Gaddafi's PR Firm Suffering From Retroactive Angst

Move over, Beyonce, Nellie, Mariah, Usher, etc., entertainers currently racked with guilt (supposedly) for having whored themselves to a moneybags Libyan. They'll have to make room for the PR firm expressing post facto regrets for sending learned academics to shmooze with the despot. (So far at least, the academics are offering no apology.) It was all part of a campaign designed to bolster Gaddafi's image in the West--which no doubt must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The PR firm now admits that during the course of the snow job, it may have crossed an ethical line or two (or twenty). From the Guardian:

Revelations about a campaign launched by a consultancy firm in Massachusetts to improve the public image of Muammar Gaddafi around the world have highlighted the ethical problems that arise when the distinction between lobbying and academia becomes blurred.

The Monitor Group, a 1,500-strong firm of consultants with 29 worldwide offices, apologised for mistakes it had made in the course of a PR campaign it ran on behalf of the Libyan leader between 2006 and 2008. The campaign, believed to be worth about $3m, focused on paying for top academic figures to travel to Tripoli for personal conversations with Gaddafi.

They included the Stanford University scholar Francis Fukuyama, Harvard's Joseph Nye and Robert Putnam, and Benjamin Barber, formerly of Rutgers University. Professor Philip Bobbitt of Columbia University in New York was approached by Monitor to visit Tripoli in July 2006, but the trip never came off. "I think the Libyans wanted somebody much more famous than I am," Bobbitt said. "I think Monitor proposed me and the Libyans replied, 'What about [New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman?' So that was the end of that."

As a result, Bobbitt never went to Tripoli and was paid nothing by Monitor. But he says he was willing to go on the principle that he would speak to practically any group that would engage with his ideas. "The big moral point is, I would usually talk to anybody. I talked to Communists before the fall of the Berlin Wall, to jihadists, anyone so long as they don't throw anything at me. The bottom line is, academics should never be discouraged from talking to anybody, however odious the regime."

What made the Monitor Group project ethically problematic was that individual academics were paid for their time and expenses with money directly from the Libyan government. It is not known how much money was given to each academic, but the $3m budget submitted to the Libyan regime by Monitor included $450,000 for a "visitor programme" that would cover "honoraria for visitors … travel cost of visits to Libya including special arrangements, debrief costs and follow-up costs"...

Perhaps we could save a lot of time if those who didn't accept a bribe/payoff/honorarium/award from the dictator stepped forwards and identified themselves. They appear to be far fewer in number than those who did allow themselves to be bought off. ;)