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Ruder Finn

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JARED: Ok this is from a string of letters between Powell and this guy from Madison Avenue, William Ruder. Ruder was co-founder of the PR agency Ruder Finn, which was key to helping Philip Morris with their campaigns to deny the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer.

Ruder wrote to Powell:

“I enjoyed our discussion about the question of the whole free enterprise system — and the open question as to who is going to be doing the work to make sure that in the long run it survives. I think unfortunately that this is in the category of everybody’s job — and therefore nobody’s. And that’s a real pity.”

...

ep 4

This includes three secret meetings of a “Powell Memo Task Force” — including one at Disney World. These gatherings drew together America’s most powerful businessmen, a future president, and an ambitious young media consultant named Roger Ailes.

https://archive.md/uqFvL

Astroturf Troopers: How the polluters' lobby uses phony front groups to attack the Kyoto treaty.

By Keith Hammond...Thu Dec. 4, 1997

In the battle to shape public opinion on global warming, the big polluters are fighting dirty. In tandem with their air war of bogus advertising, the major carbon-emitting industries are mobilizing phony grassroots troops on the ground to lobby against the global Climate Change Treaty being negotiated this week in Kyoto, Japan. And some of those troops would be right at home in Tim McVeigh's militia unit.

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), run byWashington P.R. firm Ruder Finn, represents the big oil, gas, coal, and auto corporations. And while its stated mission is to coordinate "the active involvement of U.S. business in the scientific and policy debates," a MoJo investigation found that GCC is also coordinating a secret coalition of extreme right-wingers and astroturf groups—fake grassroots lobbyists funded by conservative foundations and corporations—including so-called "Wise Use" radicals, John Birchers, Lyndon LaRouchites, and anti-UN New World Order conspiracists....GCC chairman William O'Keefe, an executive with the American Petroleum Institute, kickstarted this secret coalition in 1996 when he hired former lobbyist Susan Moya to set up a national network of "grassroots" groups, a network that now includes dozens of industry-funded astroturf groups in several states.

Moya denied the existence of her astroturf network, but the MoJo Wire has obtained a memo that says otherwise, written by Moya herself. Moya and GCC refused to answer questions about their grassroots setup, but some of the corporate-funded astroturf groups named in her memo, including Texas Citizens for a Sound Economy and People for the West, confirmed that they were part of Moya's network of "state grassroots leaders," and that they received this memo. Moya's network also includes right-wing extremist groups, some of them downright wacky:

At a GCC "grassroots" strategy meeting this spring—held at the swank Washington offices of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association—executives and lobbyists from the oil, auto, and utilities industries listened intently asSovereignty International chairman Henry Lamb boasted that his Wise Use anti-environmental network could deliver thousands of astroturf phone calls urging Congress to spike the Kyoto treaty, says a business lobbyist who attended the meeting. (Lamb also labeled Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.) a "socialist" for his efforts to curb pollution in New England.) Duly impressed, GCC chairman O'Keefe, who was directing the meeting, pledged to give Lamb whatever resources he needed for astroturf lobbying.

So what? So Sovereignty International is a leading promoter of United Nations paranoia, claiming that environmentalism is part of a plot to establish a "one world government." The group was founded in 1988 by Lamb; Tom McDonnell of the American Sheep Industry Association, who has collaborated with Lyndon LaRouche followers; and Dr. Michael Coffman, a self-styled expert on global environmentalism who did a national speaking tour this summer sponsored by the John Birch Society. His topic: The U.N.-corporate-environmentalist conspiracy to seize private land in America, hand it over to wild animals, and herd all the humans into crowded communities.

In June, GCC President Gail McDonald was an unscheduled speaker at the seventh annual Fly-In for Freedom, the anti-environment lobbying blitz on Washington run by the Alliance for America, which networks more than 600 Wise Use groups nationwide. Though her name didn't appear on Fly-In materials, McDonald appeared on a panel on global environmental issues, and gave a presentation to the assembled anti-enviros. Her message was familiar: Global warming is just a theory, and even if it's real, it can't be blamed on the CO2 polluter industries. McDonald, a former Clinton appointee turned corporate lobbyist, also spoke briefly at a Fly-In luncheon sponsored by People for the West—a mining industry front that blames environmentalists for Western economic woes.

