If you want to get all technical on us, this is more of an HR story than a PR story, but it has certainly changed our perception of the Social Security Administration, so we’ll let it rip anyway.

The SSA recently earned a bit of unwanted publicity by formally reprimanding a federal employee for…excessive flatulence.

That’s right: this airy, fortunately anonymous man earned the ire of his colleagues thanks to his chronic inability to avoid being…gassy in the workplace (you can see why we struggled to find an appropriate stock photo). The language his superiors used to knock the wind out of his sails is worth reading, and senior officials’ quick attempts to quash the story make for an amusing case study in PR damage control.

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In a very public attempt at damage control, the Australian radio station behind the prank call to Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton’s hospital has issued an apology, suspended the DJs involved, and now looks to take further steps to rescue its reputation.

While we hesitate to draw a line between the call and the subsequent suicide of the nurse/receptionist who answered it, the station has also agreed to donate all advertising profits from now until the end of the year to the woman’s family (according to a statement, the donation will amount to at least $500,000). While this offer is incredibly generous, we have to say that it all feels like “too little, too late.”

Now Australian PR man Lyall Mercer of Mercer PR weighs in, writing that both the station and the hospital should have been able to foresee the risks of their actions. First, he thinks that the hospital, knowing that any security breach would attract widespread attention, should have developed specific policies “to protect the world’s most famous people”.

We’re not quite sure we agree with that sentiment because the hospital is a public health facility, but we certainly do believe that producers at the station “should have read the future better”, because “even if the prank ‘succeeded’, there was still the real possibility of a nasty public backlash due to the fact that they called a hospital”.

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You’ve probably heard that Korean artist PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ recently became the most-watched YouTube video ever (we’re proud to say we still don’t get it). He may be a novelty act to Westerners, but he’s a big name now, and he’s scheduled to appear at a Washington, D.C. Christmas concert attended by the First Family next month.

As of today, though, he has some serious explaining to do.

American media outlets just caught on to a story, first noticed on a CNN site earlier this year and reported last week by South Korean magazine Haps, about PSY’s less appealing past: turns out he once (allegedly) covered a song with extremely inflammatory lyrics about killing American soldiers and their family members. This is a rough translation:

Kill those f–ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those f–ing Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully

We can’t claim to completely understand the context of what will inevitably become a huge story, but there’s little doubt that PSY was involved in protests against the US military in the early aughts.

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Seems like everyone in the UK media world had way too much fun in the 70’s, doesn’t it?

The latest chapter in Britain’s never-ending sex scandal, however, may the most ironic of the bunch. Owner of amazing eyebrows Max Clifford is a bigtime UK PR man who we’ve covered before (and who represented such clients as a certain obscure goat-herder named Simon Cowell). He made his name breaking trashy tabloid stories—and getting sued for them! Many of his “greatest hits” happened to involve sexual scandals, “toe sucking” and “hamster sandwiches”—classy stuff, that.

This week the esteemed Mr. Clifford found himself arrested for undisclosed sexual offenses dating back three decades as part of an ongoing “inquiry” by UK law enforcement.

That’s not the worst part of this story, though. Here’s a quote from an interview that the oh-so-wise Clifford granted a couple of weeks ago:

“I think there’s a lot of very famous people that are very concerned, very frightened. In the 60s and 70s, everything opened up. All kinds of things were going on. At the time, these were young guys, many of them were being pursued in dressing rooms and concert halls and everywhere they went by young girls. A lot of them have trouble remembering what happened two weeks ago, let alone 40 years ago or more.”

Ah yes, the eternal struggles of successful men “being pursued” by young, sex-crazed girls. Next week we’ll bring you the latest chapter in our definitive PR guidebook, How to Make Yourself Look Like a Horse’s Ass.

Depending on how closely you follow the news, you may have heard a bit about one of this country’s most unusual cottage industries: A series of independent practitioners offering a service called “reparative” or, more colloquially, “gay cure” therapy. The niche discipline is popular enough to earn an official ban from the State of California (when applied to subjects under the age of 18).

These “medical” professionals claim to be able to relieve individuals suffering from unwanted bouts of homosexuality; they’ve received a bit of attention from the political press over the past few years, and they’re about to face the biggest PR challenge in the history of their (relatively new) practice.

The most interesting part about this case is that it concerns the Orthodox Jewish community, most of whose members believe homosexuality to be forbidden by the Torah. Four young men whose rabbis urged them to seek reparative therapy with a group called JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing) are now suing the organization for fraud with the backing of the Southern Poverty and Law Center, a non-profit known for defending those with contradictory opinions both popular and unpopular.

The defendants’ lawsuit states that the group, whose director believes that “homosexuality is a learned behavior, which can be unlearned”, falsely advertised its services—and some of the practices involved in the JONAH “solution” are unconventional, to say the least.

One thing is clear: the immediate future presents a series of uphill battles for gay cure therapists.

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Yesterday we reported on UK advertising authority Clearcast’s decision to pull an excellent SodaStream spot for “denigrating” major soda brands whose products don’t even appear in the ad. Today brings another story of a regulatory group killing a clever campaign, and we have to ask: have British people always been such irrational buzzkills?

Here’s the ad for travel metasearch engine Kayak:

The Advertising Standards Authority received more than 400 complaints about this video and decided to kill the obviously satirical spot “because it was too upsetting to individuals who have undergone brain surgery, and their families.”

