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War
on Truth: The Secret Battle for the American Mind
An Interview with John Stauber of PR Watch
by Derrick Jensen
Originally Published in "The Sun", Reprinted with
Permission
"Australian
academic Alex Carey once wrote that "the twentieth century
has been characterized by three developments of great political
importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate
power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of
protecting corporate power against democracy."
In societies like ours, corporate propaganda is delivered through
advertising and public relations. Most people recognize that
advertising is propaganda. We understand that whoever paid for
and designed an ad wants us to think or feel a certain way,
vote for a certain candidate, or purchase a certain product.
Public relations, on the other hand, is much more insidious.
Because it's disguised as information, we often don't realize
we are being influenced by public relations. But this multi-billion-dollar
transnational industry's propaganda campaigns affect our private
and public lives every day. PR firms that most people have never
heard of - such as Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, and
Ketchum - are working on behalf of myriad powerful interests,
from dictatorships to the cosmetic industry, manipulating public
opinion, policy making, and the flow of information.
As editor of the quarterly investigative journal PR Watch, John
Stauber exposes how public relations works and helps people
to understand it. He hasn't always been a watchdog journalist,
though. He worked for more than twenty years as an activist
and organizer for various causes: the environment, peace, social
justice, neighborhood concerns. Eventually, it dawned on him
that public opinion on every issue he cared about was being
managed by influential, politically connected PR operatives
with nearly limitless budgets. "Public relations is a perversion
of the democratic process," he says. "I knew I had
to fight it."
In addition to starting PR Watch, Stauber founded the Center
for Media and Democracy, the first and only organization dedicated
to monitoring and exposing PR propaganda. In 1995, Common Courage
Press published a book by Stauber and his colleague Sheldon
Rampton titled Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies,
and the Public Relations Industry. Their second book, Mad Cow
U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, came out in 1997 and
examined the public-relations coverup of the risk of mad-cow
disease in the U.S.
I interviewed Stauber over dinner at the home he shares with
his wife, Laura, in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at:
PR Watch, 3318 Gregory St., Madison, WI 53711, (608) 233-3346,
or at www.prwatch.org.
Jensen:
How is a propaganda war waged?
Stauber: The key is invisibility. Once propaganda becomes visible,
it's less effective. Public relations is effective in manipulating
opinion - and thus public policy - only if people believe that
the message covertly delivered by the PR campaign is not propaganda
at all but simply common sense or accepted reality. For instance,
there is a consensus within the scientific community that global
warming is real and that the burning of fossil fuels is a major
cause of the problem. But to the petroleum industry, the automobile
industry, the coal industry, and other industries that profit
from fossil-fuel consumption, this is merely an inconvenient
message that needs to be "debunked" because it could
lead to public policies that reduce their profits. So, with
the help of PR firms, these vested interests create and fund
industry front groups such as the Global Climate Coalition.
The coalition then selects, promotes, and publicizes scientists
who proclaim global warming a myth and characterize hard evidence
of global climate change as "junk science" being pushed
by self-serving environmental groups out to scare the public
for fundraising purposes.
Another industry front group is the Hudson Institute, a prominent
far-right think tank espousing the view that global climate
change will be beneficial! The Hudson Institute is funded by
the American Trucking Association, the Ford Motor Company, Allison
Engine Company, Bombardier, and McDonnell Douglas, among others.
The Global Climate Coalition and the Hudson Institute are routinely
quoted in the news media, where they promote their message of
"Don't worry, burn lots of oil, gas, and coal." In
order to confuse the public and manipulate opinion and policy
to their advantage, corporations spend billions of dollars a
year hiring PR firms to cultivate the press, discredit their
critics, spy on and co-opt citizens' groups, and use polls to
find out what images and messages will resonate with target
audiences.
For obvious reasons, public relations is a secretive industry.
