PRSSA Bateman Client EveryLibrary Fails Ethics Test on Book-Ban Debate

In a new batch of ethics violations, PRSA recruits a partisan front group as PRSSA's "client" for the Bateman Case Study Competition.

If your 11- or 12-year-old child stumbled upon and checked out a SCHOOL library book containing these types of lines and passages (graphic below / source: Parents Defending Education), would you as a parent have a problem with it?

According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and their current “client” for the annual PRSSA Bateman Case Study Competition, EveryLibrary… you’re essentially an anti-American, anti-First Amendment “book banner” lunatic, if you would have a problem with it.

Welcome to PRSA’s latest far-left-wing political indoctrination campaign of our nation’s young PR collegians (and of anyone else who buys what they’re selling).

In the next month or so, PRSA’s student organization, PRSSA, will go into the home stretch of its annual Bateman Case Study Competition, which, last year, adopted the exceptionally partisan, politically controversial, and ideologically toxic EveryLibrary as its “client” for the 2024-25 academic year. (The Bateman Competition client is always chosen by PRSA National’s paid staff, headquartered in deep-blue-state New York.)

Sadly, for hundreds (maybe thousands?) of participating PRSSA students and their faculty / professional advisors nationwide, they may not realize they’re actively being used as political pawns in the contrived “anti-book ban” movement, thanks to PRSA and EveryLibrary… neither of which is an “open book” on their PR ethics.

For background, PRSSA’s Bateman Case Study Competition is an annual, nationwide program.

It originally was intended as a good-faith, experiential learning opportunity for PRSSA’s public relations students on college campuses where PRSSA chapters are located.

For decades, PRSSA students have taken on either a hypothetical PR issue or, in more recent history, actual business or non-profit “clients,” to develop a large-scale, soup-to-nuts PR campaign, in alignment with stated organizational objectives of said “client.”

Bateman is supposed to be a great opportunity for PR students — particularly seniors / upperclassmen. They’re able to apply strategic communication theories and concepts they’ve learned in the classroom. Their work can then be judged competitively with peer-group teams from other universities for their PR research, planning, implementation, and evaluation skills, acumen, and creativity.

I myself participated in Bateman when I was a student leader at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the early 1990s. I recall that our “client” was a hypothetical one… a fictional hospital involved in a crisis scenario.

For some PRSSA students at various universities, the Bateman Case Study Competition is not simply some voluntary extracurricular activity.

Many PRSSA chapter faculty advisors and / or PR collegiate programs of study across the U.S. have integrated the Bateman Case Study Competition into actual, graded coursework for students to earn college credit, such as this example out of Colorado:

As such, if these students register protest to PRSA National due to obvious ethics violations or improper partisanship by either PRSA or the “client,” they risk retaliation of losing team points in the Competition or even receiving a poor grade.

Alternately, the university and its PRSSA chapter that “gets with the program” on whatever PRSA National is dishing out and subsequently wins the Bateman Competition receives significant national publicity from PRSA and associated “bragging rights.” (Last year’s Bateman client was a magazine focused on DEI themes.)

Concerningly, though, PRSA’s choice of Bateman client has evolved to more politicized causes and not-so-hidden partisan agendas, namely to promote PRSA’s now long-running DEI (Diversity / Equity / Inclusion) rhetoric.

To be clear, PRSA’s DEI agenda has little to do with actually “including” all people or making anyone feel welcome except those who blindly adopt and pledge allegiance to PRSA’s prevailing political talking points:

I not only speak from my own personal experience as a moderate conservative (one of many who has been roundly and wrongfully demonized by PRSA for years) but can point to others’ independent experiences, too. (I am a past National Board member of PRSA, but in 2021, after I reported too many financial discrepancies to which PRSA refused to answer, PRSA’s leadership decided I should no longer be a member.)

Take this LinkedIn post from just about a year ago, for example, of a California PR professional who’d had-it-up-to-here with what she essentially characterized as PRSA’s false “diversity” posturing… followed by PRSA’s bungled response to her concerns. I gathered that this (former) member had felt discriminated against and/or unwelcomed within PRSA (I don’t know all the back story, but this post feed with comments is here).

Suffice to say, PRSA has a major “say-do” disconnect on making people feel welcomed and included — just as PRSA talks a big game about values such as professional “ethics,” but they violate those tenets all the time.

And this is where PRSA and EveryLibrary both commit Ethics Violation #1 in relation to Bateman:

They claim to be “nonpartisan,” but they clearly aren’t. And that’s called “lying.”

PRSA’s choice of EveryLibrary as this year’s Bateman campaign force-feeds EveryLibrary’s “anti-book ban” dogma straight down the throats of every PRSSA student nationwide, in alignment with the prior Biden Administration’s fixation on this “banning books” topic, on false “diversity” grounds.

The former President engaged in full-on spin during a State of the Union address, obscuring conservatives’ actual concerns about not displaying smut or exceptionally age-inappropriate content in public school libraries with Biden’s customarily incoherent, false accusations of “erasing history”… (???)

Under his virtue-signaling veneer, Biden’s real agenda was clear:

1) interject highly sexually explicit materials into not just public libraries but also public SCHOOL libraries, which have a captive audience of underage kids, in order to satisfy his and his handlers’ utter fixation on imposing such content on this demographic — whether their parents like it or not, and 2) impose a litany of racial and gender stereotyping and scapegoating content utterly divisive and toxic to societal harmony.

The more Biden/Harris could gin up and stoke up societal outrage on gender and race, the better their chances were at winning future elections… Or so their political operatives’ logic apparently went.

As it turned out, this faulty logic got their party booted out of the White House and expelled out of the current federal power structure.

Since taking office, the Trump Administration has put the kibosh on these faux “book ban” hijinks:

However, PRSA National didn’t get the memo.

Politically out-of-touch and biased as ever, neither PRSA nor EveryLibrary has shown the least degree of respect for all sides, viewpoints, and the full range of valid American belief systems, as represented in this complex and nuanced controversy. Instead, the conservative view has been demonized and mocked by this campaign and its “client,” leading PRSSA students to believe that doing so is socially, ethically, and professionally acceptable.

It is not.

Consequently, PRSA National is failing to prepare PRSSA students for the world they are entering.

Worse still, PRSA and EveryLibrary teach students that lying through one’s teeth about being “nonpartisan” — and then never being held accountable for those lies — is acceptable behavior, too.

It is not.

EveryLibrary swears up one side and down the other — with doe-eyed innocence — to be a “non-partisan” and “non-aligned” organization that merely is “pro-library.”

And I also hear they have a bridge in Brooklyn they can sell you!

Consider the evidence. EveryLibrary’s social feeds and posted content reek of partisanship:

EveryLibrary also has its own online publication, to take deeper dives into divisive rhetoric aimed at pitting Americans against Americans.

The EveryLibrary brand launched some years ago an online “open source” publication, ironically titled “The Political Librarian” (an odd publication name for a supposedly “nonpartisan” cause).

These jokers refer to “The Political Librarian” as an “academic journal” and even decry in their social media blather the notion of “divisive politics“… when THEY themselves are the very ones at Divisiveness Central, stoking up as much misleading and toxic disinformation as possible.

A recent issue of EveryLibrary’s “The Political Librarian” is chock-full of partisan caricatures and defamation against the Republican party and conservatives in general, painting conservative Americans as a “whiteness” monolith and as little more than hate-mongering racists.

For example, in this singular issue, published opinions offered up as (false) fact by EveryLibrary include comments that “white Republicans” “embrace anti-democratic sentiments” and “live in the fantasy that they are the ones who are oppressed” due to a “white victimhood” and “the desperation of whites to cling to power.”

EveryLibrary even published a “whiteness” so-called “study” to correlate community skin color with book banning.

I mean, good grief. I couldn’t even begin to make this stuff up. Here are a few excerpts:

These racial stereotyping / scapegoating “divisive concepts” actually run afoul of some state laws that bar this kind of “teaching” within taxpayer-funded higher education institutions. (More on that in a minute.)

Thanks to PRSA, PRSSA students nationwide who’ve done their due-diligence research of EveryLibrary’s content have by now — as per the Bateman timeline — received a heaping helping of these published narratives in “The Political Librarian” publication, for many months now.

Indoctrination, Ahoy!

On a Bateman information call in January 2025 with EveryLibrary’s leadership (their “client”), participating PRSSA students were advised not to call people “fascists” or “Nazis” or to say “all Christians are bad,” as part of their Bateman campaigns, which is telling, as to the overall politicized tenor.

EveryLibrary also advised the students — in all seriousness — “Don’t, like, hold a fundraiser in a strip club or something…” which was intellectually and morally offensive to suggest these students needed such advice:

EveryLibrary’s leadership also told the students they could “go after” elected / political leaders in their campaigns and that these public figures were “fair game.”

This advice may run directly afoul of Hatch Act regulations.