OK, full disclosure: Your editor is one of those people who’ve undergone major brain surgery–and he does not find anything about this ad to be particularly offensive. It’s not like Kayak’s creative agency made a mockery of an entire culture or anything like that.

What gives? At what point do advertising and PR pros have to be intentionally boring in order to avoid ruffling a few feathers? Do our industries really have a creativity problem?

Seems like we just can’t quite keep up with the ongoing PR crisis surrounding puppeteer Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo. After a man accused Clash of having an “improper relationship” with him when he was 16, recanted and settled, then tried to re-file his claim, today brings news of a second man looking to take Clash to court.

According to TMZ, an unnamed accuser in his 30′s filed a lawsuit against Clash today. He claims that the two met on a gay phone chat line when he was 15 and Clash was 32–and that they maintained an ongoing relationship.

And now for the predictably gory details: This latest accuser claims that, although the relationship began nearly 20 years ago, he did not take legal action until now because he “did not become aware that he had suffered adverse psychological and emotional effects from Kevin Clash’s sexual acts and conduct until 2012″. The lawsuit even veers into character assassination, citing Clash’s “depraved sexual interests” and claiming that he used his status as an entertainer to “[prey] on teenage boys.”

Oh, and this guy’s legal team learned something from the first settlement: their filing included a demand for “more than $5 million.”

We wish we had no more to report on this unfortunate story. Even if the latest case ends with a settlement or a dismissal of all charges, the legal saga will continue to be a major headache for the Sesame Street brand.

UPDATE: Sesame Workshop just released a statement announcing that Kevin Clash has resigned from Sesame Street in the wake of these newest allegations, citing the puppeteer’s conclusion that “he can no longer be effective in his job”. A sad day for the whole team.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

Last week we updated you on the juiciest available details regarding the David Petraeus scandal; most of these revelations involved a Tampa, Florida-based socialite named Jill Kelley, who seems to have played the role of third party spoiler in this twisted romantic tragedy.

As the controversy grows into every tabloid writer’s dream scoop and the media subjects Mrs. Kelley’s life to a far greater degree of scrutiny than she ever expected, a few interesting details have come to light.

There’s quite a bit to sort through: First of all, Mrs. Kelley has an identical sister named Natalie Khawam. The two enjoy participating in Florida politics, raising money for charitable causes…and racking up combined debts of approximately $7.6 million! Mrs. Kelley is currently “mired in lawsuits from a string of banks”, and Ms. Khawam declared bankruptcy earlier this year after engaging in a court battle over custody of her son and receiving character testimony from both General Petraeus and top Army General John Allen (who seems to have developed an amorous interest in her sister that included hundreds of not-so-discrete emails).

Another mini-scandal: Petraeus helped Kelley earn a gig as “honorary” consul to South Korea, but Kelley reportedly dropped the first part of her fake title when socializing—and this weekend the New York Daily News ran a story alleging that she tried to turn the unpaid position into a big-time score by enticing businessmen with her fictional connections to South Korea’s president.

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We love Ikea for its particleboard dorm-room tables, its interactive catalogs and its maze-like retail monoliths–masterpieces of psychological trickery designed to make it impossible for visitors to leave without walking past every single cupboard and toothbrush holder stocked in the company’s massive basement warehouses.

But this week we learned that Ikea hasn’t always been a group of good guys distributing meatballs and cheap full-length mirrors to Americans on a budget. While the company’s “official code of conduct” currently includes “zero tolerance for child and forced labor”, its European executives apparently didn’t feel any ethical qualms about utilizing prison labor in the 70’s and 80’s.

A recent report on Ikea’s past practices by auditor Ernst and Young–which the company requested after outside parties accused it of using slave labor–revealed that the workers who made some of the company’s signature furniture in its East German factories didn’t work by choice: they were prisoners who’d been sentenced to hard labor due to their political beliefs, which in most cases amounted to opposing the Soviet-backed Communist government after the post-war division of Germany. Seems like Ikea had a “don’t ask, don’t tell”-style arrangement with its Eastern partners.

Ikea can’t claim ignorance either; the Ernst and Young report found that company executives received tip-offs about the practice but did nothing to curb it.

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You may have heard that late-90’s “ska” kings No Doubt recently jumped on the comeback train. You may have also heard that the band immediately ran into controversy over the video for their single “Looking Hot.”

For some reason, the video’s director thought it would be a great idea to dress the band members in stereotypical Western/Native American gear: feathered headdresses, leather leggings, teepees, cute cowboy outfits…you get it.

We like to play dress-up as much as the next guy (which is to say not at all), but we’re a little surprised that the creative team responsible for the video couldn’t see the “scandal” coming.

Anyway, the band predictably pulled the spot after too many people complained about it being insensitive to the traditions and concerns of the Native American community; they even shut down their own website’s online forum after discussion of the video overwhelmed fans’ comments.

Today Zimbio asks whether this controversy served any discernible purpose, and it’s a good question. Arguments on both sides popped up over the past week, with some decrying the proliferation of political correctness while others lamented the public’s general ignorance of American Indian history and the perpetuation of long-discredited stereotypes.

Can we take any lessons from the band’s screw-up other than the fact that big-name pop stars should choose their video themes very carefully? Did the band make the right decisions to control the damage? And how could they have avoided the controversy (besides making an entirely different video)? Here’s the offending spot in case you missed it: Read more