PR firms don't like to reveal their clients. Some of them, though,
can be identified. Here's a list of just a tiny fraction of
the clients represented by Burson-Marsteller, the world's largest
PR firm:
NBC, Philip Morris, Trump Enterprises, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA
rebels in Angola, Occidental Petroleum, American Airlines, the
state of Alaska, Genentech, the Ford Motor Company, the Times
Mirror Company, MCI, the National Restaurant Association, Coca-Cola,
the British Columbia timber industry, Dow Corning, General Electric,
Hydro-Quebec, Monsanto, AT&T, British Telecom, Chevron,
DuPont, IBM, Warner-Lambert, Visa, Seagram, SmithKline Beecham,
Reebok, Proctor & Gamble, Glaxo, Campbell's Soup, the Olympics,
Nestl, Motorola, Gerber, Eli Lilly, Caterpillar, Sears, Beretta,
Pfizer, Metropolitan Life, McDonnell Douglas, and the governments
of Kenya, Indonesia, Argentina, El Salvador, the Bahamas, Italy,
Mexico, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria.
Jensen: That list encompasses everything from biotechnology
to genocide to jet-skis.
Stauber: In its latest reporting year, Burson-Marsteller claimed
more than a quarter of a billion dollars in net fees from its
clients. And it's only one of a number of PR firms owned by
the Young & Rubicam advertising agency. Other top-ten PR
firms include Hill & Knowlton, Shandwick, Porter/Novelli,
Fleishman-Hillard, Edelman, and Ketchum - companies that most
of us have never heard of, but whose influence we've all felt.
Burson-Marsteller alone has twenty-two hundred PR flacks - that's
slang for a public-relations practitioner - in more than thirty
countries. In its promotional materials, the firm says its international
operations are "linked together electronically and philosophically
to deliver a single standard of excellence." It claims
that "the role of communications is to manage perceptions
which motivate behaviors that create business results,"
and that its mission is to help clients "manage issues
by influencing - in the right combination - public attitude,
public perceptions, public behavior, and public policy."
Jensen:
Why don't we read more about these hidden manipulations in the
news?
Stauber: Primarily because the mainstream, corporate news media
are dependent on public relations. Half of everything in the
news actually originates from a PR firm. If you're a lazy journalist,
editor, or news director, it's easy to simply regurgitate the
dozens of press releases and stories that come in every day
for free from PR firms.
Remember, the media's primary source of income is the more than
$100 billion a year corporations spend on advertising. The PR
firms are owned by advertising agencies, so the same companies
that are producing billions of dollars in advertising are the
ones pitching stories to the news media, cultivating relationships
with reporters, and controlling reporters' access to the executives
and companies they represent. In fact, of the 160,000 or so
PR flacks in the US, maybe a third began their careers as journalists.
Who better to manipulate the media than former reporters and
editors? Investigative journalist Mark Dowie estimates that
professional PR flacks actually outnumber real working journalists
in the US
Jensen: How does politics figure into this equation?
Stauber: Public relations is now inseparable from the business
of lobbying, creating public policy, and getting candidates
elected to public office. The PR industry just might be the
single most powerful political institution in the world. It
expropriates and exploits the democratic rights of millions
on behalf of big business by fooling the public about the issues.
Unfortunately, there's no easy remedy to the situation. When
Sheldon Rampton and I wrote Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, our
publisher said, "This book is going to depress readers.
You need to offer a solution or they'll feel even more disempowered."
But there is no simple solution. Propaganda will always be used
by those who can afford it. That's how the powerful maintain
control. In defense, the rest of us need to develop our critical-thinking
capabilities and maintain a strong commitment to reinvigorating
democracy.
Jensen:
But if it's not illegal and everyone uses it, what's wrong with
public relations?
Stauber: There's nothing wrong with much of what is done in
public relations, like putting out press releases, calling members
of the press, arguing a position, or communicating a message.
Everyone, myself included, who's trying to get an idea across,
market a product, or influence other citizens uses techniques
that fit the definition of public relations. After all, the
industry grew out of the democratic process of debate and decision
making.
Today, however, public relations has become a huge, powerful,
hidden medium available only to wealthy individuals, big corporations,
governments, and government agencies because of its high cost.
And the purpose of these campaigns is not to facilitate democracy
or promote social good, but to increase power and profitability
for the clients paying the bills. This overall management of
public opinion and policy by the few is completely contrary
to and destructive of democracy.
In Washington, D.C., issues are no longer simply lobbied. They
are "managed" by a triad composed of (1) public-relations
experts from firms like Burson-Marsteller; (2) business lobbyists,
who bankroll politicians, write legislation, and are often former
politicians themselves; and (3) phony grassroots organizations
- I call them "astroturf groups" - that the PR industry
has created on behalf of its corporate clients to give the appearance
of public support for their agendas.