In November, GCC organized a "national conference" in Washington, D.C. opposing the Clinton administration's position on global warming. Invited speakers, representing groups like the United Mine Workers and theSouth Carolina Black Chamber of Commerce, complained that the Kyoto treaty "could raise taxes, drive up consumer prices and change American lifestyles." But while the guest list seemed pretty mainstream, GCC's conference was sponsored by radical anti-enviros and astroturfers, including Clean Water Act foes the American Farm Bureau Federation, mining front group People For the West, and the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), an anti-environmental umbrella group run by New World Order crank Henry Lamb. Founded and funded by land developers, ECO claims to network more than 300 Wise Use groups, most of them funded by the extractive industries. For an in-depth look at ECO and its ties to other right-wing and corporate astroturf groups fighting the Kyoto treaty, click here.

Dogging the EPA's regional workshops on global warming this year was Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), perhaps the premier corporate-funded astroturf crew. To protest the Kyoto treaty, CSE fielded handfuls of demonstrators in Dallas in October, Atlanta and Chicago in September, and Boston in June—some of them sporting military camouflage, blue helmets, and signs saying "50 Cent U.N. Gas Tax." The Dallas stunt (see photo above) was co-sponsored by the National Center for Policy Analysis, a corporate-funded free-market think tank.CSE's Patrick Burns appears on Moya's contact list—when we asked Burns if his group had coordinated its "grassroots" demonstrations with the GCC, he hung up the phone.

http://www.p**owerbase.info/**index.php/Global_Climate_Coalition

Global Climate Coalition (GCC) is a coalition of the largest oil, gas, coal, car and chemical companies and trade associations, set up in 1989 'to coordinate business participation in the scientific and policy debate on the global climate change issue'. Members include corporate giants such as Exxon, Du Pont and Union Carbide. Both Shell and BP Amoco have recently left the GCC in an attempt to project a more environment-friendly image.

GCC employs E Bruce Harrison, one of the main anti-environment PR firms, to direct its campaign to discredit the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and undermine the global climate change treaty. This panel of 300 independent experts has published several reports which concluded that the earth is warming up due to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and urgent action is needed to avoid the destructive impact of climate change - flooding, extreme weather etc.

The GCC has successfully lobbied the US government to avoid or water down inter-national controls at climate negotiations at Rio, Berlin and Kyoto. Its strategies include questioning the scientific basis of climate change, shifting the blame of climate change to developing countries, and using the threat of US job losses. It promotes the research of industry-funded scientists, and sets up its own 'grassroots' campaign groups which promote 'wise use' of the earth's resources. Another tactic is the sponsorship of front organisations such as the National Wetlands Coalitionwhich projects an image of environmental protection while promoting oil drilling in wetlands.

....

Global Climate Coalition Ignored its own scientists

In a recent article in the New York Times entitled “Industry Ignored its Scientists on Climate” [1]. Andrew Revkin points to new evidence concerning the Global Climate Coalition. It states that the GCC for more than a decade ‘led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases lead to global warming”. The coalition in that time pointed to uncertainty in the scientific world, fostering an argument against the idea that greenhouse gases were responsible. However, new documents have come to light which shows that even as the coalition worked to manipulate opinion, that its own scientists were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases was sound. In an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995, the coalitions scientists wrote “The scientific basis for Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”.

Stating that in 1997, the year that the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated, that the budget of the GCC was, according to tax records, $1.68 Million, much of which came from the petroleum industry, Revkin continues “Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions ... By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about the consequential issue and delay government action” [2]. They didn’t have to win the argument it is suggested, only cause as much confusion surrounding the issue as possible, in order to divide public opinion. According to Revkin, documents in the shape of minutes, of a committee meeting, concerning a 17 page primer by advisors, reveal that the coalition knowingly excluded sections of the primmer which went against its agenda. One section states “The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse emission-induced climate change” [3].

According to minutes, the committee gave its approval to the primer, but only after advisors agreed to omit the section above. The primer itself was never distributed publically. In essence the coalition had in the findings of its experts, evidence which supported the position of environmentalists at the time .Yet it knowingly decided to suppress this information. Although the coalition came to an end in 2002, lobby groups such as the American Petroleum Institute continue to take a stance against any law or policy to drastically cut emissions.

External Links

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Brown Lloyd James and Bell Pottinger are among at least a handful of PR firms in the U.S. and U.K. that have worked with despots. Others include Potomac Square Group, Qorvis Communications, Ruder Finn, and Monitor Group, which have grabbed headlines for working with Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and The Maldives.

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wiki

Ruder Finn is a public relations firm with co-headquarters in the United States and China. Ruder Finn maintains offices across North America, Europe and Asia. The agency was founded by Bill Ruder and David Finn and is now led by CEO Kathy Bloomgarden. Ruder Finn has four areas of expertise: Health & Wellness, Corporate & Public Trust, Technology & Innovation and Consumer Connections.[1]

RF was established in 1948 in New York with the formal partnership of David Finn and Bill Ruder.[2] Their first client was Perry Como, a famous singer, and over time they expanded their network to include consumer products companies as well as government agencies.

