Ketchum Trains Military Personnel

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For the past two decades, the U.S. Army has been shipping out career officers for a year-long PR training at the Pittsburgh office of global PR firm Ketchum, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. "The two sides were paired through a call from the Pentagon. It seems someone thought it would be a good idea to get public relations training," the Post-Gazette's Teresa F. Lindeman writes. Several program alumni told the paper that "crisis communications and media relations tools have come in especially handy since leaving Ketchum." Don McGrath completed the program in 1990 to became a Pentagon press spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army. "By 1991, the U.S. air attack began, and [McGrath] needed everything he knew to cope with the almost overwhelming media invasion," Lindeman writes. McGrath is now vice president of corporate communications for BASF Corp. in New Jersey.