be the automaker’s PR firm that made a unilateral decision to pay off columnist for praise. Either way, we think all automakers need to stop promoting themselves this way, because the Internet has made such efforts much harder to hide, and getting caught will only further tarnish your image.