When the students show up in the coming days to compete in the Bateman Case Study Competition, they will be judged — no doubt — on how profusely and enthusiastically they regurgitate left-wing ideological dogma as spewed in EveryLibrary’s propaganda back to their “client,” to PRSA National’s affirmative head-nodding and judges’ approval.

So, beyond overcoming the obvious falsehood that EveryLibrary is “nonpartisan,” we have to assess the very real risk that PRSA’s adoption of EveryLibrary for the Bateman campaign could arguably be illegal, particularly in states with Hatch Act and divisive concepts statutes of their own.

In my own home state of Tennessee, for one, engaging in veiled (or unveiled) political activities through taxpayer funded universities is actually illegal.

Not just “unethical,” mind you, but ILLEGAL. I’m not an attorney, and I’m not giving legal advice, but facts about legal statutes that are on the books are what they are.

This is all-new territory for PRSSA and its Bateman Competition, even as legally compromised as PRSA has already been for years, due to its habitual financial misreporting practices.

For starters, legislation was passed years ago in Tennessee called “The Little Hatch Act,” which — akin to the U.S. federal Hatch Act — bans partisan political activity engaged through taxpayer-funded employers and higher education facilities / platforms (which PRSA uses and leverages in order to host and operationalize its university-based PRSSA student chapters).

In advance of the 2022 mid-term elections, the Tennessee State Employees Association (TSEA) – the only organization that by Tennessee law represents higher education employees – issued “The Little Hatch Act Reminder” to all state employees.

This reminder warned, “A violation of the Tennessee Little Hatch Act is a Class C misdemeanor which is punishable up to 30 days in jail, a fine of up to $50, or both. DOHR Rule 1120-10-.03 provides that a violation of Tennessee Little Hatch Act or federal Hatch Act may result in discipline up to termination.”

Tennessee also has a “divisive concepts” statute (much to EveryLibrary’s chagrin).

It bars Tennessee taxpayer-funded higher education institutions and public relations / PRSSA faculty advisers at PRSSA chapter-affiliated universities in the state from promulgating – or knowingly allowing the promulgation of – ideological propaganda masquerading as fact to students, as specifically spelled out in the statute. Such propaganda includes but is not limited to “race or sex scapegoating” and “race or sex stereotyping.”

Take a quick read:

I don’t know how it works in other states, but I’ve included in this blog some examples of how PRSSA chapters are implementing their Bateman Competition work in the public domain on behalf of EveryLibrary.

One PRSSA chapter in Long Beach, California (at a taxpayer-funded university), parroted in just recent weeks EveryLibrary’s misleading and alarmist “activism” propaganda online, admonishing “this current administration,” meaning, the Trump White House (sound “nonpartisan”?):

One of many creepy things about EveryLibrary’s messaging is that the organization purposely posts stuff, in trying to make EveryLibrary appear like some innocuous book-hugger and kid-hugger group.

Take a look at these depictions of little kids — who I’m guessing may be 5 or 6 years old and in what I am also guessing might be via stock photography — who EveryLibrary uses as poster-children on its social media feeds, with an implied message of, “Please oh please, you mean Republicans… don’t ban my copy of ‘Curious George’!”…

But in reality, as documented, EveryLibrary (and now PRSA / PRSSA) is largely lobbying for highly sexualized content in PUBLIC SCHOOL libraries…

…As in, books with graphic depictions (including illustrated graphic novels) of sexual acts, for any young kid of elementary / middle-school age to stumble upon.

Here’s an example of one such incident, of which there have been countless other incidents in communities nationwide:

These issues are real.

The prevailing leftist strategy to conflate issues and nomenclature (including misuse of the word “ban” itself) on First Amendment grounds is all a part of their disinformation routine.

For example, EveryLibrary constantly promotes PEN America “data” on alleged “book bans” in its propaganda, but respected, Harvard-educated researchers like Dr. Jay Greene at the Heritage Foundation have countered:

“The entire conversation on “book banning” has taken place under a false definition promulgated by PEN America, a left-wing advocacy group that purports to monitor an unprecedented spike in “bans.” But it defines “ban” so expansively as to render that term meaningless.

“If a book has been temporarily removed, reviewed and then returned to the shelves, it has been banned, according to PEN.

“If a school places a parental permission requirement on a book, it has been banned, according to PEN.

“If a school moves a book to a guidance counselor’s office, it has been banned, according to PEN.”

Thus, it’s how the EveryLibrary sausage is made, in its fictionalized data… now being sold to PRSSA students wholesale, as if it’s gospel.

Meanwhile, if a parent dares to disagree and protest content in their child’s taxpayer-funded school library, then they get slapped with a “Book Banner!” label by the EveryLibrary ideological crowd (and now, apparently, by all of PRSA / PRSSA, too).

I’m reminded of the video a few years ago of a child who appeared at a school board meeting and read aloud from an age-inappropriate book that he (a 6th grader) found in his own library:

The Long Beach PRSSA student chapter — using its @LibrosUnidosLB X handle — enthusiastically promotes a book of similar content that EveryLibrary seeks to have stocked in public school libraries, entitled “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”

The book contains graphic sex scenes (as per the opener of my blog, above), and it’s been protested throughout Middle America when school librarians have placed the book within the grasp of pre-teens… such as 11 and 12 year-olds.

While the book may have its merits (I’ve not read it), parents of young children have a right to safeguard their kids, in precisely the same way that it would be inappropriate for a school to take a field trip of 11 and 12-year-olds to go see a rated-R movie with sexual themes, nudity, violence, and foul language without parental consent. There simply is no difference.

You can read about one Kansas community’s protest movement over this type of content, here.

EveryLibrary officials have pooh-poohed these community protests, on grounds that these books are simply being “taken out of context.”

EveryLibrary has pushed false and misleading social media conflations, that if any parent has the audacity to protest their young kid reading or viewing illustrations from a school library book showing graphic sex acts, then they are not only a “book banner” but also a sexist and a racist, too, since — as the EveryLibrary crowd’s logic goes — “book bans overwhelmingly target children’s books by women of color…”

This leads me to PRSA’s and EveryLibrary’s other massive lie:

Ethics Violation #2: PRSA’s CEO promised no “advocacy” as part of the EveryLibrary Bateman Competition.

Let that sink in. And I have pretty serious receipts on this one, too.

PRSA’s new CEO will need to address the false promises of his truth-challenged predecessor (who left PRSA staff at the end of December 2024 after I had reported her for issuing false and defamatory information on a separate matter that year).

PRSA National Board meeting minutes from March 2024 document that the PRSA National Board was informed about the selection of EveryLibrary as this academic year’s Bateman Competition client.

Per the minutes, PRSA CEO Linda Thomas Brooks assured PRSA’s Board in March 2024 that student campaigns for the EveryLibrary client “will be geared toward awareness, not advocacy.”

But clearly, at this stage, that’s an obvious untruth. PRSSA’s scope of work for EveryLibrary is nothing BUT “advocacy,” by any PR industry definition.

And PRSA knew this, from the get-go.

In a video posted to PRSSA’s Bateman information page from last autumn, EveryLibrary CEO John Chrastka stated point-blank that generating mere “awareness” or “education” about libraries in general or the notion of EveryLibrary “doing things for little children” in general was of precisely zero interest to EveryLibrary as a PRSSA campaign goal.

Here, he blurts it right out:

Essentially, every PRSSA Bateman campaign that opts to tout messages that uplift the good work of libraries in general are useless to EveryLibrary, because all that EveryLibrary is interested in is collecting names and e-mail addresses.

They’re using PRSSA as unpaid student laborers in this regard.

PRSA has enabled EveryLibrary to take full advantage of PRSSA’s free-of-charge PR army of young student talent, to stoke up a call-to-action ADVOCACY campaign throughout their local communities and online.

The goal: Procuring for EveryLibrary 1 million new names and e-mail addresses for its database.

Here it is, in EveryLibrary’s Bateman deck:

Consequently, if you check social media at this writing, you can find PRSSA chapters out there promoting links for the public to sign up for self-styled databases created by the students.

Here’s an example of just one, under an Ohio PRSSA chapter that entitled its EveryLibrary campaign as “More Than Just Books”:

Neither PRSA nor EveryLibrary offers any liability protection for students or their universities, if this raw public consumer data that PRSSA students are collecting is ever potentially misused by EveryLibrary — such as being re-packaged and sold to other Democrat party or similarly partisan activist groups, for their own fundraising purposes.

As itemized in writing on the official PRSSA “2025 Bateman Case Study Competition Rules and Guidelines” posted online (Page 4), PRSA forces Bateman-participating PRSSA chapters and taxpayer-compensated faculty advisors and their respective university institutions to waive PRSA’s / PRSSA’s liability… or else have to go to their own legal expense to prove in a court of law “willful misconduct”:

(No mention was made in PRSA’s Bateman information packet of training for the students and their faculty advisors, tied to safeguarding consumers’ personal information or data privacy during these database-procurement efforts that the students are expected to mount on EveryLibrary’s behalf.)

