For controversial companies, the tactic of the moment is clear: attack! Attack! Attack your opponents, and smear them! The latest PR firm to offer this advice is Edelman, which advised an oil company client to attack the vicious, uh... community groups that oppose their plans.

The Answers Are Staring You Right in the Face: Richard Edelman, CEO of the World's Largest PR Firm, is in Denial About His Climate Change Denial | Europe is Descending Into WWII-Level Antisemitism | Study: Bribery Works | The NSA's MonsterMind Doesn't Need Humans to Start a Cyber War | "They're Watching" | Look:

When a popular public figure like Robin Williams takes his own life, the public needs a chance to grieve. The best way to do that: by listening intently to our international PR firm tell us how to leverage these suicides to build our #brand.

Here is just the latest example of how a large PR agency can be a huge, huge, huge, hustle, staffed by hustlers, who will charge you too much money to do dumb, simple things, on the internet. Edelman!

Massive enemy PR firm Edelman is moving its office from Times Square to Hudson Square. Employees received (and leaked!) a motivational brochure that has a decidedly...propagandist design style. Compare:

Nina Devlin was a partner with fancy financial PR firm Brunswick Group—which was great for her husband, who took information about the deals that Nina was working on and used it to help his friends make millions through illegal insider trading. Now Nina has a new job. With Edelman!

Drew Kerr, the carrot-spewing former Radar flack, has seen his firm Four Corners Communications shrink to essentially a one-man shop in the past year. But the savvy Kerr, who specializes "in online and offline media" (that covers it all!), knows how to get good PR for himself in these lean times: by crushing PR…

All those rumors about Madonna and Guy Ritchie possibly getting a divorce? Not to worry: Madonna's flack, Liz Rosenberg, says publicly that "There are no divorce plans." But wait—is that the same Liz Rosenberg who assured everyone in 2006 that Madonna was not adopting a baby in Malawi? Yes it is! That would be a…

Back in 2005, two activist groups—Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch—launched campaigns to kick Wal-Mart's ass in the media. Which they did quite successfully for a while. The soulless retailer spent untold millions on a huge, political-style PR campaign from our friends at Edelman to fight back against the…

Beauty product purveyor Dove has finally responded to allegations, first reported in a New Yorker story, that the company retouched photos of the "Real" women in its "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads. Which would make them big hypocrites. But according to a statement from Dove this morning (via its PR agency, Edelman),…

Wow! As a nerd on the PR and marketing beat I find this to be absolutely astounding and heartening: the UK is about to make it a crime for companies to misrepresent themselves as consumers in their online marketing. That means, for example, that a company setting up a fake blog to hype its own products could be…

Richard Edelman, the touchy CEO of the massive Wal-Mart supporting PR firm Edelman, is going above and beyond for his client AdMeTech, a prostate cancer foundation. He's inviting a select group of "key opinion leaders"/ perfect strangers to his own apartment for dinner, where he will discuss his own experience with…

Steve Rubel, Edelman PR's Director of Insights, posts an insightful chart from an international survey (PDF) Edelman conducted. It shows that "opinion elites," defined as college-educated people in the top income quartile of their country who report a significant interest in and engagement with the media, business…

Edelman, the massive Wal-Mart-touting PR firm with the blog-watching CEO, has hired Katie Levinson, who is fresh off her gig as the communications director for the wildly successful Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign. She's also worked in PR roles for the Republican National Committee, the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign,…

So many PR tactics are shrouded in secrecy: off-the-record briefings, front groups, "file sharing." And lots of things that PR firms get paid a lot of money to do—devise corny slogans, make pretty marketing materials that get ignored, or think up new and creative ways to say "no comment"—are really big wastes of…

Richard— We appreciate your own personal commitment to talking about ethics in PR. I would even go so far as to say that you believe what you say, and say it in good faith, most of the time. But we're not gonna be taking down the post about your (alleged!) media training lying incident. And here's why: