Being source-outed is becoming the classic PR problem of our age.

More and more, corporations find themselves in the headlines because they ignore two realities of the information age:

1. A company’s attempt to covertly influence opinion is only as effective as the reaction people have when they find out who’s behind it and why.

2. Yes, they will find out.

Last year I wrote about Sony’s “stealth marketing” fiasco, in which the consumer electronics giant paid graffiti artists in several cities to adorn abandoned buildings with unattributed spray-paintings of bug-eyed cartoon characters riding the PlayStation like a skateboard, or licking it like a lollipop.  Within weeks, national news stories quoted angry community leaders and officials who lambasted Sony for blatantly hiding its identity while breaking zoning and illegal billboard laws.

Now Hewlett-Packard is shuffling its board and may face legal action after it was discovered that the company hired private investigators who pretended to be directors in an effort to learn who was chatting it up with the news media.

In this day and age, it’s hard to believe that battle-savvy companies like Sony and HP would think there was any hope of keeping their efforts secret. But they did, and so do too many other companies. This has made “source-outing” a cottage industry among industry watchdogs, competitors, academia, government regulators and news media.

Left-leaning organizations like Center for Media and Democracy and CorpWatch routinely catalog the vested business-political interests behind front groups, think tanks and pundits who are quoted as independent expert sources in news coverage, talk shows and community events. And the ubiquitous use of corporate-sponsored “video news releases” is under attack by Federal Communications Commission chief Jonathan Adelstein, who says “You can’t tell any more the difference between what’s propaganda and what’s news.”

Where is this all going? Expect to see more exposés similar to how the St. Petersburg Times discovered that “big corporations have devised a form of idea laundering, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to seemingly independent groups that act as spokesmen under disguise.” The story explained how sponsored messages from Wal-Mart, McDonalds, ExxonMobile and others “wind up on the opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers - often with no disclosure that the writer has financial ties to the companies involved.”

These days, it doesn’t take a pesky little dog to pull back the curtain and reveal Man, Inc. behind the voice of Oz. That’s because the curtain is made of glass.

What’s happening here is that society is being conditioned to believe that every organized voice in the court of public opinion has an agenda behind it. Sometimes that purpose is political, sometimes to sell product. That in itself is not going to be a big shock to anyone except for most naive media consumers. What is does mean is that a company’s approach to transparency ultimately will make the difference between being believed or being written off.

It certainly seems like The Petersburg Times understands that concept. Soon after it published the story about editorial columnists with hidden corporate connections, it ran a second article – this one listing which of those columns had run in their own newspaper.

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