http://www.nytimes.com/
July 18, 2005
The New York Times (page A16)
Public Relations Campaign for Research
Office at E.P.A. Includes Ghostwriting Articles
By FELICITY BARRINGER
WASHINGTON, July 17 - The Office of Research and Development
at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public
relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years,
to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the
office's image and ghostwrite articles "for publication in
scholarly journals and magazines."
The strategy, laid out in a May 26 exploratory proposal notice
and further defined in two recently awarded public relations contracts
totaling $150,000, includes writing and
placing "good stories" about the E.P.A.'s research office
in consumer and trade publications.
The contracts were awarded just months after the Bush administration
came under scrutiny for its public relations policies. In some
cases payments were made to columnists, including Armstrong Williams,
who promoted the federal education law known as No Child Left
Behind and received an undisclosed $240,000. In January, President
Bush publicly abandoned this practice.
The governmentwide public relations strategies, however, continue
to include the preparation of TV-ready news reports on government
policies.
An E.P.A. spokeswoman said over the weekend that the effort to
raise the profile of the agency's research had a worthwhile goal:
calling attention to the work of 1,900 scientists and staff members.
Noting that the office's annual budget is $600 million, the spokeswoman,
Eryn Witcher, said, "We would like to use less than 1 percent
of that to make information accessible to the public."
Three similar contracts - one of which was abandoned, the agency
said - and the broader $5 million proposal were provided to The
New York Times by the environmental group Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility. Its director, Jeff Ruch, said he
had received them from an agency employee who believed that research
money was being inappropriately diverted to a public relations
campaign.
"The idea that they would take limited science dollars and
spend them on P.R. is not only ill advised, it's just plain stupid,"
Mr. Ruch said in an interview.
Ms. Witcher responded: "It's not spending money on communications
at the expense of research but rather in support of it. This allows
the results of E.P.A. research to be shared with the general public."
While the scope of the exploratory proposal is new, Ms. Witcher
said, the two smaller contracts "are standard. It's standard
to get more help with skills that folks don't have. It's very
common throughout the entire federal government."
One of the smaller contracts asks the contractor to "develop
feature article research and strategy" and to "write
the strategy to support a new unit that will be identifying feature
story ideas, creating slant, identifying consumer magazines to
target and polishing the final article."
That contract, for feature articles, was
awarded to JDG Communications of Falls Church, Va., for $65,692.62,
Ms. Witcher said.
The second smaller contract was also awarded
to JDG Communications, for $85,829.06.
It calls on the contractor to develop two "perception specific
indicators" that "must show whether public relations
efforts to create awareness and improve the reputation of E.P.A.'s
research and development, its labs and its top-quality scientists
has favorably influenced public perception."
The more extensive and expensive plan seeks help from public
relations agencies to, among other things, "provide research,
writing and editing of Office of Research and Development articles
for publications in scholarly journals and magazines."
Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science magazine and a former head
of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a telephone interview
on Saturday that he found the idea of public relations firms ghostwriting
for government scientists "appalling."
"If we knew that it had been written by someone who was
not a scientist and submitted as though it were the work of a
scientist, we wouldn't take it," Mr. Kennedy said. "But
it's conceivable that we wouldn't know, if it was carefully constructed."
He added that the practice of putting public relations polish
on scientific work has already been practiced by industry. "We
had seen it coming in the pharmaceutical industry and were sort
of wary about it," he said. "The
idea that a government agency would feel the necessity to do this
is doubly troubling."
Speaking of ghostwriting, Mr. Kennedy said: "If the ghostwriting
is the kind of ghostwriting that most of the good mentors I knew
did with Ph.D. students on first paper, it could be a good thing.
But I sincerely doubt if any for-profit P.R. firm hired in the
interest of improving a scientific publication is going to be
the right person to do that."
The contract for assessing the office's image states that the
public relations research data "will also be used to show
E.P.A.'s relative position with its competitors." The contract's
list of competitors included the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, private industry and academia.
Mr. Ruch, of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility,
suggested that the notion of a government science agency having
competitors might reflect an increasing push across the government
to solicit outside support, often from industry, for federal scientific
research.
But Ms. Witcher of the environmental agency rejected that hypothesis,
saying that the other federal agencies mentioned in that contract
were not thought of as competitors. "They are looking at
other federal agencies that also do science and research to see
how they are communicating to the public," she said.
As for the issue of ghostwriting for journals, she said: "Nothing's
been done. Nothing's been awarded. What they envisioned is looking
at this very technical" material presented by scientists
and making it accessible to laymen. The ghostwriters, should they
ever be hired, she said, "can't make up the material. They
are taking scientists' work and making it more understandable."