To date, PRSSA chapters far-and-wide have posted in the public domain all kinds of content, using the word “advocacy” and “advocating” and “activist” in referring to their EveryLibrary support campaign — doing PRECISELY what PRSA’s now-long-gone CEO promised wouldn’t happen.

Check it out:

PRSA’s Sierra Nevada Chapter of the professional organization touted their sponsored student PRSSA chapter’s campaign.

They asked their member professionals to sign the EveryLibrary petition, under the auspices that doing so would fight back against a prior failed ballot measure in Reno (signing the petition does nothing for Nevada libraries… it only helps EveryLibrary snap up names and e-mails).

The very idea that a PRSA chapter took it upon themselves to tie a ballot vote failure to an EveryLibrary “petition” signing is the very definition of political “advocacy,” which is precisely what PRSA’s CEO pinky-promised her Board would never happen on this Bateman campaign.

As such, on this “advocacy” matter, PRSA and EveryLibrary have engaged here a classic case of bait-and-switch: Promise one thing; but do the opposite. Sound “ethical”?

Sadly, the joke is on PRSSA students (and their advisors) who trusted PRSA not to deceive them or to push undisclosed agendas. The students’ trust clearly has been violated — and that’s not the students’ fault.

The joke is also on PRSA chapter professionals, who are too ignorant or oblivious to how their own students are being gamed and deceived here by both PRSA Headquarters and the EveryLibrary crew. And when it comes to being “gamed,” if even the folks out in Nevada can’t figure it out, then who can?

Which brings me to PRSA’s and EveryLibrary’s Ethics Violation #3: ASTROTURFING.

Ladies and Gentleman: EveryLibrary is a front group.

I’ll say it again.

EveryLibrary.

Is.

A.

Front.

Group.

Who / what are they a “front” for? America’s politically partisan far left-wing. It’s blatantly obvious.

By definition, front groups are unethical, because they mislead the public to falsely believe the group works in service to something that it is not.

PRSA’s Board of Ethics & Professional Standards (BEPS) issued some 17 years ago its Professional Standards Advisory PS-7 (2004; Revised October 2008), entitled, “ENGAGING IN THE USE OF DECEPTIVE PRACTICES WHILE REPRESENTING FRONT GROUPS.”

This ethics advisory was issued during distant-prior years when PRSA still held a measure of credibility on issues of public relations ethics.

The advisory warned PRSA members and the wider PR industry about the unethical misconduct and trust-destroying dangers of astroturfing and front groups, defined in the advisory as “groups and individuals that represent undisclosed sponsorships and/or deceptive or misleading descriptions of goals, causes, tactics, sponsors or participants.”

The BEPS advisory warned that “astroturfing” is patently unethical and that “PRSA members should recognize that assisting front groups…even if such activities are lawful such as 527 organizations, constitutes improper conduct and malpractice under the PRSA Member Code of Ethics and should be avoided.”

BEPS’s Advisory also provided a wide smattering of hypothetical examples of improper practices tied to the unethical naming conventions of astroturfing front groups.

By name, such groups purport to take a stand seemingly on only positive and innocuous causes for the public good (you know… like public libraries), when the reality is that these groups can be widely co-opted in either opposite shenanigans or destructive behaviors at odds with the public good (you know… like partisan politics and forcing divisive concepts on society for partisan political gain), unethically veiled as to their real intent from proper public disclosure.

All this astroturfing nonsense is EveryLibrary, in a nutshell, right down to its phony name, posturing as if it really even cares about “every library,” when at their core, they only care about left-wing political money-funneling (“Names and e-mail addresses!“).

And yet THIS is who PRSA chooses for its Bateman Competition client to impose upon students.

Of all the deceptive maneuvers for PRSA to engage in…. and just when I think PRSA cannot get any worse, they exceed expectations, to the negative.

Why couldn’t PRSA have chosen for its Bateman program a “client” that’s a legitimate nonprofit doing real work for real charitable benefit… like those involved in researching cures for childhood cancer or helping homeless people find pathways to economic hope or helping boost grassroots support for local charity food pantries?

It’s very sad to me that PRSA has chosen to wedge PRSSA into this political firestorm.

Contact PRSA Headquarters to ask that this campaign be scrapped, with a public apology issued to PRSSA chapters, students, and faculty / professional advisors.

You can find more information about how EveryLibrary-cited “expert” sources use inaccurate data and deception to fuel partisan “book ban” protest campaigns:

Mary Beth West is a 30-year public relations strategist who served as a two-term, volunteer trustee on her local community’s library board 15 years ago. Her family was among the largest private financial contributors to construction of that community’s county library.

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