Jensen: How do people in the PR industry respond to these charges?
Stauber: In private, their response to me is invariably "You're
right, only it's even worse." In public, they say, "What
are you, against freedom of speech? Corporations and the wealthy
have a right to make their voices heard, and that's what we
do. This is just democracy in action."
Jensen:
But how do they defend promoting the interests of torturers
and murderers?
Stauber:
PR executives compare themselves to lawyers. They say, "People
come to us with a need to be represented in the arena of public
affairs, and we have an obligation to represent them."
Jensen:
To lie for them.
Stauber:
To "manage issues and public perception" is how they
would put it.
Jensen:
How did all this come about?
Stauber:
The PR industry is a product of the early twentieth century.
It grew out of what was then the world's largest propaganda
campaign, waged by Woodrow Wilson's administration to get the
American public to support US entry into the First World War.
At that time, the country was much more isolationist than today.
A huge ocean separated us from Europe, and most Americans didn't
want to get dragged into what was seen as Europe's war.
In fact,
citizens are almost always reluctant to go to war. Take the
Persian Gulf War of 1991. We now know that the royal family
of Kuwait hired as many as twenty public-relations, law, and
lobbying firms in Washington, DC, to convince Americans to support
that war. It paid one PR firm alone, Hill & Knowlton, $10.8
million. Hill & Knowlton set up an Astroturf group called
Citizens for a Free Kuwait to make it appear as if there were
a large grassroots constituency in support of the war. The firm
also produced and distributed dozens of "video news releases"
that were aired as news stories by TV stations and networks
around the world. It was Hill & Knowlton that arranged the
infamous phony Congressional hearing at which the daughter of
the Kuwaiti ambassador, appearing anonymously, falsely testified
to having witnessed Iraqi soldiers pulling scores of babies
from incubators in a hospital and leaving them to die. Her testimony
was a complete fabrication, but everyone from Amnesty International
to President George Bush repeated it over and over as proof
of Saddam Hussein's evil. Sam Zakhem, a former US ambassador
to Bahrain, funneled another $7.7 million into the propaganda
campaign through two front groups, the Freedom Task Force and
the Coalition for Americans at Risk, to pay for TV and newspaper
ads and to keep on payroll a stable of fifty speakers for pro-war
rallies.
The Hill
& Knowlton executives running the show were Craig Fuller,
a close friend and advisor to President Bush, and Frank Mankiewicz
- better known as a friend of the Kennedys and former president
of National Public Radio - who managed the media masterfully,
particularly television: a University of Massachusetts study
later showed that the more TV people watched, the fewer facts
they actually knew about the situation in the Persian Gulf,
and the more they supported the war.
But back to the history of the industry. After the Wilson administration
succeeded in getting the public behind World War I, public-relations
practitioners who'd been involved in the campaign - like Ivy
Lee and Edward Bernays - began looking for business clients.
The tactics of invisible persuasion that they'd honed working
for the War Department were put to use on behalf of the tobacco,
oil, and other industries. And with each success, the public-relations
industry grew. Tobacco propaganda has surely been the most successful,
longest-running, and deadliest public-relations campaign in
history.
Jensen:
Wasn't Bernays central to that?
Stauber:
He was, although, to his credit, he later recognized the deadly
effects of tobacco and condemned colleagues who worked for tobacco
companies.
Edward
Bernays was surely one of the most amazing and influential characters
of the twentieth century. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and
helped to popularize Freudianism in the US Later, he used his
relation to Freud to promote himself. And from his uncle's psychoanalysis
techniques, Bernays developed a scientific method of managing
behavior, to which he gave the name "public relations."
Believing that democracy needed wise and hidden manipulators,
Bernays was proud to be a propagandist and wrote in his book
Propaganda: "If we understand the mechanisms and motives
of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment
the masses according to our will without them knowing it."
He called this the "engineering of consent" and proposed
that "those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country. . . . In almost every act of our daily
lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our
social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by
the relatively small number of persons . . . who pull the wires
which control the public mind."