In 1999 Ruder Finn established RFI Studios, a digital practice, to help clients protect and build their reputation online. The agency expanded aggressively in Asia, establishing offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Singapore, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. In 2011, Ruder Finn further strengthened its presence in the region by acquiring Thunder Communications, a Chinese event management, brand and marketing consultancy, and forming a partnership with Kyodo Public Relations, the largest independent PR firm in Japan.[3]

The agency has received multiple honors, including PRSA Bronze Anvils, Big Apple Awards, SABREs and PRWeek Awards.[4][5][6][7] David Finn, the agency’s chairman, also received a Big Apple Award for his leadership, service and ethical conduct in the field of public relations.[8]

Clients[

Controversy

1960s through late 1990s - While representing long-time client Philip Morris (now Altria), Ruder Finn was instrumental in crafting the public relations campaign that disputed the evidence tobacco smoking is hazardous to health.[16][17][18][19]

1998 - Caught in conflict of interest as discoveries of financial dealings of Swiss authorities post-World War II surfaced which involved some of their Jewish clients.[20]

2005 - Pro bono work done for the UN raised speculation when Kofi Annan's nephew, Kobina, worked as an intern at the firm.[21]

2012 - Ruder Finn accepts contract worth £150,000 per month by current government of Maldives that is currently being condemned by many nations and organizations (including the Commonwealth) for organizing a political coup d'état that led to the fall of the first democratically elected President of the Maldives. While vice-president of Ruder Finn Tchividjian "admitted there were 'diverse points of views' surrounding the circumstances around the change of government"[22] the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group has reiterated its call for early elections to be held in the Maldives and that the Commission of National Inquiry set up by the current government to investigate the incidents of 7 February 2012 is not impartial or independent.[23] Since Ruder Finn's involvement with the current coup regime of Maldives, angry pro-democracy Maldivians have been flooding Ruder Finn's Facebook and other social media networks.[24]

David Finn, photographer[

Firm founder Finn is also a well respected photographer, most notably of sculpture, and his photographs have illustrated numerous books. David Finn was also the editor of Sculpture Review magazine for many years.

https://tobaccotactics.org/wiki/ruder-finn/

ruder Finn, Inc. “is one of the world’s largest independent global communications and creative agencies with dual headquarters in the United States and China”1

It has numerous corporate clients, including an association with the tobacco industry that stretches back decades.

Background

Ruder Finn was founded by David Finn and William Ruder in 1948, with singer Perry Como the agency’s first client, and is now one of the world’s biggest privately owned PR agencies.2

Ruder Finn represents more than 250 corporations,governments, not-for-profit organisations and start-ups.3

It has four main divisions: health and wellness, corporate reputation, technology and innovation, and consumer.4

The agency has seven main offices worldwide, in China, India, Singapore, the UK and the US, and includes McDonalds, Mondelez International, PepsiCo, Sanofi, and Volkswagenamong its clients.5

Ruder Finn employs more than 700 staff and its global revenue rose 10% to$78 million in 2019.6

Senior management

As of May 2020, the senior management of Ruder Finn included:7

Links with the Tobacco Industry

Ruder Finn’s long relationship with the tobacco industry, dating back to the 1960s, is documented in tobacco industry documents publicly disclosed during a series of US court cases in the 1990s.

The agency worked on public relations and advertising campaigns for Philip Morris (now Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International), as well as for the Tobacco Institute, a lobbying body formed by the tobacco industry in 1958 in order to communicate its agenda to the US government and public.

It benefitted from a long-standing relationship between George Weissman, former chairman and CEO of Philip Morris, and Ruder Finn co-founders David Finn and William Ruder.8

The agency resumed its relationship with the tobacco firm in 2019, albeit at arms length. Ruder Finn was given a seven-figure sum to work for the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. The Foundation says that it is an independent organisation but is solely funded by Philip Morris. (For more on the work with the Foundation see below).

