Hey dictators. Got a national reputation problem on your hands? You could invest in some good public relations, couldn’t you? Specifically, give Racepoint PR a call – they’re the agency that did such a good job of brushing up Colonel Gadhafi’s image and, more recently, shifting attention away from Rwanda’s genocide problem.

You see, for just $50 000 a month, Racepoint could give you a fighting chance of “drowning out” the complaints of the opposition to your regime.

Remember back in 2009,  when Rwanda’s authoritarian regime and its human-rights record were seriously under fire? Accusations were flying thick and fast – rumours of the government’s media censorship, and the way it was suppressing freedom, shutting down newspapers and just generally creating a “climate of fear” were downright awful for Rwanda’s image. Given what was presumably the restricted environment for traditional media, the web was the stage where the opposition was shouting loudest.

What did Rwanda’s leaders do? They appointed Racepoint Group to create two pro-Rwanda websites and fill the internet to the seams with positive stories about the country, all as part of the strategy to create a new national image.

The campaign’s principle aim was to counter the efforts of human rights groups seeking to “advance a story of an unstable Rwanda as a means of continuing to attract donors and wield influence in the region”. Okay.

Larry Weber, chairman of Racepoint’s holding company, W2 Group Inc., gets pretty annoyed when people say it is morally questionable for him to be promoting Rwanda’s rulers. “The campaign was to do nothing but to help them learn how to communicate more aggressively in a world that likes to throw a lot of stones.”

In 2007, Racepoint took on a contract to promote Colonel Gadhafi, and embarked on a campaign which presented the Libyan as a “democrat, a reformer, an intellectual and philosopher” in an effort to smooth relations between Libya and the West. Larry admits that the Colonel turned out to be “not a good man” in the end. Guess that’s the risk of dealing with these big personalities in the PR game, hey?

[Source: Globe and Mail]