Rex Zeppelin: Sinquefield-backed blimp-flying political outfit fires PR agency that hit up reporters to do their bidding

St. Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield wants so badly to cut taxes in Missouri that one of his affiliated political groups was involved in a hilarious scheme to try and pay experienced reporters to ghostwrite its materials.

Grow Missouri, which carries Sinquefield’s political water by advocating tax cuts, hired a Boston public relations firm to help figure out how to get its message across. Most people know Grow Missouri only by the blimps it puts over Missouri skies (emblazoned with the #GrowMO hashtag), which do more to show off Sinquefield’s wealth than communicate any particular ideology.

Part of Grow Missouri’s branding work fell a Skyword employee named Molly Berry, whose Twitter biography once described herself as a “crazy mother trucker” and an “undercover lover.”

Berry didn’t seem to consider that reaching out to political reporters in Missouri to gauge their interest in collecting some side dough writing for an organization connected to one of the state’s most influential people would pose an intractable conflict of interest. Nor did she apparently think through how embarrassing it would be to the client when reporters got these solicitations and made them public.

Predictably, that’s exactly what happened.

Skyword CEO Tom Gerace tried to cover the grenade last week with a statement characterizing the whole affair as an oversight.

“Going forward, we have amended our recruitment process for advocacy organizations to ensure we do not reach out to prospective writers who may be covering our clients’ work,” Gerace said.

Skyword’s next client will appreciate the firm’s after-the-fact due diligence, but not Grow Missouri. The Columbia Tribune reports that Skyword got canned by Grow Missouri on Tuesday.