Isn't Fenton the left-wing PR outfit that championed the Sandinistas and the El Salvadorian FMLN? Did they actually put these insane words into Comrade Cindy's mouth? I doubt it because I don't think they'd want to shoot themselves in the foot, while Cindy might.
The camp at Crawford is full of Cindy Sheehan supporters, people from all walks of life, but off to the side are a small group of professionals skilled in politics and public relations who are marketing Cindy Sheehan's message.
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Sheehan's message hasn't changed since she got here, but the support staff interested in getting that message out to the world has grown considerably.
Organizers are set up in a house trailer. Their meetings closed to reporters.
Leading the group is Fenton Communications employee, Michele Mulkey, based in San Francisco. Fenton specializes in public relations for liberal non-profits.
Their bills are being paid for by True Majority, a non-profit set up by Ben Cohen -- of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream fame.
Ben Cohen, True Majority: "People are willing to listen to her and we want to do as much as we can to make her voice heard."
Cohen's group has teamed up with Berkeley based MoveOn.org, an anti-Bush group co-founded by Joan Blades.
Earlier this month, MoveOn helped organize anti-war vigils in support of Cindy Sheehan.
Current Democratic National Party Chair Howard Dean's organization Democracy for America is also involved, as is the more radical anti-war group Code Pink organized by San Francisco's Medea Benjamin.
Money donated through these groups and others is helping to pay for Gold Star families whose children have been killed in Iraq to attend anti-Bush protests.
This week Simi Valley California Gold Star wife Melanie House flew to Idaho for a protest and then flew to Crawford.
ABC7's Mark Matthews: "Can you tell us if you're getting help in airfare to come down here?"
Melanie House: "What difference does that make?"
There is real reluctance to talk about who's paying, and the P.R. machine that's promoting Cindy Sheehan, but not everyone here is completely comfortable with it.
http://tinyurl.com/bsuhw
this is an Internet-fueled things, as well. Moveon.org got going. Cindy Sheehan formed her own — created her own Web site. And they got a lot of interest from there.
It really was, actually, kind of a grassroots thing that a number of groups, like MoveOn, like Code Pink, and others, managed to get people. And of course, now, they’ve never...
HUME: And who hired Fenton Communications (search), this P.R. firm...
(CROSSTALK)
YORK: Fenton Communications was paid for by a group called True Majority.
HUME: Who are they?
YORK: Well, it’s a group founded by Ben Cohen (search), the Ben of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.
HUME: A noted liberal activist, but nonviolent...
YORK: Oh, absolutely, who has contributed a lot of money. And Fenton Communications has represented MoveOn and Soros, and the whole sort of complex of groups on the left.
The Man from Alar presents: The Cindy Sheehan Show
David Fenton is a very successful and dangerous man. The founder and CEO of Fenton Communications has had a storied rise as a capitalist, founding and leading the largest, most powerful and most successful public relations firm in the world catering to Leftist organizations. A decade ago, he said he was a Democrat, but he came up in far left and Marxist circles, including the Liberation News Service, the Sandanistas, and the Christic Institute. He should be a household name from the fraud he publicized in the Alar scandal of 1989. Here is an excerpt from an invaluable article by John Gizzi of the Capital Research Center, which is an absolute must read:
http://tinyurl.com/dp8v9
Well, it wasn’t a lie that cost Fenton any money. Rather the opposite. As the Gizzi piece explains: “About his Alar scare campaign, Fenton boasted, ‘A modest investment repaid itself many-fold in tremendous media exposure and substantial, immediate revenue’.”
In recent days, Fenton has been the PR firm of choice in several anti-Bush campaigns, including Peaceful Tomorrows, MoveOn.org, and others. The Peaceful Tomorrows campaign is particularly notable bacause it features the same grief-mongering-against-Bush as does The Cindy Sheehan Show. We note in passing a couple of significant points, via a WSJ Opinion Journal article on Peaceful Tomorrows: (1) the same ethical standards evidenced in the Alar scandal seem to be in place in Peaceful Tomorrows’ benefactors calling themselves 501 (c)3 organizations; and (2) from the way personnel move around, the institutional Democratic Party, the Leftist groups and Fenton all seem as snug as a bug in a rug:
Peaceful Tomorrows isn’t so stalwart about other rules. The Tides Center is a 501(c)3, a tax-exempt non-profit, and therefore correctly explains on its Web site that its projects “may not engage in direct support or opposition of a candidate for political office.” We can only assume the Tides Center has been too busy counting its Heinz money to sever ties with Peaceful Tomorrows after its Bush opposition.
As for all the media attention, Peaceful Tomorrows has retained the well-known Fenton Communications, a public relations shop that for years has catered to left-wing advocacy groups. The most recent and famous is MoveOn.org, the outfit that had to disavow an ad on its site comparing President Bush to Hitler. A woman at Fenton who works on MoveOn.org’s project, Jessica Smith, also works on Peaceful Tomorrow’s campaign. Ms. Smith used to work for the Democratic National Committee and for Al Gore’s presidential campaign. We are a long way from the land of political innocents.
The timing and financial backing of the Sheehan spectacle are no accident in our view. Within a few days of Sheehan’s arrival in Crawford, Ben Cohen’s anti-war group had hired Fenton Communications, which had “worked intermittently with Sheehan over the past year,” (WaPo), and she was already making TV commercials. As Howard Kurtz notes, The Cindy Sheehan Show was specifically targeted at MSM reporters who had to say something every day from Crawford, Texas in August. The Cindy Sheehan saga was “dropped in their lap” and “turned into a running story” (at page 36); the PR campaign was brilliantly and effectively designed by Fenton to fill the reporters’ needs to file a daily story. It contained conflict, pathos, and perhaps most importantly, fit the biases of the reporters themselves.
Maybe we will be accused of being too cynical, but, after reviewing the business and political cunning and success of Fenton Communications, we have come to believe that if Cindy Sheehan did not exist, some other “Cindy Sheehan” would have been invented.