WAR ON TRUTH, The Secret Battle for the American Mind

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WAR ON TRUTH

The Secret Battle for the American Mind An Interview with John Stauber

By Derrick Jensen 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 fund-raising purposes.

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 U.S., 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 U.S.

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.

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 U.S. 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, D.C., 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

grass-roots 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 U.S. 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.

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 U.S. 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 grass-roots 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 grass-roots 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

grass-roots 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 move-ment's grass-roots 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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