1960s

On 11 January 1964, the US Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health released its first report and concluded that smoking causes lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men and is a probable cause of lung cancer in women.9

Three months later, Philip Morris signed an agreement with Ruder Finn.10

The agency engaged in a campaign to deny the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer and diffuse public fears over the safety of smoking. In one such example, in a press release issued on 28 October 1968, James C. Bowling, Vice President for Philip Morris Incorporated, called for “care, cooperation and confidence” andurged an attempt to “find the truth” rather than a “government answer” or an “industry answer” to the problem.11

During this decade, Ruder Finn’s work included arranging a series of promotional appearances for Philip Morris spokesman Johnny Roventini to accompany the launch of Marlboro Green, a menthol cigarette.1213

1970s

On 28 February 1970, Ruder Finn proposed that the tobacco industry position itself as “a responsible industry with a strong sense of duty and obligation to the public — a position similar to the beer and liquor industry.”14 A core message of the advertising it recommended was: “We reject the outrageous charges that are now being made against smoking. They simply are not true.”14

The agency targeted leading scientists in a bid to downplay the risks of smoking. One example was Dr Ernst Wynder, founder of the American Health Foundation, who Ruder Finn took to lunch in June 1973.A note of the lunch stated: “if there were some way that he and the cigarette industry, or he and the food industry could work together and seek out common interests that go toward satisfying the desires of all sides, then I believe this would be an amenable approach for him.”15

Subsequently, the agency informed Philip Morris: “I thought you might want to see the press kit that we have prepared for the opening of the new facility for Ernie Wynder’s American Health Foundation. We prepared it completely at Ruder & Finn – and please note that we have handled it so there is not one single mention of the problem of smoking and health.”15

In addition to arranging support for scientific institutions, the agency mounted a series of high-profile art sponsorships to promote Philip Morris and its brands. These included exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York and Galeria Bonina de Buenos Aires in Argentina.16

For more information on how the tobacco industry uses targeted donations to improve its corporate image, visit our page on CSR Strategy.

Negating the risk [LOMBORG SHUFFLE?!]

A report for Philip Morris by Ruder Finn at the start of the decade argued that smoking should be far down the list of health priorities. It claimed: “Many, if not most, of the federal government’s findings concerning the dangers of cigarette smoking have not been proven by clinical experiments.”17

The report ‘Cigarette Smoking and Other Hazards to Health and Safety: A Comparison’ cited eight dangers “that are as menacing (or more so) to individual and public health and safety as cigarette smoking.”17 These were: mental illness, accidents, chronic diseases, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime and violence, air pollution and malnutrition and obesity.

It argued that radiation pollution, water pollution and pesticides were “three long-range hazards which, if not prevented or controlled, may pose a potentially much greater threat to life than cigarette smoking.”17 By comparing tobacco to other known threats to human health, the industry sought to minimise and shift the public and scientific community’s focus away from the perceived harm of smoking.

Throughout the seventies the agency also continued its work on sponsorship programmes for Philip Morris ranging from scientific meetings to film festivals. It promoted annual “Philip Morris Science Symposiums” in the mid-seventies, which featured presentations from Nobel laureates.18

Ruder Finn also arranged film festivals to promote the US Benson and Hedges and Marlboro brands in San Francisco and Boston during the same period.19

For more information on the tobacco industry’s historic attempts to influence the scientific agenda, see our page Influencing Science.

1980s

Concerns over a conflict of interest saw the American Academy of Family Physicians stop using Ruder Finn as its PR agency in 1981, in reponse to pressure from anti-smoking organisation Doctors Ought to Care.20

William Ruder left the agency in 1981 to start his own consultancy, but remained a member of Ruder Finn’s board21 and sat on the Tobacco Institute Communications Committee between 1984 and 1986.22

1990s

When France brought in a ban on tobacco advertising and restrictions on where people could smoke, Philip Morris asked Ruder Finn to devise a corporate affairs programme to strengthen its influence in the country.

The agency proposed:23

“establishing a discrete, credible and effective voice and an institutionalised lobby (or more than one over time) to defend its interests without being visible as Philip Morris ensuring a proactive influence on legislative, regulatory and grass roots initiatives as they develop in order to extend the time frame and environmental space for smokers in France.” and recommended that the “defense of issues surrounding tobacco needs to be done in athird partycontext – non-tobacco linked experts, sources need to speak on behalf of tobacco interests.”23

This recommendation advocates using front groups to promote tobacco industry interests and influence legislation, effectively outsourcing advocacy for the industry’s agenda.

Ruder Finn also worked on a major arts sponsorship deal that resulted in Philip Morris supporting a history of abstraction exhibition at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1996.24

In October 1998, Planned TV Arts Washington, a division of Ruder Finn, arranged a radio tour for tobacco consultant John Luik to spread the message of “junk science” in relation to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s warnings over Environmental Tobacco Smoke.25

Discarding the past

During a debate on the ethics of tobacco PR in New York on 8 September2014, Ruder Finn’s Chief Innovation Officer, Michael Schubert, said:26

“I come from a company that when the surgeon general came out with its warning and it was determined even before the surgeon general came out with this warningbut when it started to be explored that cigarettes really were harmful to your health many, many years ago, we resigned all our cigarettes accounts and would not promote cigarette smoking to people.” adding: “You could be promoting selling something and getting people to do something that was not good for them and we didn’t want to be part of that.”