It appears not to have dawned on Bernays until the 1930s that
his science of propaganda could also be used to subvert democracy
and promote fascism. That was when journalist Karl von Weigand
told Bernays that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels had read
all of his books, and possessed an even better library on propaganda
than Bernays did.
Jensen:
Let's get back to tobacco. How did that industry use public
relations to promote its products?
Stauber: Prior to the 1950s, the tobacco industry actually hired
doctors to promote tobacco's "health benefits." It
calms the nerves, soothes the throat, and keeps you thin, they
said. We have Bernays, Ivy Lee, and other early PR experts to
thank for that. Then, when major news outlets began reporting
tobacco's links to cancer - some publications even curtailed
tobacco advertising - the tobacco industry launched what's called
a "crisis-management campaign," primarily under the
leadership of John Hill of Hill & Knowlton. Hill's goal
was to fool the public into believing that the tobacco industry
could responsibly and scientifically investigate the issue itself
and, if it found a problem, somehow correct it and make tobacco
products safe. What really happened, we all know, is that tobacco
companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and
publicizing "research" purporting to prove tobacco
doesn't cause cancer, and at the same time created one of the
most powerful political lobbies in history to prevent tobacco
regulation.
Jensen:
This strategy of funding-biased or phony research to support
corporate profitability seems ubiquitous: the timber industry
funds forestry schools, for example, where they teach that logging
is needed to "improve forest health."
Stauber: Another proven strategy is polling the public to find
what messages will resonate with people's values and desires.
If they find, for example, that women have a desire to be free
from male domination, the strategy might be to market cigarettes
as "torches of liberty," as Bernays did in the twenties,
when he arranged for attractive New York City debutantes to
walk in the Easter Fashion Parade waving lit cigarettes. That
single publicity stunt broke the social taboo against women
smoking and doubled the tobacco industry's market overnight.
It's even
better if you can put your message in the mouth of someone the
public trusts. This is called the "third-party technique"
and was also pioneered by Bernays. Surveys show that scientists
are widely trusted, so the public-relations industry hires "scientific
experts" to say things beneficial to the industry's clients.
PR firms also deliver messages through journalists, doctors,
and others who appear to be independent, trustworthy sources
of information. For example, the public is naturally suspicious
when pesticide companies claim their poisonous products are
safe. But if former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, one of
the nation's most trusted public figures, says pesticides are
safe, we're more likely to believe the message. After all, Koop
warned us about AIDS and tobacco, so wouldn't he be up-front
about pesticides, too? Sadly, no. PR strategists scored a major
victory in 1990 when Koop spoke out against Big Green, a referendum
that would have regulated or banned many pesticides. His opposition
was considered an important factor in the referendum's defeat.
Jensen:
We ought to remember what's at stake here. What we're really
talking about is corporations promoting death for profit.
Stauber: The most powerful PR firms, such as Hill & Knowlton
and Burson-Marsteller, often work for brutal dictatorships.
Most Washington lobbying firms are willing to represent dictatorships.
Jensen:
How do these people live with themselves?
Stauber:
Apparently, very well. They have prestigious positions, nice
wardrobes, six-figure salaries, and expensive homes. They hobnob
with celebrities and politicians and corporate executives. They
tell themselves that what they do is beneficial to society,
or that if they didn't do it, someone else would. Some PR flacks
invoke the Nuremberg defense: "I was just following orders."
I have a friend who was recruited right out of college by a
major PR firm. They liked what she'd written about environmental
issues, and they said to her, "All you have to do is write,
and we'll pay you a nice salary." It was just what she
wanted to do, and she was paid much more than most writers.
She rose to be a vice-president. Then one day, she woke up in
a cold sweat and couldn't go on. She quit and went to work in
journalism. But few people opt out the way she did.
Jensen:
How did you get started doing this sort of work?
Stauber: Ironically, I owe my inspiration to Burson-Marsteller,
because it was after I caught them infiltrating and spying on
a meeting of public-interest activists that I decided to start
PR Watch and shine a light on this sordid industry.
