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UK/Dozens of Ad & PR Industry Directors Have Ties to Heavily Polluting Industries

:{ByTJ Jordan and Rachel SherringtononApr 3, 2024

Dozens of Ad & PR Industry Directors Have Ties to Heavily Polluting Industries - DeSmog

Insiders fear that conflicts of interest on the boards of the six largest communications firms are quashing effective climate action....

half of the board members at the world’s six largest advertising and public relations companies have ties to polluting industries, DeSmog can reveal.

Of the 64 total board members at Omnicom Group, WPP, Interpublic Group (IPG), Publicis Groupe, Dentsu and Havas, 32 have significant experience in carbon-heavy sectors such as fossil fuels, fossil fuel financing, plastics, utilities, and aviation. Twenty-two are still serving in roles at such companies.

With combined revenues of $67 billion in 2022, the six firms dominate the communications industry, and have hundreds of subsidiary agencies around the world. Over the past two years, they have collectively held at least 163 contracts with fossil fuel clients, according to research by DeSmog and campaign group Clean Creatives.

DeSmog’s findings highlight the extent to which some of the most powerful leaders in the communications industry may face conflicts of interest amid growing calls from campaigners, scientists, lawmakers, and their own employees to stop producing branding, marketing, PR, and lobby campaigns that promote and protect the fossil fuel industry, or portray climate-damaging companies as green.

“The tangled web of board memberships is a key barrier to agencies moving away from working with fossil fuel clients”, said Belinda Noble, founder of Comms Declare, an industry campaign against representing polluting companies.

All six companies in DeSmog’s analysis have made public commitments to slash the carbon emissions from their operations, creating an appearance of climate awareness. This may be helping them recruit a new generation of talent, as young creatives say they are more likely to join a company that has good sustainability credentials, and less interested when the company has fossil fuel industry clients.

In practice, however, the six do not seem to be giving up pursuit of lucrative contracts with oil and gas companies or related industries, and employees who raise issues around representing polluting brands have told DeSmog that they are meeting opposition at the highest levels of these companies.

“It makes me very ashamed to be in this industry”, said a WPP employee, who asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “There are people in it who do genuinely want to use their skills and knowledge for positive change — lots actually — but unfortunately none of us hold positions of power and there’s only so much we can do.”

The PR industry’s six largest companies — WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, Dentsu, and Havas — have a combined total of 64 board members. DeSmog’s analysis reveals that half of these directors have connections to polluting industries. Credit: DeSmog

DeSmog sent requests for comment to the six holding groups and the directors named in this story via both company media teams and their personal company email addresses, as well as to the other companies named in this story. WPP declined to comment. None of the directors, other holding groups, or other companies responded.

“Disheartening”

Omnicom’s board stood out as the most climate-conflicted, with seven of its 11 directors having direct affiliations with polluting industries.

Among them, Valerie Williams holds a non-executive directorship at the Devon Energy Corporation and Leonard S. Coleman Jr. holds a non-executive directorship at Hess Corporation, both major U.S. oil and gas companies. Chevron is currently in the process of acquiring Hess in a $53 billion deal.

Ronnie S. Hawkins, a non-executive director at Omnicom, is currently a partner at Global Infrastructure Partners, which he joined from EIG Global Energy Partners. Both are fund managers that invest heavily in fossil fuel infrastructure, such as pipeline and refinery projects. DeSmog found that many of these projects are owned by current or recent Omnicom clients, including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, and Repsol.

Hawkins spent 19 years as a senior member of the energy investment divisions at Citigroup and Credit Suisse, respectively the2nd and 20th largest private financers of fossil fuel projects from 2016 to 2022, according to BankTrack. BankTrack’s research also shows that both banks have a history of funding oil and gas majors that also employ Omnicom agencies. Hawkins also did a stint as managing director of Harbour Energy, a London-listed oil and gas company with interests in the UK, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Norway.

Omnicom has held 54 fossil fuel contracts since the beginning of 2022, including three with Exxon, the third-largest oil and gas company in the world by revenue.

A series of videos published on Exxon’s YouTube page in 2023 promoted carbon capture and storage as a way to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuel production — even though the technology largely has a two-decade record of failure at curbing CO2 pollution, and is mostly used by the oil industry to extract more oil. Scientists continue to cast doubt on whether carbon capture will ever function at the huge scale required to make a dent in climate change.

In another 2023 campaign, Mobil (Exxon’s automotive car fuel brand) launched an advert positioning petrol-powered cars as a way of “disconnecting”, in an apparent swipe at electric vehicles.

DeSmog’s analysis found that the proportion of board members with ties to polluting industries ranges from 33% at Havas to 64% at Omnicom Group. DeSmog also found that Omnicom agencies have had dozens of fossil fuel contracts since the start of 2022. Credit: DeSmog

“When you’re in a position like I am, trying to make change at an agency to make it more climate-minded, and you see this research, it makes you wonder whether it’s all a bit of a waste of time”, said an Omnicom employee who is involved in staff-led climate groups. “It helps you understand why we’re continuing to see agencies and holding companies like Omnicom take on fossil fuel briefs. It’s pretty disheartening.”

In its 2022 annual report, Omnicom stated that 2 percent of its revenues — around $286 million — came from the oil, gas, and utilities sectors.

Nadeem Khan, who leads the graduate program in Board Practice and Directorship at the University of Reading, said that accelerating climate action at a company such as Omnicom will require bold decisions.

“Currently, a director’s reputation is mainly judged on delivering short-term financial successes, rather than social and environmental wins”, Khan told DeSmog. “You need a board and CEO that are accepting of an organisation’s needs to adapt as renewed, evolved forms in the long-run, otherwise eventually it may not compete as markets themselves evolve.”

No Appetite for Change

New York-based IPG followed closely behind Omnicom in DeSmog’s analysis, with six of its 10 board members having experience in polluting industries such as natural gas, shipping, and plastics.

In 2022, IPG published a policy directly addressing the issue of working for fossil fuel clients — something the other five companies have yet to do. The policy has a number of requirements, including that clients must set specific emission reduction goals that are aligned with net-zero emissions by 2050.

However, IPG employees have previously told DeSmog that some elements of the policy mean it is weaker than it appears, such as the fact that it only applies to new clients. “You could drive an oil tanker through some of the loopholes in it”, said one IPG insider.

Another employee, who recently left one of IPG’s subsidiary agencies, told DeSmog that it was clear to staff engaging with leadership on polluting clients that “behind closed doors”, there was no genuine appetite for change at the top of the company.

Both employees asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions.

In November, DeSmog reported that McCann, an IPG advertising agency, will pitch to retain its relationship with Saudi Aramco when the current contract runs out this year.

With 2022 revenues of $604 billion, Saudi Aramco is the largest oil and gas company in the world.

At WPP, board chair Roberto Quarta has seven current and past ties to polluting industries, the highest in DeSmog’s analysis, including two current partnerships at Gulf Capital and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, fund management companies that have significant stakes in fossil fuel infrastructure and logistics companies. Many of those companies work closely with Exxon,TotalEnergies, Sabic, PTT Oil, Shell, BP, and Chevron. All are current or past clients of at least 10 WPP agencies, DeSmog found.

Another WPP board member, Simon Dingeman, is the former head of UK investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Since the establishment of the 2015 Paris Agreement, Goldman Sachs has provided $143 billion in fossil fuel finance, according to BankTrack, putting it in the top 15 private funders of the sector.

Dingeman is currently a senior advisor at the investment firm Carlyle Group, which has been criticised by campaigners for making claims about its climate leadership whilst doubling the emissions related to its investments between 2011 and 2021, according to research group Private Equity Climate Risks.

At Paris-based Havas, three out of nine board members have ties to polluting industries. They include Havas chairman-CEO Yannick Bolloré and board member Marie Bolloré, his sister, who have ties to the oil logistics division of the family-run Bolloré Group — which also owns Havas parent company Vivendi.

In 2023, Havas won a major contract with Shell to manage the company’s worldwide advertising spots. With $386 billion in revenue in 2022, Shell is the world’s fourth-largest oil company.

A DeSmog investigation, published in January, revealed growing discontent amongst Havas employees who saw the move as undermining Yannick Bolloré’s numerous public statements of concern about climate change. The investigation also documented a number of current or recent fossil fuel clients among Havas subsidiaries, as well as deep ties between the Bolloré Group and fossil fuel projects in Africa and Canada.

Five out of Dentsu’s nine directors have ties to polluting companies or sectors. Just under half of the 13 directors at Publicis and 12 directors at WPP have similar ties.

Board members at these companies have experiences at a range of companies with fossil fuel interests.

Dentsu’s board chairman, Tim Andree, was previously chief communications officer of BASF, the biggest chemical producer in the world and a major supplier of petrochemicals and services for the oil and mining industries. The German company has a history of lobbying against EU regulations on polluting chemicals.

At Publicis, board member André Kudelski was previously vice-chair of the Geneva Airport and a director at Swiss International Airlines. A number of Publicis agencies have produced campaigns supporting the aviation industry in recent years, including Publicis Sapient’s adverts for Swiss International Airlines’ premium economy class.

The aviation industry accounted for 2 percent of global carbon emissions in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency, with emissions in the sector growing faster than in road, rail, and shipping.

DeSmog’s analysis did not include similar examples below the parent company level. For example, John Dawkins is co-chair of GRACosway, one of Omnicom’s leading political lobbying agencies in Australia, whilst also holding chair and non-executive director roles at mining companies Precious Metal Resources Ltd and Tiaro Coal Ltd, respectively.

GRACosway and Dawkins did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment.

Low-Hanging Climate Commitments

Agencies and industry bodies have been slow to acknowledge the true climate impact of the industry, campaigners say. While five of the six holding companies have now set net-zero goals, these plans only account for emissions generated by their own business operations, such as employee travel, energy used to power office buildings, and the production of advertising campaigns.

All six are members of Ad Net Zero, a voluntary industry initiative whose members pledge to voluntarily reduce these sorts of in-house greenhouse gas emissions. Ad Net Zero’s five-step action plan does not ask members to consider the potential wider climate impacts of their work, such as the risk that producing campaigns that enhance the images of heavily-polluting clients could deflect pressure to cut emissions.

The polluting industry ties among the relevant 32 board members are concentrated in three sectors: banks that finance fossil fuel development, polluting energy production, and investment and holding companies. Credit: DeSmog

Purpose Disruptors, a campaign group focused on the ad and PR industry, defines the carbon pollution associated with an advertising-generated uplift in sales of heavily polluting products and services, such as SUVs or air travel, as “advertised emissions.” The concept has been recognised by the United Nations-led Race to Zero campaign, which focuses on getting businesses, universities, cities, and others to eliminate their carbon emissions no later than 2050.

A 2023 report by Dentsuestimated that the company’s 2022 advertised emissions were 32 times the size of its own operational carbon footprint.

“Board directors have been adamant publicly about their dedication to climate action and their companies’ pivot towards net zero”, said Sarah Chow, an investment analyst at the Sydney-based ethical pension fund Future Super. The fund has been trying to engage with Publicis and WPP on their work for high-carbon-emitting clients. “But behind closed doors and after public [annual general meetings], our relations with these directors have gone cold.”

Some experts argue that the pace of change in the industry is also constrained by the parent company structure of these six firms, which limits the power of subsidiary agencies to make their own decisions on issues such as climate strategy.

“You have to remember, these few leading directors are setting the tone and agenda not just for the overarching company, but multiple chains of companies”, said the University of Reading’s Khan.

Andreas von Angerer, head of impact investing at Zurich-based Inyova, led a group of investors in raising the issue of advertised emissions with the Publicis board at its annual general meeting in May 2023.

The group, which also includes French asset-manager Ecofi and Australia’s Future Super, collectively manages assets worth more than 16 billion euros.

Publicis’ board “told us that all of their clients are reducing emissions, even though their oil clients such as Saudi Aramco and ADNOC” — the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company — “are clearly not”, von Angerer told DeSmog.

