David Fenton is a very successful and dangerous man. The founder and CEO of Fenton Communications has had a storied rise as a capitalist, founding and leading the largest, most powerful and most successful public relations firm in the world catering to Leftist organizations. A decade ago, he said he was a Democrat, but he came up in far left and Marxist circles, including the Liberation News Service, the Sandanistas, and the Christic Institute. He should be a household name from the fraud he publicized in the Alar scandal of 1989. Here is an excerpt from an invaluable article by John Gizzi of the Capital Research Center, which is an absolute must read:

Well, it wasn’t a lie that cost Fenton any money. Rather the opposite. As the Gizzi piece explains: “About his Alar scare campaign, Fenton boasted, ‘A modest investment repaid itself many-fold in tremendous media exposure and substantial, immediate revenue’.”

In recent days, Fenton has been the PR firm of choice in several anti-Bush campaigns, including Peaceful Tomorrows, MoveOn.org, and others. The Peaceful Tomorrows campaign is particularly notable bacause it features the same grief-mongering-against-Bush as does The Cindy Sheehan Show. We note in passing a couple of significant points, via a WSJ Opinion Journal article on Peaceful Tomorrows: (1) the same ethical standards evidenced in the Alar scandal seem to be in place in Peaceful Tomorrows’ benefactors calling themselves 501 (c)3 organizations; and (2) from the way personnel move around, the institutional Democratic Party, the Leftist groups and Fenton all seem as snug as a bug in a rug:

Peaceful Tomorrows isn’t so stalwart about other rules. The Tides Center is a 501(c)3, a tax-exempt non-profit, and therefore correctly explains on its Web site that its projects “may not engage in direct support or opposition of a candidate for political office.” We can only assume the Tides Center has been too busy counting its Heinz money to sever ties with Peaceful Tomorrows after its Bush opposition.

As for all the media attention, Peaceful Tomorrows has retained the well-known Fenton Communications, a public relations shop that for years has catered to left-wing advocacy groups. The most recent and famous is MoveOn.org, the outfit that had to disavow an ad on its site comparing President Bush to Hitler. A woman at Fenton who works on MoveOn.org’s project, Jessica Smith, also works on Peaceful Tomorrow’s campaign. Ms. Smith used to work for the Democratic National Committee and for Al Gore’s presidential campaign. We are a long way from the land of political innocents.

The timing and financial backing of the Sheehan spectacle are no accident in our view. Within a few days of Sheehan’s arrival in Crawford, Ben Cohen’s anti-war group had hired Fenton Communications, which had “worked intermittently with Sheehan over the past year,” (WaPo), and she was already making TV commercials. As Howard Kurtz notes, The Cindy Sheehan Show was specifically targeted at MSM reporters who had to say something every day from Crawford, Texas in August. The Cindy Sheehan saga was “dropped in their lap” and “turned into a running story” (at page 36); the PR campaign was brilliantly and effectively designed by Fenton to fill the reporters’ needs to file a daily story. It contained conflict, pathos, and perhaps most importantly, fit the biases of the reporters themselves.

Maybe we will be accused of being too cynical, but, after reviewing the business and political cunning and success of Fenton Communications, we have come to believe that if Cindy Sheehan did not exist, some other “Cindy Sheehan” would have been invented.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 3:48 pm and is filed under business, Democrats, General, Left of Left, MSM, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.