In 1990,
I organized a meeting of citizen groups opposed to the Monsanto
company's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, called
rBGH. Surveys of consumers and farmers showed overwhelming opposition
to injecting a hormonal drug into cows to force more milk out
of them. Unfortunately, thanks to the hundreds of millions of
dollars spent by Monsanto on public relations and on influencing
the Clinton administration, rBGH was approved by the Food and
Drug Administration in 1993 and is now in wide use. What's worse,
milk and dairy products produced with the use of the drug are
not labeled, which means consumers have almost no way of avoiding
it. Some companies, like Ben & Jerry's and Stonyfield Farm,
that have refused to accept milk from cows injected with rBGH
have been threatened with legal action by Monsanto. Back in
1990, when rBGH was still just a billion-dollar gleam in Monsanto's
corporate eye, I organized a meeting in Washington, DC, of the
Consumers Union, the National Family Farm Coalition, the Humane
Farming Association, and other groups. Shortly before the meeting,
I received a call from a woman who identified herself as "Lisa
Ellis, a member of the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council."
She said she'd heard of the meeting and asked if her organization
could send a representative; it wanted to make sure schoolchildren
could avoid rBGH-produced milk. I said they were certainly welcome,
and a woman named Diane Moser attended our meeting.
A few months
later, a reporter told me that Monsanto was bragging about having
placed a spy in our meeting. A little sleuthing revealed that
the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council was a ruse, and that
both Diane Moser and Lisa Ellis were working for Burson-Marsteller
on the Monsanto account. A former employee of that firm later
told me that it routinely sends new employees into deceptive
and unethical situations to see if they're willing to be dishonest
on behalf of its clients. At the time, though, I'd never heard
of such a thing. I felt invaded and swore I would find out what
kind of scum went around spying this way. Who was Burson-Marsteller?
Through
the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to obtain thousands
of pages of internal documents from their PR campaign. I found
I was up against one of the largest, most effective, best-funded,
best-connected public-relations campaigns in history. Few people
even knew the battle was going on, however, because most Americans
had never heard of genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.
Many of those who did hear about the drug heard about it under
a different name. A 1986 survey done for the dairy industry
- which has worked hand in hand with Monsanto to promote rBGH
- showed that the term "bovine growth hormone" caused
consumers to worry, so the industry began calling the drug bovine
somatotropin, which is Latin for "growth hormone."
Then a PR firm that monitors reporters began giving positive
marks to those who called it bovine somatotropin, and negative
marks to those who referred to it by its proper name, bovine
growth hormone.
Jensen:
I've seen the same thing happen in logging. Timber-industry
and Forest Service representatives try not to use the term "old
growth," preferring instead to call ancient trees "overmature"
or "decadent." There are also a number of euphemisms
for clear-cuts; my favorite is "temporary meadows."
Stauber: If you can control the terms of the debate, you'll
win every time. If you read something about bovine somatotropin,
a "natural protein" used to enhance yields in dairy
farming, your response will likely be more positive than if
you read about injecting dairy cows with a genetically engineered
growth hormone.
Jensen:
How do PR firms get away with planting these terms in news stories?
Stauber:
Journalism is in drastic decline. It's become a lousy profession.
The commercial media are greed-driven enterprises dominated
by a dozen transnational companies. Newsroom staffs have been
downsized. Much of what you see on national and local TV news
is actually video news releases prepared by public-relations
firms and given free to TV stations and networks. News directors
air these PR puff pieces disguised as news stories because it's
a free way to fill air time and allows them to lay off reporters.
Of course, it's not just television that's the problem. Academics
who study public relations report that half or more of what
appears in newspapers and magazines is lifted verbatim from
press releases generated by public-relations firms.
Jensen:
That doesn't surprise me. But maybe I'm just cynical.
Stauber:
Frankly, if you're not cynical, you're not understanding what's
happening. The reality is that the wheels of media are greased
with more than $100 billion a year in corporate advertising.
The advertisers' power to dictate the content of what we see
as news and entertainment grows every year. After all, the real
purpose of the media as a business is to deliver an audience
to advertisers. Journalists find themselves squeezed between
advertising money coming in the back door and press releases
coming in the front.
Not only
this, they've become dependent on PR firms for the stories they
do write. All journalists know, if you want to investigate a
corporation, you eventually have to talk with someone there.
