In June 2014, Richard Berman, the infamous president of corporate public relations firm Berman and Company, pitched a room full of energy company executives on his team’s work in fighting an anti-fracking initiative in Colorado. Noting that critics often want to know the names of the donors behind his campaigns, Berman said he runs all his work “through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors,” allowing “total anonymity” for his clients.

He added that he was “religious” about not identifying the companies who fund his work. “At least I’m not going to allow them to get used,” Berman said. “And I don’t want companies to ever admit that because it does give the other side a way to diminish our message.”

But Berman appeared to break his own rule in a recent interview with the Cato Institute, mentioning a company he has advised by name, agribusiness giant Monsanto:

BERMAN: I’ve moved people to different points of view over time just by changing the language. You know, I often told Monsanto, I’ll just use one company’s position here, I often told Monsanto they made a very big mistake when they called genetically modified, GMOs, when they call them genetically modified organisms exactly that. Why would you call, why would you tell people it’s safe to eat genetically modified organisms? That’s not the first thing that you think of when you get out of bed in the morning, that I want some genetically modified organisms with my Cheerios. On the other, on the other hand, if they had just called these new foods that they were creating with science, if you call them genetically modified foods, or more importantly, genetically improved foods, so if you called them GIFs, genetically improved foods, rather than GMOs, you immediately would have had a different reaction on the part of the public. And so, I think you could have moved the needle enormously. It wouldn’t have gone so far south if you had just used different language.