Smear Campaigns: Not such a conspiracy after all.

It was only a couple days ago, many of you might have missed it, when the USA Today broke a story involving Facebook hiring a PR firm to smear Google. Two individuals, Jim Goldman, a former tech reporter for CNBC and John Mercurio, a former political reporter working for Burson-Marsteller (one of the biggest, most well known PR agencies in the world); were caught trying to feed or even co-author stories to a writer that gets his work published in places like the Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The Whistleblower’s email exchange can be found here: http://pastebin.com/zaeTeJe...

After being confronted with evidence by the USA Today, Facebook admitted to their role; claiming they were only trying to bring attention to the issue, as did Burson-Marsteller. Burson-Marsteller is saying that they have reviewed ethics policy among employees working at the firm. Both companies get negative PR, but really other than that our Justice Department doesn’t care – nothing is being done to stop this besides the PR embarrassment it showcases, which usually goes away after a week or so of not talking about it.

Terence Fane-Saunders, who worked for Burson-Marsteller in the 1980s and now runs his own PR firm, Chelgate explains: "In this grubby little attempt to seed negative stories without disclosing their source, they were denying the media (and that means the public, and that means you and me) the opportunity to assess the value of those stories," Saunders said. "If you don't know the source, you can't judge motive." http://www.ibtimes.com/arti...

TheDailyBeast talked to several PR people from Silicon Valley that say this practice happens the time in the PR business, but it’s unusual that Burson-Marsteller was so clumsy about doing so.

So if PR smear “whisper” campaigns happen all the time in the PR world, just how far removed is the tech media removed from the videogames media? Is it possible this could be happening to the stories we read on N4G every day? I pose this question to N4G users because we are exactly the people that see a broad range of articles across the media – and might find suspicious work when compared to legitimate.

It was 2 days ago when, Joe Wilcox of Betanews broke a story entitled: Don’t believe the hype: PS3 users aren’t switching to Xbox 360. http://www.betanews.com/joe... Joe called half a dozen Gamestops in America to check up on Edge’s claim actually finding no evidence that people were trading in PS3s at an unusual rate.

Edge’s News story was circulated to most major sites (there’s too many to count) like CNET News http://news.cnet.com/8301-1... SlashGear; TG Daily; The Loop; Venture Beat; Kataku; CVG and ZDNet; most of the time only citing the 200% increase mentioned by two different anonymous sources by edge, and in every instance not mentioning the statistics were from Europe in the title. In order to make a stronger story out of it every website citing Edge was skipping over the other source that Edge mentioned in England that hadn’t noticed any change.

While it’s hard to tell if PR could have been at work – the sketchy part is that only one of Edge’s cited sources would go on record. Also two of the sources cited a 200% figure – why use percentages unless you’re trying to hide the real figures? For all we know a ‘200% increase’ could be from 0 to 2. It also seems exactly like something one of the major Console manufacturers would do in a Press Release on sales figures to fit to their liking. The biggest strike against Edge’s article was the fact that another person actually investigating the claim was finding nothing of the sort, in fact, disproving Edge’s claim to some degree. Could Edge have been fed an article from an un-sourced email, like the facebook-google incident? It’s hard to say, but we really need to open our eyes on this sort of thing. Smear campaigns may be real and sadly, it seems they actually go unpunished when they’re uncovered.