“Currently these boards don’t have the progressive mindset needed to really set up a company for the future”, he said. “We really need new faces, new ideas and new minds on boards to make sure these old, established companies keep up with the transition [to net zero].”

Transitioning With the Times?

In a report released in April 2022, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change referenced the communication industry’s role in protecting polluters.

Several months later, UN Secretary-General António Guterrestold the General Assembly that “we need to hold fossil fuel companies and their enablers to account [including] the massive public relations machine raking in billions to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny.”

For the better part of two decades, advertising regulators in the UK, France, Australia, and some other jurisdictions have taken stands on greenwashing. In June 2023, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned adverts by Shell, Repsol, and Petrobras that made misleading claims about their investments in renewable energy. Shell’s adverts had been created by WPP’s Wunderman Thompson (now VML), and Repsol’s by DDB Spain, an Omnicom agency.

In November, for the first time, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two ads for promoting driving that harms the environment. The adverts for the Toyota Hilux SUV were made by WPP agency The&Partnership, according to industry publication The Drum.

Experts say that these sorts of greenwashing complaints and regulatory bans pose legal risks to individual board members, because they have the potential to inflict reputational damage that could trigger financial losses.

“Directors of advertising agencies must have sufficiently robust governance structures to mitigate and respond to these [reputational and financial] risks”, said barrister Margherita Cornaglia of Doughty Street Chambers, a group of barristers focused on human rights and civil liberties. “Failure to identify or address risks as a result of their links with fossil fuel and other polluting companies could place them in breach of their fiduciary obligations.”

Communications companies may be taking note. In its 2022annual report, WPP mentioned the “increased reputational risk associated with working on client briefs perceived to be environmentally detrimental.” Dentsu has also mentioned these risks in public documents.

Experts say they expect action on issues such as climate change to increase as younger generations join these boards of directors.

“Boards tend to transition in decennial cycles”, the University of Reading’s Khan said. “There emerges a generational shift, a new way of thinking. You can see the difference of mindsets through faster evolving changes — for example at Google, Nvidia, or Microsoft in the tech industry — where boards are made up of more entrepreneurial attitudes and comparatively younger directors.”

But Sarah Chow of Future Super believes these changes need to happen now. “Board directors are often removed from the actual problems their employees face”, she said. “They need fresh blood that understands the pulse of a company’s workforce, and what the workforce wants.” Chow would also like to see union or other employee representatives on the agencies’ boards.

A former WPP employee shared Chow’s vision: “Why isn’t a creative holding company saving a board seat for a junior creative? They are the future of the industry.”

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DESMOG PR Series 3 24}:}:

We're holding the advertising and PR industry accountable - DeSmog

about the Series

When it comes to identifying the culprits responsible for the delay and denial of climate solutions, most people are likely to think of fossil fuel companies rather than the slick world of advertising and public relations. But in the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a “massive public relations machine” is “raking in billions to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny.”

We take readers inside the world’s most influential creative and reputation management firms to show just how deep their ties with Big Oil run, and expose where lofty climate rhetoric runs afoul of commercial realities. And we document the struggles of a younger generation of climate-conscious employees to steer their industry onto a sustainable path — despite resistance from the top.

UK/Dozens of Ad & PR Industry Directors Have Ties to Heavily Polluting Industries

:{ByTJ Jordan and Rachel SherringtononApr 3, 2024

Dozens of Ad & PR Industry Directors Have Ties to Heavily Polluting Industries - DeSmog

Insiders fear that conflicts of interest on the boards of the six largest communications firms are quashing effective climate action.

OPINION

Polluters Are Melting the Winter Sports They Sponsor

:{ByAndrew Simms and Anna JonssononMar 16, 2024

Corporations are using sport to sell the high-carbon products that are killing our winters, and now we can put a figure on the damage their money does.

ANALYSIS

Oil and Gas Companies Want You to Think They Care About Women — but It’s Just PR

:{ByEllen Ormesher, Emily Gertz, Kathryn Clare and Cartie WerthmanonMar 8, 2024

Their ad campaigns for International Women’s Day champion empowerment even as climate change makes women’s lives harder and more dangerous.

Ellen Ormesher and Kathryn Clare Join DeSmog to Investigate Advertising Industry

:{ByDeSmogonFeb 26, 2024

Climate accountability in creative and PR agencies is the focus of our growing team.

Investors Challenge ‘Blind Spots’ in Climate-Friendly Ratings for Ad and PR Giants

:{ByHugh Wheelan and TJ JordanonFeb 25, 2024

DeSmog investigation finds multiple financial risks of work for fossil fuel clients aren't being assessed.

OPINION

TotalEnergies Has no Place in African Football

:{BySamm Farai MonroonJan 31, 2024

Kick Polluters Out says the French oil major wants to sportswash climate-wrecking mega-projects.

UK/Havas London Targeted by Climate Activists Over Agency’s Relationship with Shell

:{ByEllen Ormesher onJan 25, 2024

The protest followed a tip-off that the global comms agency may take on more work for the oil major.

UK/Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré Staked His Brand on Caring About the Climate. So Why Is His Company Working for Shell?

:{ByGeoff Dembicki, Dana Drugmand, Emily Gertz, Ali Lyon and Isobel MoseleyonJan 23, 2024

The Bolloré family’s business empire — which includes Havas, one of the world’s biggest ad agencies — has longtime ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Illustration of Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré in front of a background of shells.

ANALYSIS

Revealed: Three-quarters of Prestigious Green Advertising Awards Go To Agencies Working for Fossil Fuel Industry

:{ByTJ JordanonJan 4, 2024

DeSmog analysis finds majority of Ad Net Zero’s accolade-winners also represent major polluters.

Instagram Influencers Paid to Boost UAE’s Climate Credentials Over COP28

:{ByJoey GrosternonDec 14, 2023

The individuals who spoke to DeSmog said they were ‘deeply disappointed’ by the summit and had not fully understood the relationship between UAE and the organisers.

'Inoculate From Criticism': A Closer Look at the Public Relations Companies Active at COP28

:{ByCartie WerthmanonDec 9, 2023

Controversies surrounding Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber have underscored the role of reputation management in climate diplomacy.

Reuters, New York Times Top List of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Media Enablers

:{ByAmy Westervelt, Matthew Green and Joey GrosternonDec 5, 2023

New report by DeSmog and Drilled reveals extent of commercial partnerships between trusted outlets and Big Oil.

OPINION

Why Saudi Arabia Wins Top Prize in the Bad Sport Awards 2023

:{ByAndrew SimmsonNov 28, 2023

Major polluters are wielding sponsorship as a weapon to make polluting products and lifestyles appear acceptable.

OPINION

Badvertising: How Promoting Pollution Prevents Climate Action

:{ByLeo Murray and Andrew SimmsonNov 22, 2023

Left unaddressed, the warping of our collective consciousness by fossil industry propaganda will make it impossible to achieve the civilisation level transformation required for life as we know it to survive the 21st century.

UK Advertising Watchdog Bans Toyota SUV Ads on Environmental Grounds

:{ByTJ JordanonNov 22, 2023

The adverts “had not been prepared with a sense of responsibility to society,” regulator finds.

McCann to Make New Pitch for Aramco Oil and Gas Advertising Work

:{:{BySam Bright and TJ JordanonNov 16, 2023}:

There is ‘growing unease’ within the PR company about its continued work for one the world’s biggest polluters.

US/Havas Wins Shell Advertising Contract, Drawing Fire from Climate Campaigners

:{ByDana DrugmandonSep 19, 2023

Clean Creatives says move is "huge step backward" for the French ad and public relations company.

WPP Has More Fossil Fuel Clients Than Any Other Advertising Company, Report Finds

:{ByTJ JordanonSep 19, 2023

Clean Creatives’ ‘F-List’ reveals links between creative agencies and polluting industries around the world.

US/American PR Firm Edelman Enabled Oil Baron Al Jaber’s Ascension to Lead COP28 Climate Conference

:{ByCartie WerthmanonSep 13, 2023

Edelman earned millions polishing the UAE’s green image — which helped propel Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber to the top levels of climate diplomacy.

UK/How Shell Used a ‘Granfluencer’ to Promote its Brand

:{ByDimitris Dimitriadis, Joey Grostern and Sam BrightonAug 15, 2023

A Filipino grandma with two million followers is among the hundreds of influencers who have posted content promoting fossil fuel giants.

UK/Revealed: Fossil Fuel Giants Are Using British Influencers to go Viral

:{:{ByDimitris Dimitriadis, Joey Grostern and Sam BrightonJul 27, 2023}:

Some of the world’s biggest polluters are paying social media celebrities and environmentalists to promote their brands to billions of people.

Litigation Over Misleading Climate Claims Has 'Exploded' Over the Past Few Years

:{:{ByDana DrugmandonJul 3, 2023}:

New report details how more “climate-washing” lawsuits and complaints are being filed against corporations’ greenwashing than ever before, and experts warn complicit PR and ad firms could face legal risks.

PR Agency Catering to Oil Interests Led UK Climate Forum’s Communications

:{ByBrendan DeMelleonJun 28, 2023

Weber Shandwick also hosted a roundtable on “authentic” climate communication.

Climate Innovation Forum 2023 website showing event details, sponsors/partners, and London Climate Action Week.

Confronting Big Oil at Cannes Lions: The Viral Moment That Exposed the Ad Industry's Complicity in the Climate Crisis

:{ByTolmeia GregoryonJun 19, 2023

Climate activist Tolmeia Gregory sparked a social media sensation when she challenged a Shell executive at last year's festival. Now she's back, and urging other creatives to take disruptive action.

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US/Fossil Fuel Lobby Kicks off Disinformation Campaign Against EPA Auto Emissions Rule

US/How $9 Billion From Taxpayers Fueled Plastics Production – and Illegal Pollution

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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/un-climate-champions-pr-brunswick-saudi-aramco/

UN climate campaign leaders are taking advice from a PR firm that works extensively

for fossil fuel giants – including the world’s biggest oil company, Saudi Aramco.

The international public relations firm Brunswick has helped the UN’s “high-level climate champions” – a small but influential team led by the UK and Egypt, the hosts of COP26 and COP27 – to develop five UN-backed climate policies and campaigns.

One of these campaigns is Race to Zero, which encourages companies to rapidly reduce emissions, with its flagship initiative, Business Ambition for 1.5°C, calling on corporations to help limit global warming to that level.

But while advising the climate champions, and having signed up as a member of Race to Zero, Brunswick also spins for fossil fuel companies developing dozens of new oil and gas prospects.

these developments will make the 1.5°C goal – which requires a complete stop to new oil and gas projects – much harder to attain.

Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, a campaign calling for PR and advertising agencies to boycott fossil fuel companies, told openDemocracy: “Working for oil drillers and fossil fuel power companies makes Brunswick an opponent of the action that UN high-level climate champions are trying to promote.”

PR companies’ role in the climate crisis has been under renewed scrutiny in recent months, afterAntonio Guterres, the UN secretary general, condemned the “massive public relations machineraking in billions to shield the fossil fuel industry from scrutiny”.

‘Enabling deception’

Brunswick’s chief executive Neal Wolin has said the company wants “to be part of the solution [to the climate crisis] through the advice we give our clients and, importantly, how we operate as a firm”.

But critics have questioned whether Brunswick can live up to that claim, while working for some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters.

Last month, Brunswick client Saudi Aramco said it would increase its oil production capacity by one million barrels per day by 2027 – bringing its total daily output to 13 million barrels.

Another Brunswick client, Harbour Energy, the biggest oil and gas producer in the UK, said in March that it would participate in the drilling of 23 new oil wells this year, and would double the number of rigs it has in operation, from four to eight.

Brunswick client Capricorn Energy is currently exploring new oil prospects in the North Sea, Mauritania, Mexico and Suriname.

In October, Brunswick announced the opening of an office in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital. Days later, the firm helped oil contractor Arabian Drilling and gas power company Marafiq to launch successful initial public offerings (IPO) on the Saudi stock exchange.

In 2019, Brunswick worked on the IPO of Saudi Aramco, when the oil giant raised $25.6bn in the biggest initial stock offering in history.

With the help of Brunswick… oil and gas companies have continued to make sky-high profits while generating heat-trapping emissions

Kathy Mulvey, Union of Concerned Scientists

openDemocracy has also found that Brunswick has previously worked for a host of other oil and gas companies includingBP; Centrica; fracking company Cuadrilla; Sinopec, which is China’s largest oil company; BG Group, which is now part of Shell; and KazMunayGaz, the state-owned Kazakhstan gas company.

Brunswick, which has more than 1,400 employees at 29 offices worldwide, uses its UN work to tout for business from corporate clients, with a video on the firm’s website boasting that it works with “the entire eco-system of actors in the climate space”.

Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told openDemocracy that “skilled communications professionals” such as Brunswick are “enabling the fossil fuel industry’s deception”.

She added: “With the help of Brunswick and other powerful PR firms, major oil and gas companies have continued to make sky-high profits while generating ever more heat-trapping emissions and stepping up greenwashing campaigns.

“In the face of the climate emergency, PR agencies must stop attempting to secure social licence for fossil fuel polluters and instead come down clearly on the side of climate action.”

Sending the wrong message

In June, the Race to Zero campaign strengthened its membership criteria to require firms “to align their lobbying and advocacy activities with net zero by proactively supporting climate policies”.

Existing members – including Brunswick – were given up to a year to meet this new criteria, and Race to Zero published guidance on how to do so. This made clear that all “public relations campaigns” by members should be consistent with halving emissions by 2030.

Brunswick did not respond to questions from openDemocracy on whether it would align its lobbying and advocacy with net zero by June 2023.

But Duncan Meisel told openDemocracy that by working with Brunswick, the Race to Zero sends the wrong message.

Meisel said: “These guidelines are vital to building a clean energy future, and as long as the high-level champions employ Brunswick, they are sending a message that the guidelines should not be taken seriously.”

25 October 2022 | Lucas Amin

Exclusive: ExxonMobil among oil & gas firms handed ‘pollution permits’ under little-known Emissions Trading Scheme]

Tom Hale, a professor of public policy at Oxford University and an expert adviser to Race to Zero, said the campaign’s new membership criteria still failed to capture the impact of service providers such as Brunswick.

While Race to Zero members must have “a 1.5°C-compliant business model”, the rules do not require them to quantify the impact of the work they do for fossil fuel clients.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Hale said: “As net zero is operationalised, one huge area in need of more work is what standards service providers – PR companies, but also lawyers, accountants, management consultants etc – should follow.

“Current carbon accounting tools – including those used by initiatives like Business Ambition for 1.5°C – were not designed to capture the footprint of these kinds of companies, even though their impact on the direction of the economy can be substantial.”

Hale called on “leaders in these industries” to “step up and lay out a credible pathway for what net zero-aligned PR looks like”.

‘Proud of the advice we provide’

A spokesperson for Brunswick told openDemocracy that the firm is “proud of the advice we provide clients across a range of industries on the transition to a resilient net-zero economy, and of our role in advising the UN Climate Change High Level Champions and the Race to Zero campaign.”

They added that it is “vital to be engaged with companies in the most complex sectors to decarbonise. Our climate advice is based on science-based pathways for transition and we advise many businesses in these sectors on the actions it takes to build credibility and trust on climate change.

“Brunswick itself is committed to aligning our firm with a robust science-based 1.5°C pathway by 2028, in line with the Science-Based Targets initiative.”

Frances Way, executive director of the climate champions team, said: “We collaborate with a wide-range of organisations, including Brunswick, that are working to achieve a resilient, 1.5°C-aligned future, requiring actors across all sectors of the economy to transition, including among the most systemically important industries that need to decarbonise.”

The climate champions did not respond to questions about whether Brunswick was in breach of the Race to Zero guidelines.

Last month, more than 400 scientists called on the PR firm Hill+Knowlton Strategies to drop its fossil fuel clients after openDemocracyrevealed it was also working for the Egyptian presidency of COP27.

Some 636 fossil fuel industry representatives registered to attend COP27, according to research by Global Witness, leading to claims that the conference had been hijacked.

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gaslit series

https://www.desmog.com/**2022/06/**16/climate-deniers-fossil-fuel-language-obstruction/

stella l

On a recent episode of the Fox Business show “Mornings with Maria,” American Petroleum Institute CEO and President, Mike Sommers, said that “the most important environmental movement in the world is the American oil and gas industry.”

“A super absurd example of oil and gas companies appropriating and weaponizing the language of climate advocates for their own greenwashing,” commented author and climate activist Genevieve Guenther on Twitter.

Sommers’ statement may be, in fact, one of the most literal examples of how fossil fuel companies are using language to perpetuate their climate denial and fend off action. And because public perception and awareness of the climate crisis are, at least in part, driven by how we talk about it, the fossil fuel industry has used language “to create smoke and mirrors and false impressions around what they’re really doing,” said Christine Arena, author, expert on climate disinformation, and former Executive Vice President at the PR firm Edelman. Arena was one of six employees to resign in 2015 following revelations of the firm’s greenwashing work with fossil fuel lobbies and associations.

PR firms — or “the enablers,” as Arena calls them — have played a key role in exploiting communication and manipulating language to their advantage, all while working on behalf of the fossil fuel industry and using a tobacco industry playbook. Ultimately, they’ve been using it to obstruct climate action, a longtime goal of the oil, gas, and coal industries. “If we take a step back and ask ourselves, why has meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proven to be so difficult? It is at least in part because of communications and because of the language coming from the fossil fuel industry,” said Arena.

Today, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are “appropriating and weaponizing” language from climate advocates, usually in ways that are much less obvious than Sommers’ recent comment.

“The industry is repeating the same phrases it’s hearing from the climate movement to use for their own advertising purposes. They are commandeering the language of sustainability and of the climate movement,” Arena said of fossil fuel companies, adding that they are doing so “to create a false perception that they’re on our side.”

Fossil Fuel Solutionism

Language around climate solutions is particularly susceptible to this treatment, especially as polluting companies invest in strategies and tactics to present themselves as part of the solution to climate change when, clearly —as they continue to prioritize drilling for globe-warming fuels — they are not. That’s ExxonMobil touting its “lower-emission solutions” and staff working to “develop our global strategy for creating sustainable energy” while planning a $10 billion investment in new oil and gas reserves in South America. Some researchers have called this “fossil fuel solutionism."

exxon twit]

This sort of inevitability of fossil fuels — I think that’s a place where language is really important,” said Timmons Roberts, social scientist and executive director of the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University. He says the fossil fuel industry encourages this perception that everyone is complicit in climate change by using its products and is therefore too reliant on them to ever transition away

The strategy is part of a broader communications shift among polluters and their advocates. No longer are oil and gas executives straight-up “denying” that the climate is changing; instead the message becomes one that ultimately slow-walks real climate action — saying, it’s too expensive to address, it’s too late to do anything. “We call these ‘climate delay’ discourses, since they often lead to deadlock or a sense that there are intractable obstacles to taking action,” write Roberts and his colleagues in their “**Discourses of climate delay**” analysis.

Fossil fuel companies and their allies may use delay arguments and tactics across a range of platforms: in promotional campaigns, public declarations, online ads, social media, or political lobbying. Nowadays, the messaging may contain “a blend” of factual omissions and rhetorical distortions, according to Arena, that can be more confusing to people and, therefore, more dangerous than outright lies.

“If you say ‘clean coal’ a lot of people are going to know that there’s no such thing, so that’s easier for the audience to identify,” said Arena. “But then when you look at ExxonMobil’s language around carbon capture, for example, they’ll say things like ‘it’s going to take an all-of-the-above approach,’ and when the oil and gas industry says ‘all of the above,’ they mean oil and gas first.”

Arena considers this type of wording to be a form of greenwashing, where a company uses “selective micro truths,” she explained, in order to create a misleading impression. This type of language is more insidious because it’s creating the perception that oil and gas companies really are “part of the solution” and don’t need regulatory intervention — which they are often lobbying against elsewhere.

“Cleaner burning.” “Lower emissions fuels.” “Lower carbon future.” These phrases are all examples of this, Arena said.

Many of these terms appear on fossil fuel companies’ social media accounts or websites. ExxonMobil uses the phrase “advancing climate solutions” and “lower emission energy future.” Shell is “working…to accelerate the transition to net-zero emissions.” Chevron is “advancing a lower carbon future.”

By participating in the public discourse in this way, fossil fuel companies can manipulate public perceptions by making “support” seem like action. “‘Supporting the Paris agreement’ is also deceptive because it makes it look like they are in line with Paris,” said Arena. “They’re not.”

A new report from more than 40 groups, published by Oil Change International, has found that major U.S. and European oil and gas companies “still fail to meet the bare minimum for alignment with the Paris Agreement.” These companies’ pledges and commitments are far from credible, the report concludes, when they are planning more than 200 fossil fuel expansion projects between now and 2025.

[oil ch intl twt]

the History of Junk Science, Alarmists, and Climate Prophets

Denier and delayer communication strategies aren’t new; in fact they have always been central to the fossil fuel industry and its allies’ climate obstruction.

In the 1990s, for example, “sound science” was an expression used by climate deniers to attack and counter climate science — or “junk science,” as some deniers, such as former Fox News columnist and founder of the website JunkScience.com Steve Milloy, referred to the work of climate scientists like Michael E.Mann.

In another past strategy, that’s now regaining steam, climate deniers and delayers have been employing the terms “realists” and “alarmists.” In 2020, Cambridge University researcher Giulio Corsi and I analyzedthe use of these terms on Twitter, finding a 900 percent increase in their use over the previous four years. As the climate movement was gaining international attention with massive protests between 2018 and 2019, we saw that spikes in tweets about “alarmism” and “realism” often corresponded to high-profile speeches by activist Greta Thunberg. The trend also coincided with the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank and notorious promoter of climate disinformation, enlisting young German YouTuber Naomi Seibt as a counter-figure to Thunberg to denounce her and climate scientists’ “alarmism.”

[greta pix w/ indig]

This framing exploits the negative connotation of the term “alarmist” in order to discredit a legitimate scientific warning, while trying to associate backers of fringe theories about, say, sunspots causing global warming, with rationality and realism.

Milloy employed a combination of these terms when he wrote in 2002: “When the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, air pollution in the U.S. was more of an aesthetic than a public health problem. […] Few people realize this after 30 years of non-stopjunk science-fueled alarmism from environmental activists.” [Emphasis added.]

For decades, deniers have used rhetoric likening those who warn about the catastrophic impacts of the climate emergency to someone who is “out of touch with reality.” You can find it in the 1998 American Petroleum Institute “action plan,” born just a few months after the Kyoto Protocol and developed by Exxon, Chevron, Southern Company, and representatives from conservative organizations, including Milloy. The memo clearly stated that: “Victory will be achieved when those promoting the treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.” [Emphasis added.]

Both uses of language – “sound science” versus “junk science” and “alarmists” versus “realists” – create an “us versus them” dynamic. The result is two polarizing, and utterly fabricated, positions on climate science.

We can see the fossil fuel industry using language in a similar way in its public-facing propaganda, projecting political meaning on its opponents.

“Propaganda is about manipulating public opinions, stoking fears, and sewing divisions,” said Arena. “When they talk about ‘the woke’ or the ‘climate industrial complex’ or ‘activist extremists,’ that is all propaganda. The industry is blaming rising gas prices on ‘woke liberals’ or on renewables or on climate activism. Those are false narratives and they are propaganda-based."

According to John Cook, founder of Skeptical Science and research fellow at Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub in Australia, fossil fuel industry propaganda has been intensifying the “othering” of climate scientists and advocates for climate action for some time.