PR for Foundation for a Smoke-Free World

Despite that pronouncement, five-years-later Ruder Finn returned to the sector – though this time working for an organisation which says it is independent of the tobacco industry..

The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World positions itself as an independent scientific organisation aimed at ‘accelerating the end of smoking’ and is solely funded by Philip Morris International.272829

In February 2019 the Foundation contracted Ruder Finn to “manage global communications and the Foundation’s annual report.”30 The agency was paid US$2,072,480 by the Foundation in 2019.29

In 2019, Ruder Finn produced a short film featuring Derek Yach, the Foundation’s President.31 In the ‘Message from Derek’ film, posted on YouTube on 15 August 2019, Yach called for engagement with smokers, who he claimed have been ostracised from tobacco control. He also said the tobacco industry had an opportunity to change: “What happens if the unthinkable really happens and they are starting to find a way of separating nicotine from the bad stuff?”32

In September 2020, Ruder Finn Asia circulated invitations to FSFW’s “15 years of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control” conference.33 See our Foundation for a Smoke-Free World page for more detail.

According to their LinkedIn accounts, Ruder Finn’s Brian Laird, Senior Vice President, Healthcare/Consumer Digital & Social,34 and Winston Duncan, Account Executive,35 are among those working on the Foundation account in 2020.

Other controversial clients

The agency was hired to promote the causes of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Balkan war in the early 1990s.36

Ruder Finn also worked for the Global Climate Coalition in 1997, representing the interests of fossil fuel firms lobbying against moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.37

In 2004, it was brought in to help the US Tuna Foundation fight back against warnings of mercury in canned tuna.38

Pro-democracy campaigners protested outside Ruder Finn’s London office in 2012 after it emerged that the agency was working for the Maldives government, which had been accused of removing President Mohamed Nasheed in a coup d’etat.39

Relevant Links

Ruder Finn website

Tobacco Tactics Resources

References [many]

mojo w/ links

the battle to shape public opinion on global warming, the big polluters are fighting dirty. In tandem with their air war of bogus advertising, the major carbon-emitting industries are mobilizing phony grassroots troops on the ground to lobby against the global Climate Change Treaty being negotiated this week in Kyoto, Japan. And some of those troops would be right at home in Tim McVeigh's militia unit.

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), run by Washington P.R. firm Ruder Finn, represents the big oil, gas, coal, and auto corporations. And while its stated mission is to coordinate "the active involvement of U.S. business in the scientific and policy debates," a MoJo investigation found that GCC is also coordinating a secret coalition of extreme right-wingers and astroturf groups—fake grassroots lobbyists funded by conservative foundations and corporations—including so-called "Wise Use" radicals, John Birchers, Lyndon LaRouchites, and anti-UN New World Order conspiracists.

GCC chairman William O'Keefe, an executive with the American Petroleum Institute, kickstarted this secret coalition in 1996 when he hired former lobbyist Susan Moya to set up a national network of "grassroots" groups, a network that now includes dozens of industry-funded astroturf groups in several states.

Moya denied the existence of her astroturf network, but the MoJo Wire has obtained a memo that says otherwise, written by Moya herself. Moya and GCC refused to answer questions about their grassroots setup, but some of the corporate-funded astroturf groups named in her memo, including Texas Citizens for a Sound Economy and People for the West, confirmed that they were part of Moya's network of "state grassroots leaders," and that they received this memo. Moya's network also includes right-wing extremist groups, some of them downright wacky:

So what? So Sovereignty International is a leading promoter of United Nations paranoia, claiming that environmentalism is part of a plot to establish a "one world government." The group was founded in 1988 by Lamb; Tom McDonnell of the American Sheep Industry Association, who has collaborated with Lyndon LaRouche followers; and Dr. Michael Coffman, a self-styled expert on global environmentalism who did a national speaking tour this summer sponsored by the John Birch Society. His topic: The U.N.-corporate-environmentalist conspiracy to seize private land in America, hand it over to wild animals, and herd all the humans into crowded communities.

EPA's global warming Web site offers in-depth explanations of the science and the treaty. Corporate Watch's Kyoto site tracks big-business influence on the treaty negotiations. The Environmental Working Group's CLEAR site tracks hundreds of anti-environmental groups and their funders, complete with a searchable database.