Unless you belong to the same country club as the top executives,
you're going to pick up the phone and get the "vice-president
of communications" - i.e., a public-relations flack. You
need this person's help. This probably isn't the last story
you'll do on this corporation. If you write a hard-hitting piece,
no one at that corporation will ever speak to you again. What's
that going to do to your ability to write about that industry?
What's it going to do to your career?
Some PR
companies - such as Carma International and Video Monitoring
Service - specialize in monitoring news stories and journalists.
They can immediately evaluate all print, radio, and television
coverage of a subject to determine which stories were favorable
to corporate interests, who the reporters were, who their bosses
are, and so on. The PR firms then rank reporters as favorable
or unfavorable to their clients' interests, and cultivate relationships
with cooperative reporters while punishing those whose reporting
is critical. Certain PR firms will provide dossiers on reporters
so that, between the time a reporter makes an initial phone
call and the time a company's vice-president of communications
calls back, the company will have found out the name of the
reporter's supervisor, all about the reporter's family and background,
and other pertinent information.
Jensen:
We often hear charitable giving referred to as "good public
relations." How does this work?
Stauber: Corporations want us to believe that they are concerned,
moral "corporate citizens" - whatever that means.
So businesses pump millions of dollars into charities and nonprofit
organizations to deceive us into thinking that they care and
are making things better. On top of that, corporate charity
can buy the tacit cooperation of organizations that might otherwise
be expected to criticize corporate policies. Some PR firms specialize
in helping corporations to defeat activists, and co-optation
is one of their tools.
Some years
ago, in a speech to clients in the cattle industry, Ron Duchin,
senior vice-president of the PR firm Mongoven, Biscoe, and Duchin
(which represents probably a quarter of the largest corporations
in the world), outlined his firm's basic divide-and-conquer
strategy for defeating any social-change movement. Activists,
he explained, fall into three basic categories: radicals, idealists,
and realists. The first step in his strategy is to isolate and
marginalize the radicals. They're the ones who see the inherent
structural problems that need remedying if indeed a particular
change is to occur. To isolate them, PR firms will try to create
a perception in the public mind that people advocating fundamental
solutions are terrorists, extremists, fearmongers, outsiders,
communists, or whatever. After marginalizing the radicals, the
PR firm then identifies and "educates" the idealists
- concerned and sympathetic members of the public - by convincing
them that the changes advocated by the radicals would hurt people.
The goal is to sour the idealists on the idea of working with
the radicals, and instead get them working with the realists.
Realists,
according to Duchin, are people who want reform but don't really
want to upset the status quo; big public-interest organizations
that rely on foundation grants and corporate contributions are
a prime example. With the correct handling, Duchin says, realists
can be counted on to cut a deal with industry that can be touted
as a "win-win" solution, but that is actually an industry
victory.
Jensen:
Why does this strategy keep working?
Stauber: In part, because we don't have a watchdog press that
aggressively investigates and exposes PR lies and deceptions.
Its success is also a reflection of the sorry state of democracy
in our society. We really have a single corporate party with
two wings, both funded by wealthy special interests. On the
critical issues - taxation, health care, foreign policy - there's
rarely much disagreement. If there is, more special-interest
money floods in to make sure the corporate agenda wins out.
On a deeper level, we all want to believe these lies. Wouldn't
it be great to wake up and find ourselves living in a functioning
democracy? To be truly represented by our so-called Representatives?
Not to have to worry about the destruction of the biosphere
or the safety of the water we drink and the food we eat? I think
we all buy in because we want to believe things aren't as bad
as they really are.
The reality
is, though, that the US political and social environment is
corrupt and deeply dysfunctional. Structural reforms must be
made in our political and economic system in order to assert
the rights of citizens over corporations. But since big corporations
dominate the media, we're not going to hear about this on network
news or in the New York Times. We're not going to hear about
it from politicians who are bought and paid for by wealthy interests.
The beginning of the solution is for people to recognize that
it's not enough to send checks in response to direct-mail solicitations
from politicians and public-interest groups. We need to become
real citizens and get personally involved in reclaiming our
country.
Big environmental
organizations, socially responsible investment funds, and other
groups perpetuate the myth that if we just write checks to them,
they'll heal the environment, reform the corrupt campaign-finance
system, protect our freedom of speech, and reign in corporate
power. This is a dangerous falsehood, because it implies that
we don't have to sweat and struggle to make democracy work.