“There’s a lot of terminology that has become more powerful in sending that signal that climate advocates are different,” said Cook. “Labels to say, ‘these people who care about climate change are trying to change society.’” Climate denial is intimately connected to values like individual freedom and free market fundamentalism,he explained. That’s why those labels are often extended in meaning to accuse climate advocates of a “radical liberal agenda,” said Arena.

The “othering” of climate advocates isn’t only by fossil fuel companies. In September 2021, the Italian Minister of the Ecological Transition called climate activists “radical chic” and said that the “extremist and ideological ones” are “worse than the climate catastrophe.”

Over time, the language of climate deniers and delayers has evolved from “basic climate denial” to “culture wars,” said Arena.

Culture wars are strictly linked to political ideology: that’s why some words are chosen by deniers and delayers over others, because they “tap into broader values” and “activate” their supports, added Cook. For example, deniers might pose the argument that “[climate action] is going to impinge on their freedom,” he said.

The Supposed Church of Climate Change

Another linguistic tactic used to denigrate those who support climate action is to cast an issue with roots in science — climate change — as one of religion. In Italy, for example, the daily newspaper Il Foglio uses pseudo-religious terms when referencing climate change: ecology becomes “a religion to replace canceled Christianity” where “you kiss trees and worship whales;” switching to an electric car is “fanatical;” climate change is referred toas “dogma.” And Friday, the Italian paper writes, has becomethe day of “forced conversion to sustainability” when youth climate activists go on strike from school, as part of Greta’s “children’s crusade.”

Associating climate change with religion reinforces the denier message that the build-up of greenhouse gases and its far-reaching global impacts is actually a matter of faith and has nothing to do with a factual, physical reality in the form of heatwaves and hurricanes. In this scenario, climate advocates seem unreasonable, disconnected from reality and unable to see things clearly. The effect is to relegate those supporting climate science to one end of the spectrum, one where we don’t need to address the intensifying impacts of heating the globe.

But this zealous religious framing happens beyond the pages of Il Foglio. According to Cook, deniers also use words like “cult” and “high priests” to describe climate advocates, while emphasizing that they themselves are “treated like heretics.”

“They are framing themselves as the rational scientific person and the scientists or advocates as the hysterical, biased, faith-based and not evidence-based,” said Cook of climate deniers. “They’re trying to flip reality because ideology is driving their denial.” [heartland reverse engr]

Don’t Worry, Just Adapt!

Another narrative emerging from the denial anddelayer camp is that “adapting” to climate change will be our lifeline: Those perpetuating it end up downplaying the impacts of the climate crisis because they say we will be able to adapt to it.

In a May 31 Slate article about Alex Epstein’s new book Fossil Future, which advocates for fossil fuels, Nitish Pahwa writes: “The new style of climate denial is here: It’s not that carbon emissions aren’t increasing, or aren’t warming the world, but look, you’re doing fine right now, right? So, we’ll be just fine!”

On May 20, Stuart Kirk, the head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management division, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.” Kirk was later suspended for his comments.

[vid]

stuart Kirk, head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management division, was suspended for his comments to investors in which he downplayed the risks of climate change.

This argument implies that working to slow climate change is futile and offers adaptation as “the only possible response” to the climate crisis, according to Roberts and his colleagues in their “Discourses of delay” analysis.

“Every day there’s new discourses being invented either by the actors in these industries that don’t want to make the energy transition or by their public relations firms with tremendous capacity in terms of developing new language discourses,” said Roberts.

Effective PR is a key element to designing a convincing greenwashing campaign. “The PR and ad industry plays a central role in enabling climate obstruction,” said Arena. And the American Petroleum Institute’s is the perfect example of this. “They’re not on it. The only thing that they’re on is architecting and spreading more disinformation, which they are the quarterbacks of doing,” she added.

From fossil fuel solutionism to adaptation-only narratives, these climate obstruction tactics commandeer language in an attempt to undermine one of the most urgent and far-reaching challenges of our day. And the momentum behind such deceptive language is only building.

“We are on a dangerous trajectory,” Arena said. “I would say broadly that climate disinformation and greenwashing are getting much worse, and today we have many more examples to point to than we even did back when the industry was trying to deny climate change altogether.”

Understanding how opponents of climate action employ these discourses of delay is essential to recognizing climate disinformation and misinformation, Arena said, and ultimately to disrupting it. “We have to redouble our efforts to hold these companies and their enablers accountable.”

On Wednesday, a key congressional ally of former President Donald Trump broke with him over the legitimacy of the Saudi-sponsored golf tournament he is hosting on his Trump National Bedminster property in New Jersey.

The argument came after Nick Adams, a pro-Trump social media influencer, took to Twitter to complain that the golfers participating in the tournament weren't getting top billing. "I really have no interest in the PGA Tour FedEx Cup Playoffs without the top LIV Tour golfers being included," he wrote. "Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, and Jason Kokrak should ALL be playing."

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), however, disagreed.

"I have no interest in watching these guys play after selling their souls to the highest bidder when that bidder is a foreign country known to have financed 9-11 and other terrorist activity," wrote Roy. "But whatever… somehow this is MAGA or something."

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in the coordinated attacks on New York and Washington were Saudi nationals. An FBI memo released last year hinted at official Saudi involvement.

Trump himself claimed in 2016 while he was running for president that Saudi Arabia was responsible, without providing any evidence.

"(Now) he chooses to host the kingdom at his course in the backyard where 750 people were blown away," said Brett Eagleson, who was 15 when his dad died in the rubble of the World Trade Center, referencing the number of New Jersey residents killed on 9/11.

"It's incredibly infuriating," he said.

Bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, LIV has sought to lure top golfers from the establishment PGA and DP World tours with contracts that have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Human Rights groups say the venture is a "sportswashing" exercise being used to boost Saudi Arabia's international reputation. Organizers insist their intention is to boost golf's popularity worldwide.

Trump has come under heavy criticism, particularly from the families of 9/11 victims, for agreeing to host the Saudi-backed golf tournament, with many openly protesting the tournament.

For Tim Frolich, who was injured on 9/11, the tournament has reopened old wounds.

"I had trouble sleeping last night, just the anger," the 58-year-old told AFP.

Trump, for his part, has defended Saudi Arabia's involvement in the tournament, claiming to reporters that "nobody's gotten to the bottom of 9/11."

With additional reporting by AFP

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https://www.climateone.org/audio/enablers-firms-behind-fossil-fuel-falsehoods

february 11th, 2022

Public perception is important to any company, and fossil fuel companies are no different. Every year, they spend large amounts of money to make sure that the public is abundantly aware of all of the work fossil fuel companies are doing to help with the transition to clean energy. The problem is, the money spent on the messaging outpaces the money spent on the decarbonization.

PR firms, ad agencies, and law firms work behind the scenes to protect the fossil fuel industry and slow down the clean energy transition. Despite the industry having knowledge of the climate crisis as early as 1959, they continue to resist any change.

For example, many large oil and gas companies say they support a price on carbon pollution. Yet large oil companies invest a small fraction of their profits promoting carbon pricing policies and low carbon energy. The House oversight committee reports that less than half of 1% of their lobbying effort over the past decade focused on carbon pricing. The committee also reports that from 2010 to 2018, BP spent about 2% of its capital expenditures on low carbon investments. Exxon spent less than a quarter of 1% on cleaner energy. Jamie Henn, founder and director ofClean Creatives, gives some insight into these expenditures:

“I think it tells a story that big oil’s supposed commitment to climate action is little more than greenwashing. ExxonMobil just made record profits because of high gas prices. And what are they doing with it? They are telling their shareholders that they are going to increase oil and gas production, and they're doing a $10 billion stock buyback to reward their shareholders. In comparison ExxonMobil spent maybe upwards of about $300 million on algae research, which over the last 10 years, so that's about 30 million a year maybe. Yet that's the focus of all their advertising.”

Despite how much money these companies have to spend, they are still losing the battle of public perception. 60% of Americans say that fossil fuel companies are to blame for the climate crisis and about 50% of them want them to pay damages.Christina Arena, former VP at the global PR firm Edelman, argues that proponents of clean energy can use this reality to help deal with the climate crisis.

“This industry is kind of losing control of the narrative, even though it is trying so hard to direct it. And so, I think that opens the door for clean tech marketers and clean energy marketers to come in with a more compelling narrative. Tell your story better be more creative. Capture America's hearts and minds.”

Law firms also help fossil fuel companies' limit their legal liabilities. Michaela Anang, a research coordinator for Law Students for Climate Accountability and a law student at UC Davis, says the group grew out of a desire by law students to bring more scrutiny to their future employers.

“The top 100 law firms which we called the Vault 100 firms or Big Law are significantly contributing to furthering issues within our climate as opposed to mitigating those issues which we as students and as future legal professionals hope that they would be moving towards. ”

CIC’s Trade Associations PR Investigation in the Media

Posted: April 8, 2019

In early March 2019, the Climate Investigations Center (CIC) launched its Trade Associations and the Public Relations Industry report, which revealed the almost $1.4 billion energy and business trade associations spent over the past decade on advertising, communications, and advocacy via contracts with public relations (PR) companies. Since the publication of the report, CIC’s Kert …

https://climateinvestigations.org/trade-associations-pr-investigation-media/

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CIC’s Trade Associations PR Investigation in the Media

Climate Investigations Center on April 8, 2019

cic pr trade association report summarization photo

Since the publication of the report, CIC’s Kert Davies has been interviewed by online media outlets and podcasts discussing which PR firms were contracted, the various campaigns spawned from these connections, and the impacts these campaigns have on the public and lawmakers.

HuffPost

In a HuffPost article titled Big Business Spent $1.4 Billion On PR, Advertising Over The Last Decade, Chris D’Angelo wrote about CIC’s findings on trade associations and their public relations contracts. Additionally, D’Angelo interviewed Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University who has tracked corporate spending and climate change denial groups. Regarding trade association PR contracts, Brulle says, “I don’t think you can understand the opposition to climate action unless you take this massive amount of activity into account.” Brulle called these PR campaigns the “sinews of the political operations and the cultural operations surrounding climate politics.”

Drilled Podcast

“In a lot of ways, PR firms have been sort of the linchpin of the fossil fuel industry’s plan for a long, long time.”

The true crime podcast, Drilled, hosted Davies on an episode titled, Big Oil Is Ramping Up PR Spending and Oil Production, which focused on the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and public relations firms. The episode covered both CIC’s trade association PR investigation as well as a report published by Influence Map.

Host Amy Westervelt described PR firms as being “the linchpin of the fossil fuel industry’s plan for a long, long time,” highlighting their extensive use by trade associations that represent the corporate interests of their membership. These trade associations allow member companies to push their political and anti-environmental agendas without a direct connection to their brand which might tarnish their reputation.

Westervelt highlighted trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the US Chamber of Commerce as some of the biggest offenders. During the interview, Davies explained that the visible PR campaigns are part of larger goals and targets that have been “agreed upon by the members of that trade association” and are a “window into their political game.” He notes that this tactic includes “very little overt climate denial” and instead is about “laying the groundwork for the campaigns that are against policies on climate change.” For instance, by “making fracking look good” people may begin to “question these policies like the Green New Deal,” Davies says.

Example of trade association advertising, this is API’s Vote4Energy campaign: “We can produce the energy America needs and protect the environment – it doesn’t have to be either/or. There’s already been a lot of progress.” Member companies of API include ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell.

The Real News Network

Kert Davies interviewed by Dharna Noor on the Real News Network, April 2019. View the video above to watch the full Real News Network segment on CIC’s trade associations and public relations spending report.

Davies was also recently interviewed on the Real News Network where he outlined the origins of CIC’s 2019 trade association PR investigation, showcased the report’s findings, and discussed the purpose of trade association campaigns.

As discussed on the show, the money spent on PR contracts by renewable energy associations and fossil fuel associations was a major finding of CIC’s investigation. Of the almost $1.4 billion spent by trade associations in the past decade, only $98.4 million of it (7%) was spent by renewable energy associations. In his interview, Davies elaborated, stating:

…it turns out that if you add all of [the renewable energy trade association PR contracts] up, including the ones that do biofuels and ethanol… they are a fraction of the total spending… API alone is six times the total spending of all the renewable energy associations combined.

