Berman 1 – Maddow 0

I took a few spare moments this morning to watch a YouTube video of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviewing a fellow named Rick Berman, president of Berman and Company, a Washington DC public affairs firm. I didn’t pick this video randomly. I’ve been meaning to watch it for some time now because I know someone who works for Berman and Company, and I occasionally have a chance to chat with her about her work.

By way of background, Berman and Company is paid to represent the interests of various industries and their related products: tobacco, high fructose corn syrup, and alcohol, to name a few. As such, they conduct marketing campaigns against such things as increases in the minimum wage, health care reform, and smoking bans. You get the idea. By all accounts, they’re very good at what they do.

In the interview, Rachel Maddow accuses Mr. Berman of using an additional and unethical tactic: forming non-profit organizations (e.g., Center for Consumer Freedom, Center for Union Facts, and the American Beverage Institute) as front groups from which to lobby the interests of well-heeled industry donors. Rachel’s point is that the anonymity involved in donating to non-profit agencies allows big business and other special interests to remain at arms length in their support of Berman and Company’s edgier, no-holds-barred public opinion campaigns. In addressing this accusation, Mr. Berman correctly points out that non-profit agencies representing “the left” have the same right to withhold donor identities. There was much more to the interview, but suffice it to say Mr. Berman emerged relatively unscathed.



While I might be aghast at the company Mr. Berman keeps (i.e., the tobacco, alcohol and food industries, among others), I’m wondering why those of us working to improve the public’s health don’t have a similar public affairs machine. Berman’s group produces TV, magazine and newspaper ads, writes op-ed pieces, creates websites, testifies at hearings across the nation, conducts client training, and otherwise takes an aggressive approach towards influencing public opinion in a variety of areas. Where is the public opinion campaign to ensure healthy food access in poor neighborhoods, to expand culturally accessible health care, or to ensure that kids get sufficient physical activity and healthy food while at school? I would argue that we cannot afford not to have such support, and until we do, the public is apt to listen to whoever has the megaphone.

As a footnote to the Maddow interview, I did my own bit of research and discovered that Mr. Berman has not only created several non-profit organizations, but he serves as the President of each agency, and also contracts a significant portion of agency revenue to his own for-profit firm for “management fees”. This practice would seem to allow industry donors both to remain anonymous and to take receive tax breaks for non-profit donations that eventually make their way to a for-profit company. It’s also interesting that there doesn’t appear to be a conflict of interest in Mr. Berman and his various non-profit boards of directors agreeing to contract large sums of money to Mr. Berman’s own agency. I’m not an attorney, but there’s something not right there.

- Doug Hirano, MPH, APCA Executive Director