Embodiment

Cory Doctorow at the boings on self-serving anonymity as flack industrial standard practice:

PR people, both in-house and outside contractors, have adopted a gospel that holds that they themselves should never appear in an article. When I asked around about this practice, PR people defended it, saying that their success would be judged by the extent to which they were absent from the story. It's as though the odd doctrine that companies are people means that companies can't admit that they are made up of people. When a PR person says something innocuous, he is speaking ex cathedra, voice of the company embodied, which has possessed him and speaks through him, without interpretation or engagement by the person himself. He is the company's living embodiment, without name or identity.

Previously here, here, here and here.