API alone spent over six times more than the renewable energy trade associations we analyzed.

Davies also explains that this 2019 report was a continuation of a 2014 CIC investigation, which started with a survey to PR firms asking questions about their internal climate action plans, carbon tracking initiatives, and any client projects focused on climate change issues. As Davies explained, “Turns out, nobody had ever asked the PR companies these questions before, but we got some very interesting responses, including the biggest company, Edelman, who accidentally sent me an email saying ‘there are only wrong answers here, don’t respond.’”

Edelman PR email replying to Kert Davies, "There are no right answers for this guy."

Dharna Noor, host of the Real News Network segment, also highlighted Edelman’s connection to Koch Industries, “a key funder of climate change denial messaging.” As detailed in CIC’s investigation, Edelman was a frequent contractor to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, of which Koch Industries and its subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources, is a member.

The Intercept

…companies are “using stories that appear to be part of a journalistic publication, but are actually paid for by advertisers in attempt to improve an image…”

In early April 2019, the Intercept published an article by Sharon Lerner titled, How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content. The Intercept article warns against the rise of ”native advertising”, which is a form of advertising where an ad is written in article form and published on credible news sites to look like an article.

Lerner explains that fossil fuel and other companies are “using stories that appear to be part of a journalistic publication, but are actually paid for by advertisers in attempt to improve an image suffering in the coverage done by actual journalists.” Lerner cites CIC’s research, saying, “Industry trade groups spent almost $1.4 billion on PR, advertising and communications contractors over the past decade, according to the Climate Investigations Center, almost half of which came from the American Petroleum Institute.”

Click here to read CIC’s full Trade Associations and the Public Relations Industry report

https://climateinvestigations.org/trade-association-pr-spending/

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Trade Associations and the Public Relations Industry

How much money have the corporate and fossil fuel industry’s powerful trade association allies spent to convince the American public that its products are beneficial and necessary – and to stymie progress on climate change that could harm its financial interests?

To find out, Climate Investigations Center researchers analyzed the public relations expenditures of these trade associations going back to 2008, using data from publicly-available federal Form 990 tax records. The expenditures provide unique insight into trade association priorities and the willingness of public relations firms to represent socially harmful industries.

The trade associations we analyzed spent almost $1.4 billion on contracts with public relations, advertising, and communications contractors since 2008.

Between 2008 and 2017, these trade associations spent almost $1.4 billion on public relations, advertising, and communications contractors. The American Petroleum Institute eclipses all spenders at $663 million over this time period, accounting for nearly half the total trackable spending from all trade associations. The US Chamber of Commerce ranked second at $244 million spent. We found that the public relations firms with the most lucrative contracts over the time period of our dataset were Edelman, DDC Advocacy, FleishmanHillard, and Blue Advertising (once part of Edelman).

Many of the trade associations we analyzed are fossil fuel associated but represent different sectors of the industry, such as oil, gas, coal, petrochemical, mining, and utility companies. Trade associations spend their revenue, from members’ dues, on salaries, rent, and services such as lobbying and legal counsel, to forward the goals of the industry they represent.

Trade associations routinely utilize the advertising andfront group — astroturf— services that public relations firms can provide. Top trade associations spend millions on public relations work each year, often targeting the Washington DC media market and political decision makers. Some prominent PR campaigns are launched nationwide, while others create front groups that will intentionally never bear the trade association’s name.

To view the spending by individual trade associations or to see a profile of the PR firms we analyzed,

click on the links below:

Trade Associations

American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity

American Fuels & Petrochemical Manufacturers

America’s Natural Gas Alliance

American Petroleum Institute

Edison Electric Institute

National Association of Manufacturers

National Mining Association

National Propane Gas Association

National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

Nuclear Energy Institute

United States Chamber of Commerce

Western Energy Alliance

Renewable Energy associations

Public Relations Firms

Edelman and Blue Advertising

Burson-Marsteller (Burson Cohn & Wolfe, as of 2018)

DCI Group

Democracy, Data & Communications Advocacy (DDC Advocacy)

FleishmanHillard

FTI Consulting

Hawthorn Group

Hill+Knowlton

Kivvit

Porter Novelli

Something Else Strategies

Our analysis also reveals that fossil fuel trade associations far exceed the PR and advertising spending of renewable energy trade associations. One fossil fuel industry trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, spent over six times more than four prominent renewable energy trade associations combined. In total, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), Growth Energy, the National Biodiesel Board (NBB), and the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) spent $98.4 million on PR and advertising during the 2008 to 2017 period. API alone dwarfs all four associations, spending a total of $663.2 million during the same time period.

API alone spent over six times more than the renewable energy trade associations we analyzed.

In addition to a comprehensive analysis of how industry utilizes these sizable contracts, CIC has made available all the IRS 990 tax forms used in this analysis, and produced interactive data visualizations and downloadable spreadsheets with the raw data.

In this report, the Climate Investigations Center has extended and updated the Center for Public Integrity’s groundbreaking 2015 report on public relations spending by trade associations. Spending data we have compiled since the CPI analysis confirms that public relations firms remain in a lucrative and influential partnership with big business and energy trade associations.

The Center for Public Integrity published “Who needs lobbyists? See what big business spends to win American minds,” which was the most thorough analysis of trade association spending to date in January 2015. The report compiled IRS 990 data from 2008 through 2012 to reveal that trade associations were often spending more on public relations firms than lobbyists. For some industries, advertising and front groups seemed to be the most powerful chosen means of achieving policy goals, putting public relations firms at the center of the policy debate over clean air, climate solutions, and good governance.

Download our data here (.csv file), or view in the table below:

Trade Association Contract Recipient Year Amount Paid

Western Energy Alliance Resonate Networks 2014 $175,000.00

Western Energy Alliance FTI Consulting 2017 $217,317.00

Western Energy Alliance Resonate Networks 2013 $200,000.00

Western Energy Alliance FTI Consulting 2018 $243,000.00

Western Energy Alliance Clear Channel 2013 $125,360.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Agency 2018 $4,834,422.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2018 $5,270,805.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2017 $1,150,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce R Street Films 2018 $1,554,650.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Albright Stonebridge Group LLC 2017 $712,888.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2017 $2,919,990.00

United States Chamber of Commerce R Street Films 2016 $4,500,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2016 $9,204,150.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2016 $10,400,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Glass House Strategy 2016 $797,550.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Integrated Web Strategy 2015 $1,756,009.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2015 $1,734,327.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2014 $14,456,184.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2015 $1,200,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2014 $7,050,000.00

many more pages]

Energy and Corporate Trade Associations Spend $1.4 Billion on PR Campaigns

Posted: March 14, 2019

How much money have the fossil fuel industry’s powerful trade association allies spent to convince the American public that its products are beneficial and necessary – and to stymie progress on climate change that could harm its financial interests? To find out, Climate Investigations Center researchers analyzed the public relations expenditures of these trade association

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whole season on PR

https://www.desmog.com/drilled-climate-podcast-episodes/

US/Drilled S3Ep2: The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

ByGuestonApr 26, 2020 @ 12:12 PDT

Hosted and reported by climate journalist Amy Westervelt, DrilledNews. Featuring: Bob Brulle, environmental sociology researcher at Brown University, and Naomi Oreskes, science historian at Har...

US/Drilled S3Ep1: The Father of Public Relations

ByGuestonApr 26, 2020 @ 10:55 PDT

Hosted and reported by climate journalist Amy Westervelt, DrilledNews. Featuring: Bob Brulle, environmental sociology researcher at Brown University; and clips from Naomi Oreskes, science histo...

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https://rigged.ghost.io/start/

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RIGGED

START HERE: INFORMATION POLLUTION — A BRIEF HISTORY

To understand how each spinmaster, technique, and industry contributed to the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created.

The playbook in action for Nestle

Speaking at the April 1982 Public Affairs Council conference to his colleagues in the PR industry, Pagan revealed the skeleton of the playbook that would last all the way through the Stratfor days.

Pagan International arose out of the ashes of a controversial Nestle public relations campaign named, in Orwellian fashion, the “Nestle Coordination Center for Nutrition.” It was co-run by Pagan and Jack Mongoven.

Mongoven was once a reporter for The Chicago Tribune and served as an executive editor of Pioneer Newspapers before becoming a spokesman for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and then the Republican National Committee.

Nestle’s Coordination Center for Nutrition began in 1980 as a major public relations effort designed to fend off complaints and an eventual international boycott. Criticism of Nestle was spearheaded by the British group War on Want, which tracked the company’s marketing of powdered baby milk in the developing world in a 1974 investigation called “The Baby Killer.”

Nestle had decided the developing world would be a good place to sell its baby formula, despite the fact that the formula interrupted women’s lactation process and prevented their breasts from producing enough milk.

“Women who were induced to use [the] formula in place of breast milk often had no choice but to dilute the formula with contaminated water, leading to diarrhea, dehydration and death among … infants,” explain John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in their book, “Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.”

This behavior by Nestle created a global uproar and eventually planted the seeds of a boycott by more than 700 churches and activist groups.

Mongoven and Pagan — under the auspices of the Coordination Center for Nutrition, which shared office space with The Tobacco Institute,according to Legacy Tobacco Archive Library documents — decided the best response to the burgeoning social movement was to divide and conquer it.

One of their first strategies was to peel off some of strongest supporters of the anti-Nestle campaign — educators.

“Some of the boycott’s strongest support came from teachers, represented by the National Teachers Association, so NCCN courted support from American Federation of Teachers, a smaller, more conservative rival union,” wrote Stauber and Rampton.

Nestle also won over an ally from the inside of another institutional opponent: churches.

“To counter the churches involved in the boycott, they needed to find a strong church that would take their side,” Stauber and Rampton further explained. “The United Methodists were supporting the boycott, but through negotiations and piecemeal concessions, Nestle gradually succeeded in winning them over.”

To make amends, Nestle worked with the Infant Formula Audit Commission to ensure its global marketing practices were in line with World Health Organization rules. It was chaired by Edmund Muskie, a former U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter.

The problem: Nestle created the commission, funded it and called all the shots. Few equipped with this knowledge were surprised when the commission concluded “the company has not been improperly ‘dumping’ baby formula on Third World hospitals,” as explained in The Los Angeles Times.

Muskie’s audit commission — or, better put, Nestle’s — is now seen as a “model” for corporations seeking to defuse sticky communication crises, as documented in a 1986 article in the Journal for Business Strategy.

For his successful efforts running what he would later describe as “a responsive, accurate corporate issue and trends warning system [with] analysis capability,” Pagan received the Public Relations Society of America’s prestigious Silver Anvil Award. Other industries have followed similar strategies, such as the shale gas industry’s“Energy in Depth” and corporate education reform’s “Stand for Children.”...

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_Valley_formula

The Mohawk Valley formula is a plan for strikebreaking purportedly written by the president of the Remington Rand company James Rand, Jr. around the time of the Remington Rand strike at Ilion, New York in 1936/37.

The plan includes discrediting union leaders, frightening the public with the threat of violence, using local police and vigilantes to intimidate strikers, forming associations of "loyal employees" to influence public debate, fortifying workplaces, employing large numbers of replacement workers, and threatening to close the plant if work is not resumed.^[1][2]

The authenticity of the written plan has never been clearly established. Although it was allegedly published in the National Association of Manufacturers Labor Relations Bulletin, no original copy has been found, nor does NAM list it among its pamphlets from that era.^{[3][non-primary} ^source ^needed] Parts of the plan use language sympathetic to the views of labor organizers. The Remington Rand company did indeed ruthlessly suppress the strikes, as documented in a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, and the plan has been accepted as a guide to the methods that were used. At least one source names the strikebreaker Pearl Bergoff and his so-called "Bergoff Technique" as the origin of the formula.^[4] Rand and Bergoff were both indicted by the same federal grand jury for their roles in the Remington Rand strike.