It's so much easier to write a check for twenty-five or fifty
dollars than it is to integrate our concerns about critical
issues into our daily lives and organize with our neighbors
for democracy.
Many so-called
public-interest organizations have become big businesses, multinational
nonprofit corporations. The PR industry knows this and exploits
it well with the type of co-optation strategies that Duchin
recommends.
Jensen:
This seems especially true of big environmental groups.
Stauber: E. Bruce Harrison, one of the most effective public-relations
practitioners in the business, knows that all too well. He's
made a lucrative career out of helping polluting companies defeat
environmental regulations while simultaneously giving the companies
a "green" public image. In the industry, they call
him the "Dean of Green." As a longtime opponent of
the environmental movement, Harrison has developed some interesting
insights into its failures. He says, "The environmental
movement is dead. It really died in the last fifteen years,
from success." I think he's correct. What he means is that,
in the eighties and nineties, environmentalism became a big
business, and organizations like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness
Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental
Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council became
competing multi-million-dollar bureaucracies. These organizations,
Harrison says, seem much more interested in "the business
of greening" than in fighting for fundamental social change.
He points out, for instance, that the Environmental Defense
Fund (whose executive director makes a quarter of a million
dollars a year) sat down and cut a deal with McDonald's that
was probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars in publicity
to the fast-food giant, because it helped to "greenwash"
its public image.
Jensen:
How so?
Stauber:
After years of being hammered by grassroots environmentalists
for everything from deforestation to inhumane farming practices
to contributing to a throwaway culture, McDonald's finally relented
on something: it did away with its styrofoam clamshell hamburger
containers. But before the company did this, it entered into
a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund and gave that
group credit for the change. Both sides "won" in the
ensuing PR lovefest. McDonald's took one little step in response
to grassroots activists, and the Environmental Defense Fund
claimed a major victory.
Another
problem is that big green groups have virtually no accountability
to the many thousands of individuals who provide them with money.
Meanwhile, the grassroots environmental groups are starved of
the hundreds of millions of dollars that are raised every year
by these massive bureaucracies. Over the past two decades, they've
turned the environmental movement's grassroots base of support
into little more than a list of donors they hustle for money
via direct-mail appeals and telemarketing.
It's getting
even worse, because now corporations are directly funding groups
like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the National
Wildlife Federation. Corporate executives now sit on the boards
of some of these groups. PR executive Leslie Dach, for instance,
of the rabidly anti-environmental Edelman PR firm, is on the
Audubon Society's board of directors. Meanwhile, his PR firm
has helped lead the "wise use" assault on environmental
regulation.
Corporations
and public-relations firms hire so-called activists and pay
them large fees to work against the public interest. For instance,
Carol Tucker Foreman was once the executive director of the
Consumer Federation of America, a group that itself takes corporate
dollars. Now she has her own lucrative consulting firm and works
for companies like Monsanto and Proctor & Gamble, pushing
rBGH and promoting the fake fat Olestra, which has been linked
to bowel problems. She also works with other public-interest
pretenders like the Washington, D.C.-based organization Public
Voice, which takes money from agribusiness and food interests
and should truthfully be called Corporate Voice.
Jensen:
It seems the main thrust of the PR business is to get the public
to ignore atrocities.
Stauber:
Tom Buckmaster, the chairman of Hill & Knowlton, once stated
explicitly the single most important rule of public relations:
"Managing the outrage is more important than managing the
hazard." From a corporate perspective, that's absolutely
right. A hazard isn't a problem if you're making money off it.
It's only when the public becomes aware and active that you
have a problem, or, rather, a PR crisis in need of management.
Jensen: How does your work at PR Watch help?
Stauber: The propaganda-for-hire industry perverts democracy.
We try to help citizens and journalists learn about how they're
being lied to, manipulated, and too often defeated by sophisticated
PR campaigns. The public-relations industry is a little like
the invisible man in that old Claude Rains movie: crimes are
committed, but no one can see the perpetrator. At PR Watch,
we try to paint the invisible manipulators with bright orange
paint. Citizens in a democracy need to know who and what interests
are manipulating public opinion and policy, and how. Democracies
work best without invisible men.
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