Noam Chomsky has described the formula as the result of business owners' trend away from violent strikebreaking to a "scientific" approach based on propaganda. An essential feature of this approach is the identification of the management's interests with "Americanism," while labor activism is portrayed as the work of un-American outsiders. Workers are thus persuaded to turn against the activists and toward management to demonstrate their patriotism.^[5][6]

Elements of the formula[

The following is the text of the Mohawk Valley formula as quoted in the labor press:

When a strike is threatened, label the union leaders as "agitators" to discredit them with the public and their own followers. Conduct balloting under the foremen to ascertain the strength of the union and to make possible misrepresentation of the strikers as a small minority. Exert economic pressure through threats to move the plant, align bankers, real estate owners and businessmen into a "Citizens' Committee".
Raise high the banner of "law and order", thereby causing the community to mass legal and police weapons against imagined violence and to forget that employees have equal rights with others in the community.
Call a "mass meeting" to coordinate public sentiment against the strike and strengthen the Citizens' Committee.
Form a large police force to intimidate the strikers and exert a psychological effect. Utilize local police, state police, vigilantes and special deputies chosen, if possible, from other neighborhoods.
Convince the strikers their cause is hopeless with a "back-to-work" movement by a puppet association of so-called "loyal employees" secretly organized by the employer.
When enough applications are on hand, set a date for opening the plant by having such opening requested by the puppet "back-to-work" association.
Stage the "opening" theatricallyby throwing open the gates and having the employees march in a mass protected by squads of armed police so as to dramatize and exaggerate the opening and heighten the demoralizing effect.
Demoralize the strikers with a continuing show of force.If necessary turn the locality into a warlike camp and barricade it from the outside world.
Close the publicity barrage on the theme that the plant is in full operation and the strikers are merely a minority attempting to interfere with the right to work.With this, the campaign is over—the employer has broken the strike.^[2]

A similar, although more nuanced and longer, version was published in The Nation in 1937.^[1]

see drilled

https://heated.world/p/big-oils-first-publicist-advised

Lee’s real legacy: The American Petroleum Institute

Lee’s most controversial legacy may be the advice he gave to the Nazis in the 1930s. But his most lasting legacy is his creation of the oil and gas industry’s first trade group—the American Petroleum Institute—over a decade before, in 1919.

“After the war ended, there was an interest in sort of coordinating an industry position for the petroleum industry to represent their interests to the public,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle tells Westervelt in Season 3, episode 2 of the podcast. “Ivy Lee draws on his experience in the war propaganda board effort to start developing larger institutional public relations efforts. And he works with the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which we now know as ExxonMobil, to form the American Petroleum Institute in 1919.”

Today, the American Petroleum Institute remains a powerful PR force for fossil fuels in an era of climate emergency. Representing more than 600 corporations, it is the largest U.S. trade group for the oil and gas industry—and its members spend a cumulative billions of dollars a year trying to convincing the public that oil is good, and American, and necessary for progress.

In fact, earlier this month, Ivy Lee’s brainchild API announced a new “seven figure” PR campaign and advertising push to convince the public that the oil and gas industry is a good-faith partner in the fight against climate change. The group’s campaign comes after decades of funding climate science denial and climate policy delay.

The API has deemed the push “Energy for Progress.” According to the group’s president, Mike Sommers, "What it really is all about is going on offense to tell the story of this industry.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

If you see something, say something

Today, the American Petroleum Institute’s ads run in nearly every respected media outlet. The New York Times; the Washington Post; on Vox and Politico and MSNBC. They also run on buildings; on billboards; on public transit and elsewhere.

HEATED is tracking these ads on an Instagram account called @fossilfuelads, to visually demonstrate how the industry’s deceptive messaging infiltrates our daily lives.

If you see any fossil fuel ads in your daily life, please send them to fossilfuelads@heated.world....

new phase: / fallback pos:

not real, real but nat'l, hu cause but wreck economy to fix --> look what cool stuff w make for you w/ it! [api superbowl vid not get hungergames //?]

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/09/16/fossil-fuel-ad-campaigns-climate-science-denial-pr-exxon-lawsuits

no lnx pix twt

Fossil Fuel Ad Campaigns Emphasize 'Positives' After Climate Science Denial PR Lands Industry in Hot Seat

By Sharon Kelly • Monday, September 16, 2019 - 19:09

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Public relations experts keep a careful eye on the multitude of ways that PR can go wrong: tracking the year’s biggest “PR blunders,” assessing flopped ads for lessons learned, and noting when to remain silent and when to circulate a particular point of view.

PR blunders have been blamed for causing stock prices to dip, powerful executives to lose jobs, and occasionally even forced public apologies from PR representatives themselves.

But it takes a special kind of PR nightmare — a particularly unusual kind in the U.S., with its broad protections for free speech — to prompt investigations by state attorneys general into whether a company’s public messaging was so misleading and harmful that it should be considered illegal.

That is the situation facing one of the world’s most powerful industries, on one of the most consequential issues of our time, climate change. The subject of these investigations isn’t the direct harm from the fossil fuel industry’s actions, it’s the ways that companies communicated about their actions, and how that misled investors or the public.

And right on cue, the fossil fuel industry's PR professionals have been stepping in to help reshape the narratives propping up their bottom lines.

What #ExxonKnew

Exxon Knew billboard

Sign about what Exxon knew about climate change. Credit: John Duffy, CC BY 2.0

ExxonMobil, for example, currently faces investigations by multiple state attorneys general centering on how the oil giant communicated about climate change and the risk of climate regulation to investors and to the public.

In 2015, the New York state attorney general subpoenaed ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, following an InsideClimate News investigative series, eight months in the making, that was one of three finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Last year, New York’s investigation ripened into a lawsuit, still pending.

“Investors put their money and their trust in Exxon — which assured them of the long-term value of their shares, as the company claimed to be factoring the risk of increasing climate change regulation into its business decisions,” New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a statement roughly a year ago, when her investigation turned into a lawsuit that claims ExxonMobil defrauded its investors. “Instead, Exxon built a facade to deceive investors into believing that the company was managing the risks of climate change regulation to its business when, in fact, it was intentionally and systematically underestimating or ignoring them, contrary to its public representations.”

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block a different investigation into ExxonMobil’s climate communications, this one by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

Alexander Kaufman

@AlexCKaufman

Big news: SCOTUS just rejected Exxon Mobil's appeal to stop Massachusetts' attorney general from forcing the oil giant to turn over documents detailing what and when it knew about burning fossil fuels causing climate change. http://news.trust.org/item/20190107143238-u421z/ …

U.S. top court rejects Exxon in climate change document dispute

Ruling clears the way for Massachusetts attorney general to obtain records from Exxon Mobil to probe whether it concealed its knowledge of the role fossil fuels play in climate change

news.trust.org

In March, a report by the Climate Investigations Center tallied $1.4 billion worth of public relations, advertising, and communications contracts signed by energy and business trade associations from 2008 to 2017. One organization, the American Petroleum Institute (API), accounted for nearly half of that sum.

The Evolution of Fossil Fuel Messaging — and Climate Science Denial

Amid the investigations into their communications on climate change, many fossil fuel companies have been slowly re-tooling their messaging.

Some have acknowledged a need to transition away from fossil fuels — but at what critics respond would be a very slow pace.

Others have continued to push natural gas as a climate-friendly fossil fuel, despite the industry’s severe climate-changing methane problems. API, for example, has placed ads claiming natural gas can “help meet the growing global demand for sustainable energy” under the Washington Post’s “branded content platform,” as The Intercept’s Sharon Lerner reported in April.

Other campaigns ditch mention of climate change and pollution all together, instead focusing on the benefits of products made from fossil fuels.

During the Super Bowl in 2017, the American Petroleum Institute released an ad campaign called Power Past Impossible, touting the many uses of oil and natural gas and highlighting how dependent modern life is on the byproducts of these fossil fuels.

“Oil majors are projecting themselves as key players in the energy transition while lobbying to delay, weaken, or oppose meaningful climate policy,” Edward Collins of the UK-based think tank InfluenceMap said in a March statement accompanying a report he authored on public relations campaigns by oil and gas giants. “They advocate gradual implementation of market-based and technological climate solutions, but the latest [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report makes clear that urgent policy action and limitations on fossil fuel use are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”

The shift doesn’t spell the end of climate science denial — DeSmog’s database of individuals and organizations that seek to cast doubt on climate science or oppose action to prevent some of the worst effects of warming the world includes roughly 225 organizations — and that list continues to grow.

Climate sciences deniers, many with ties to the oil, gas, and coal industries, have also climbed to dizzying heights within the Trump administration, placing them in positions where they can wield power directly and also communicate doubt to the public. Vice President Mike Pence is closely tied to the Koch network and in 2016 said, regarding climate change, “I don't know that that is a resolved issue in science today.”

And of course, there's President Trump himself, who in June responded, “I believe that there’s a change in weather and I think it changes both ways,” when asked by Good Morning Britain if he believed in climate change.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don't believe it !

But some of the organizations and think tanks in DeSmog's database have gotten a lot quieter when it comes to questioning climate science, even during the Trump administration — and a handful have dissolved entirely.

Take, for instance, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a free market think tank that co-authored a 1991 report that read: “Currently, scientists disagree on whether global warming has already occurred, whether significant global warming will occur in the future, whether warming would be harmful or somewhat beneficial to humans and whether, if harmful, it is better to adjust to the warming or try to prevent it.”

A quarter century later, the organization carried a very different message to an industry conference. “It is no secret that the oil and gas industry has an image problem,” Jacki Pick of the NCPA reportedly told the Tyler Area Energy Summit in Texas in March 2017. “We don't do a very good job of explaining the value of the industry.”

Later that year, the NCPA folded,citing “significant financial challenges over the last three years.”

'A Crisis of Perception'

This year, the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco’s chief executive similarly warned of the oil and gas industry’s image problem.

“My encounters in Davos showed me that fewer and fewer of our stakeholders accept logic and facts, least of all from us. We are therefore facing what I would call a crisis of perception,” Amin Nasser told an industry audience in February, according to The Guardian. “Because it threatens our industry’s very relevance, it puts our ability to supply ample, reliable, and affordable energy to billions around the world at risk, which in turn risks their energy security.”

Ethical oil ad

The oil industry has had image problems before. The “Ethical Oil” ad campaign pitted Canadian oil [peacekeeper un cdn soldier?!] against Middle Eastern oil producers. Credit: EthicalOil.org

In August, a top Chevron executive hinted that a group of major oil and gas companies plans to launch a new branding campaign, which she suggested would be modeled after the “Got Milk?” ad campaigns that launched in 1993.

“I think as an industry, we have an image that we need to change, where people equate what we do to their everyday life,” Kimberly S. McHugh, a Chevron vice president, said at the Summer NAPE Expo in Houston.

“What we do is noble,” she added, “we help humankind.”

That's a message that the fossil fuel industry, particularly as investigations into their past communications continue, may be trumpeting a lot more loudly in coming days.

Or, in the words of McHugh at the NAPE Expo: “The world needs what we have.”

Promotion of GMO-Derived Impossible Burger at World’s Largest Natural Food Trade Show Denounced as Deceptive

awards silver anvil bernays, e bruce harrison but not poison ivy?

http://www.awpagesociety.com/

https://www.prsa.org/

===

maybe this is more historical. abstract

http://www.prwatch.org/topics/public-relations

===

1	Waterfront Strategies	$136,704,026	$11,147,408	$125,556,618
2	Great American Media	$119,870,370	$2,275,577	$117,594,793
3	National Media Research	$91,583,810	$359,985	$91,223,825
4	Main Street Media	$53,783,031	$180,247	$53,602,784
5	Screen Strategies Media	$46,690,599	$45,112,813	$1,577,786
6	Mentzer Media Services	$46,212,642	$22,989,866	$23,222,776
7	Canal Partners Media	$41,062,537	$38,730,915	$2,331,622
8	OnMessage Inc	$36,423,356	$31,206,517	$5,216,839
9	Automatic Data Processing Inc	$35,592,211	$35,592,211	$0
10	Buying Time LLC	$34,277,478	$25,179,775	$9,097,703
11	Strategic Media Placement	$33,592,889	$23,968,470	$9,624,419
12	Strategic Media Services	$33,392,104	$30,022,198	$3,369,906
13	GMMB	$32,267,310	$31,375,401	$891,909
14	SKDKnickerbocker	$26,404,278	$20,175,823	$6,228,455
15	Strategic Fundraising	$26,286,396	$26,286,396	$

---

In fact, we can tell you just how well certain media companies, consultants, pollsters and others in the “election-industrial complex” are doing. In the 2014 elections, for instance, the Democratic media firm Waterfront Strategies took in over $136 million from campaigns and committees — easily the biggest haul for any vendor. At least 82 other vendors raked in $5 million or more.

This week, the Center for Responsive Politics is making this information more accessible. Expenditures, like contributions, must be reported to the FEC by campaigns and other committees; but they’ve always been the poor stepchild of campaign finance, typically receiving far less attention than the other side of the ledger. They’re often ignored simply because of the size and complexity of the data set. Filers tend to describe their spending as vaguely as possible (e.g. “Media” or “Postage”) and will refer to the same recipient any number of ways (e.g. “USPS,” “Post Office,” “Postal Service,” among dozens of possibilities). To make matters worse, the FEC’s expenditures file is full of duplicates and difficult to interpret correctly.

CRP has spent years wrestling with these issues, and at last we’re putting expenditures data in the spotlight with a dedicated section on our site.

The front page of the section will highlight the cycle’s top overall vendors — the huge media-buying and fundraising firms favored by the parties and their allies. The “Top Vendors” tab at left shows a longer list that can be broken down by type of vendor (media, polling, fundraising and online media) or by party, since many firms do business exclusively with Democrats or Republicans. Clicking on a vendor’s name will take you to a profile showing all firms that used that vendor and the amount they spent. This is a great way to identify when ostensibly independent groups, such as super PACs, and candidates, rely on the same firms. For example,Mentzer Media Services, 2014’s sixth-ranked vendor, was a favorite of both Sen.Mitch McConnell‘s campaign and conservative outside groups that spent money on his behalf, like Crossroads GPS and 60 Plus Association.

The expenditures section also shows a pie chart breakdown of all expenditures for the cycle. CRP divides expenditures into seven major categories: Administrative, Campaign Expenses, Fundraising, Media, Strategy & Research, Salaries & Wages, and Unclassifiable. (We also have categories for contributions and transfers, but don’t include those here because in aggregate that money is just being passed from group to group.) As the chart shows, campaign spending is dominated by media, and to a lesser extent by money spent on fundraising and personnel.

At the bottom of the page is a list of the cycle’s top-spending candidate committees. Click on any of the campaigns to see a breakdown of their expenditures as well as their top vendors, or click on the “Top Committees” tab at left for a longer list that includes other types of committees.

In fact, the Employment Policies Institute operates from the same office suite [8] as Berman and Company, a public relations firm owned by Richard Berman [8]. This is not an opinion; it’s a fact anyone can verify by viewing EPI and Berman and Company’s websites. The 990 for the Employment Policies Institute Foundation (EPIF) lists Rick Berman as the CEO; in 2011 his for-profit firm was paid $1.5 million of EPIF's total $2.1 million budget. If you’re wondering how a PR company could so easily fool newspapers across the country—including the Post, which regularly pats itself on the back for breaking Watergate—then you haven’t woken up to the crisis of American journalism.

According to Pew Research Center [9], newspaper newsrooms have shrunk 30% since 2000, leaving fewer than 40,000 newspaper employees across the country, the lowest number since 1978. In such a depressed media environment — where there are four public relations flacks for every reporter, compared to a 1-to-1 ratio in the 1960s – it is not surprising that a P.R. company could successfully rebrand itself as a think tank and capitalize on an acronym held by an actual think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, with 20 staff and 36 respected research associates. Unilke the Berman group, the Economic Policy Institute lists its staff, its raft of experts, its board, its annual report and its annual audit, which shows its funders, right on its website [10].

The Junkyard Dogs

Global Warming Is Good For You

excerpted from the book

Trust Us, We're Experts!

by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam Publisher, 2001, paper

The Junkyard Dogs

p222

Major corporations and petty hustlers O alike use the mantle of science to market all kinds of potions and remedies, many of which have no demonstrable efficacy and some of which are harmful. The history of psychiatry and the other social sciences is also riddled with scientific-sounding explanations for human behavior, on the basis of which innocent people have been sterilized, lobotomized, drugged against their will, or imprisoned.

The concept of "junk science," however, is a particular term coined by corporate attorneys, lobbyists, PR firms, and industry-funded think tanks. It has very little to do with the quality of the research in question. In the hotly contested terrain of regulatory and liability law, "junk science" is the term that corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter how rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect the environment and public health. The opposing term, "sound science," is used in reference to any research, no matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or reverse environmental and public health protections.

"Junk science" first emerged in the courtroom as a disparaging term for the paid expert witnesses that attorneys hire to testify on behalf of their clients. In many cases, of course, an expert witness is unnecessary. If one person shoots another in front of witnesses, you don't need a rocket scientist to know who is responsible. During the twentieth century, however, courts expanded the system of tort law under which personal-injury lawsuits are filed in order to cover cases in which proof of causation is somewhat more complicated. Many of these cases require a scientist's testimony particularly when the injury in question comes from environmental or toxic causes-for example, cancer in army veterans subjected to radiation from atomic bomb tests; asbestos-related mesothelioma; Reyes Syndrome caused by taking aspirin; or the link between swine flu vaccinations and Guillain-Barre Syndrome. By expanding the system of tort law, courts made it possible for people injured through these sorts of causes to collect damages from the companies responsible.

p229

Tobacco Science Meets Junk Science

For big tobacco, the industry campaign against "junk science" presented an interesting opportunity-a chance to reposition itself as something other than a pariah in the scientific community.

Just as every action in the physical world begets an equal and opposite reaction, every risk to public health seems to beget an equal and opposite effort at denial from the industry whose products are implicated. The tobacco industry, which U.S. Surgeons General have cited since the 1 960s as "the greatest cause of illness, disability and premature deaths in this country," helped invent the strategy of using scientists as third-party advocates, and if Oscars were given for such campaigns, tobacco would certainly win a lifetime achievement award. Prior to the 1950s, tobacco companies routinely advertised tobacco's alleged health "benefits" with testimonials from doctors and celebrities. When the first scientific studies documenting tobacco's role in cancer and other fatal illnesses began to appear, the industry was thrown into a panic. A 1953 report by Dr. Ernst L. Wynder heralded to the scientific community a definitive link between cigarette smoking and cancer, creating what internal memos from the industry-funded Tobacco Institute refer to as the " 1954 emergency." Fighting for its economic life, the tobacco industry launched what must be considered the costliest, longest-running, and most successful PR crisis management campaign in history. In the words of the industry itself, the campaign was aimed at "promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks," by "creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, and advocating the public's right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice."

For help, the tobacco industry turned in the 1950s to what was then the world's largest PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, which designed a brilliant and expensive campaign that was later described as follows in a 1993 lawsuit, State of Mississippi vs. the Tobacco Cartel:

As a result of these efforts, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC), an entity later known as The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), was formed.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee immediately ran a full-page promotion in more than 400 newspapers aimed at an estimated 43 million Americans . . . entitled "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers." . . . In this advertisement, the participating tobacco companies recognized their "special responsibility" to the public, and promised to learn the facts about smoking and health. The participating tobacco companies promised to sponsor independent research.... The participating tobacco companies also promised to cooperate closely with public health officials....

After thus beginning to lull the public into a false sense of security concerning smoking and health, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee continued to act as a front for tobacco industry interests. Despite the initial public statements and posturing, and the repeated assertions that they were committed to full disclosure and vitally concerned, the TIRC did not make the public health a primary concern.... In fact, there was a coordinated, industry-wide strategy designed actively to mislead and confuse the public about the true dangers associated with smoking cigarettes. Rather than work for the good of the public health as it had promised, and sponsor independent research, the tobacco companies and consultants, acting through the tobacco trade association, refuted, undermined, and neutralized information coming from the scientific and medical community.

p265

Defining Terms

The absence of real standards for distinguishing between junk science and sound science allows corporate apologists to use the term with confidence, while simultaneously managing to amicably disagree about an issue as fundamental and important as tobacco. The concept of junk science serves as a convenient way of reconciling their pro-corporate bias with pretensions of scientific superiority, while simultaneously glossing over ethical conflicts of interest.

Equally disturbing is the sheer amount of rhetorical venom and bile that the junkyard dogs of science have injected into public policy discussions, polarizing debates and lowering rather than elevating the tone of public scientific discourse. Some of the most respected voices in public life have been targeted for attack. Since its founding in 1936, Consumers Union and its monthly publication, Consumer Reports, have been icons of integrity, offering impartial scientific testing of consumer products and also serving as advocates for real consumer protection. None of this matters to "Junkman" Steven Milloy. In l999 he launched a second website, called "Consumer Distorts" (www.consumerdistorts.com), which accuses Consumer Reports of socialism, sensationalism, and "scaring consumers away from products." ACSH has also gone to war repeatedly with Consumers Union, accusing it of "irresponsible fear-mongering" for its reports on health threats represented by pesticides and other chemicals found in foods and common household items.

The failure of the self-proclaimed "sound science" movement to provide a sound methodology is doubly disappointing because, in the end, the critics of junk science have a certain amount of truth on their side. There is indeed a great deal of bad science in the news media and in courtrooms, and not all of it comes from corporations. Over the years, both business marketers and advocacy groups have become highly skilled at inventing and exaggerating fears, dealing in dubious statistics and using emotional appeals to sell products or mobilize public support for causes. The time constraints and visual nature of television make simple messages stand out more easily than complex ones, and marketers have learned to exploit this reality of the modern mass media. In addition to the political goals that underlie these appeals, sometimes there are commercial motives as well. Great profits can be made by selling overhyped "natural" food supplements like shark cartilage and melatonin.

***

Global Warming Is Good For You

p268

Automobile exhausts, coal-burning power plants, factory smoke stacks, and other vented wastes of the industrial age now pump six billion tons of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" into the earth's atmosphere each year. They are called greenhouse gases because they trap radiant energy from the sun that would otherwise be reflected back into space. The fact that a natural greenhouse effect occurs is well-known and is not debated. Without it, in fact, temperatures would drop so low that oceans would freeze and life as we know it would be impossible. What climatologists are concerned about, however, is that increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing more heat to be trapped. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are currently at their highest level in 420,000 years.

"The basic science of global warming has not changed since the topic was raised earlier in this century," notes a December 1999 open letter by the directors of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office. "Furthermore, the consensus of opinion has been growing, within both the scientific and the business communities. Our new data and understanding now point to the critical situation we face: to slow future change, we must start taking action soon. At the same time, because of our past and ongoing activities, we must start to learn to live with the likely consequences-more extreme weather, rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, ecological and agricultural dislocations, and the increased spread of human disease.... Ignoring climate change will surely be the most costly of all possible choices, for us and our children."

"There is no debate among statured scientists of what is happening," says James McCarthy, who chairs the Advisory Committee on the Environment of the International Committee of Scientific Unions. "The only debate is the rate at which it's happening." Between 1987 and 1993, McCarthy oversaw the work of the leading climate scientists from 60 nations as they developed the IPCC's landmark 1995 report.

There are, of course, areas of considerable outstanding dispute and genuine scientific uncertainty. No one knows how rapid or drastic global warming will turn out to be, or how severely it will affect food production, ocean levels, or the spread of disease. There is also debate over the extent to which global warming has already contributed to droughts, intense hurricanes, and environmental degradation such as coral bleaching. Given these uncertainties, it is difficult to talk of a "worst-case scenario," but the scenarios that are plausible include many that are dire enough.

... For the oil, coal, auto, and manufacturing industries, warnings of the sort involve another kind of high stakes. Any measures to control emissions of greenhouse gases threaten their long-standing habits of doing business.

They view scientists' conclusions about global warming with the same interest-driven hostility that the tobacco industry shows toward scientists who study lung cancer. Like the tobacco industry, they have pumped millions of dollars into efforts to debunk the science they hate. They have found little support, however, among the "statured scientists" to whom McCarthy refers-the people who are actually involved in relevant research and whose work has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The global warming consensus among these scientists is so strong that the oil and auto industries have been forced far afield in their search for voices willing to join in their denial. What is remarkable, given this fact, is the extent to which industry PR has been successful in creating the illusion that global warming is some kind of controversial, hotly disputed theory.

Lobbying for Lethargy

In 1989, not long after James Hansen's highly publicized testimony before Congress and shortly after the first meeting of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Burson-Marsteller PR firm created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Chaired by William O'Keefe, an executive for the American Petroleum Institute, the GCC operated until 1997 out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers. Its members have included the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, Amoco, the American Forest & Paper Association, American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Chrysler, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Dow Chemical, Exxon, Ford, General Motors, Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Union Carbide, and more than 40 other corporations and trade associations. The GCC has also used "Junkman" Steven Milloy's former employer, the EOP Group, as well as the E. Bruce Harrison Company, a subsidiary of the giant Ruder Finn PR firm. Within the public relations industry, Harrison is an almost legendary figure who is ironically considered "the founder of green PR" because of his work for the pesticide industry in the 1960s, when he helped lead the attack on author Rachel Carson and her environmental classic Silent Spring.

GCC has group in the United States battling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Its activities have included publication of glossy reports, aggressive lobbying at international climate negotiation meetings, and raising concern about unemployment that it claims would result from emissions regulations. Since 1994 GCC alone has spent more than $63 million to combat any progress toward addressing the climate crisis. Its efforts are coordinated with separate campaigns by many of its members, such as the National Coal Association, which spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993, and the American Petroleum Institute, which paid the Burson-Marsteller PR firm $1.8 million in 1993 for a successful computer-driven "grassroots" letter and phone-in campaign to stop a proposed tax on fossil fuels.

These numbers may not seem huge compared to the billions that corporations spend on advertising. The Coca-Cola company alone, for example, spends nearly $300 million per year on soft drink advertisements. But the Global Climate Coalition is not advertising a product. Its propaganda budget serves solely to influence the news media and government policymakers on a single issue and comes on top of the marketing, lobbying, and campaign contributions that industry already spends in the regular course of doing business. In 1998, the oil and gas industries alone spent $58 million lobbying the U.S. Congress. For comparison's sake, environmental groups spent a relatively puny total of $4.7 million-on all is- a sues combined, not just global warming.

Industry's PR strategy with regard to the global warming issue is also eminently practical, with limited, realistic goals. Opinion polls for the past decade have consistently shown that the public would like to see something done about the global warming problem, along with many other environmental issues. Industry's PR strategy is not aimed at reversing the tide of public opinion, which may in any case be impossible. Its goal is simply to stop people from mobilizing to do anything about the problem, to create sufficient doubt in their minds about the seriousness of global warming that they will remain locked in debate and indecision. Friends of the Earth International describes this strategy as "lobbying for lethargy".

"People generally do not favor action on a non-alarming situation when arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt," explains Phil Lesly, author of Lesly's Handbook of Public Relations and Communications, a leading PR textbook. In order for the status quo to prevail, therefore, corporations have a simple task: "The weight of impressions on the public must be balanced so people will have doubts and lack motivation to take action. Accordingly, means are needed to get balancing information into the stream from sources that the public will find credible. There is no need for a clear-cut' victory.' ... Nurturing public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation in support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary."

p283

Hot Talk, Slow Walk

During the 1 990s, Clinton-bashing was a common theme in industry's appeals to conservatives, using the argument that the global warming issue was a liberal attempt to replace private property with "socialism," "bureaucracy," and "big government." Particularly strong criticisms were leveled at then-Vice President Al Gore, who has spoken with occasional eloquence about the greenhouse effect and wrote about it in his book Earth in the Balance. Ironically, industry's attacks on Clinton and Gore helped conceal the Clinton administration's own complicity in the effort to prevent any effective regulations on greenhouse emissions.

On the eve of Earth Day in April 1993, Clinton announced his intention to sign a treaty on global warming, only to spend the rest of his two terms in office waffling and backpedaling. His "Climate Change Action Plan" of October 1993 turned out to be a "voluntary effort," depending entirely on the goodwill of industry for implementation. By early 1996, he was forced to admit that the plan was off track and would not even come close to meeting its goal for greenhouse gas reductions by the year 2000.

In June 1997, Clinton addressed the United Nations Earth Summit and pledged a sustained U.S. commitment to stop global warming. Painting a near-apocalyptic picture of encroaching seas and killer heat, he acknowledged that America's record over the past five years was "not sufficient.... We must do better and we will." Four months later, however, he announced that realistic targets and timetables for cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be put off for 20 years, prompting Australian environmental writer Sharon Beder to comment that "champagne corks are popping in the boardrooms of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil, Ford, General Motors, and the coal, steel and aluminum corporations of the US, Australia and Europe.... The new limits are so weak, compared with even the most pessimistic predictions of what the US would offer in the current negotiations, that two years of hard work by 150 countries towards reaching an agreement in December are now irrelevant."

During negotiations in Kyoto, the United States lobbied heavily and successfully to weaken the treaty's actual provisions for limiting greenhouse gases. The resulting treaty proposed a reduction of only 7 percent in global greenhouse emissions by the year 2012, far below the 20 percent cut proposed by the IPCC and European nations or the 30 percent reduction demanded by low-lying island nations that fear massive flooding as melting polar ice leads to rising sea levels. The United States also successfully won a provision that will allow countries to exceed their emission targets by buying right-to-pollute credits from nations that achieve better-than-targeted reductions.

Greenpeace called the resulting Kyoto treaty "a tragedy and a farce." It was condemned as "too extreme" by U.S. industry, declared dead on arrival by Senate Republicans, and praised by some environmental groups; and it provided all the political wiggle room that the Clinton administration needed to have its cake and eat it too. Clinton embraced the agreement but simultaneously said he would not submit it to the Senate until impoverished Third World nations agreed to their own cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions.

There is a method to this madness that is well understood in Washington lobbying circles, although it is rarely discussed in public. By talking tough about the environment while sitting on the Kyoto treaty, Clinton and Gore were able to preserve their "green credentials" for political purposes while blaming the treaty's demise on anti-environmental Republicans and an apathetic public. For Democrats, it was a "win-win situation." They could stay on the campaign-funding gravy train by doing what their corporate donors wanted, while giving lip service to solving the problem. The December 12,1997 New York Times reported that Clinton was "in the risk-free position of being able to make a strong pro-environmental political pitch while not having to face a damaging vote in the Senate.... One senior White House official . . . said it was possible that the treaty would not be ready for submission . . . during the remainder of Mr. Clinton's term in office." And indeed, this prediction proved correct. Industry's "lobbyists for lethargy" had succeeded.

Stormy Weather

While Nero fiddles, the burning of Rome is proceeding and even appears to be occurring faster than some climatologists expected. The twelve warmest years in recorded history have all occurred since 1983. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological Association concurred that 1997 was the hottest year ever, only to be surpassed by 1998, which was in turn surpassed by 1999. In January 2000, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences Fred Seitz's former stomping grounds issued a major report concluding that global warming is an "undoubtedly real" problem and is in fact occurring 30 percent faster than the rate estimated just five years earlier ...

A series of extreme weather events also seemed to corroborate the IPCC's predictions. In 1998, a January ice storm caused widespread power outages in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. In February, Florida was hit by the deadliest tornado outbreak in its history. April through June was the driest period in 104 years of record in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, and May through June was the warmest period on record. Heat and dry weather caused devastating fires in central and eastern Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Central America, and Florida. Massive floods hit Argentina, Peru, Bangladesh, India, and China, where the flooding of the Yangtze River killed more than 3,000 people and caused $30 billion in losses. Droughts plagued Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia. On October 4, 1998, Oklahoma was hit by 20 tornadoes, setting a national record for the most twisters ever during a single day. Three hurricanes and four tropical storms caused billions of dollars of damage to the United States. In late September, Hurricane Georges devastated the northern Caribbean, causing $4 billion in damages. A month later, Central America was devastated by Hurricane Mitch, Central America's worst natural disaster in 218 years, which killed more than 11,000 people and displaced another 2.4 million. In the Pacific, October's Super typhoon Zeb inundated the northern Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan. Only eight days later, Super typhoon Babs struck the Philippines, submerging parts of Manila.

In 1999, farmers in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States suffered through a record drought. A prolonged heat wave killed 271 people in the Midwest and Northeast. Hurricane Floyd battered North Carolina, inflicting more than a billion dollars in damages, while Boston marked a record 304 consecutive days without snow. In India, a supercyclone killed some 10,000 people. Torrential rains and mudslides killed 15,000 in Venezuela. Hurricane-force windstorms destroyed trees, buildings, and monuments in France, leaving more than $4 billion in damages. The South Pacific islands of Tebua Tarawa and Abunuea in the nation of Vanuato disappeared beneath the ocean, the first victims of the global rise in sea levels. The wave of catastrophes continued in 2000, with a prolonged drought in Kenya while wet, warm weather spawned billions of crop-threatening locusts in Australia and drought driven fires devastated Los Alamos. The melting and fissuring of Antarctica's ice shelf, which first became dramatically evident in 1995, led in l May 2000 to the calving of three enormous icebergs with a combined surface area slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut.

p287

"You can't stop climate change given what we're doing right now,'' said Michael MacCracken in February 2000. MacCracken is director of the National Assessment Coordination Office of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, which was launched by President Bush in 1989. It is already too late to stop global warming, he said, due to the accumulated carbon-dioxide emissions that have already entered the atmosphere. The best that can be hoped for is to minimize the problem and adapt to the changes. In the United States, necessary measures will include changing the way water supplies are managed in the western United States, beefing up public health programs, building higher bridges, and rethinking massive environmental restoration projects.

For years, the PR apparatus of big coal and big oil persuaded many key decision-makers that global warming was a phantom-that it was not even happening. As the scientific data proving otherwise has accumulated, the contrarian line of argument has also shifted. Industry voices have begun to admit that the industrial greenhouse effect is real, and some are attempting to argue, like Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, that it is actually a good thing-that it will enhance plant growth or that it will be of no consequence because the anticipated temperature changes will be relatively slight. Other voices are stepping forward with industry's standard lament, claiming that even if global warming is a bad thing, fixing the problem is impossible because it will cost trillions of dollars, ruin the economy, and eliminate jobs.

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Trust Us, We're Experts!

Index of Website

Home Page

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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Public_Relations/ToxicSludge.html

Toxic Sludge is Good for You -- The Torturers' Lobby

The Torturers' Lobby & Haiti

The Torturers' Lobby, Propaganda, & Public Relations

The Torturers' Lobby & Grenada

The Torturers' Lobby & Nicaragua

The Torturers' Lobby & Central America

The Torturers' Lobby & Kuwait

===

liquid truth from book sheldon and rampton

Liquid Truth: Advice from the Spinmeisters

In 1992, the food industry’s International Food Information Council (IFIC) retained Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille,

“an international market research expert,” to research

“how Americans relate to food biotechnology and

genetic engineering.” IFIC, an ardent

enthusiast for the use of biotechnology

in agriculture, wanted to know how it

could overcome consumer apprehensions about the new technology.

A “core team” was assembled to

aid in the research, consisting of representatives from the Monsanto Agricultural Company, NutraSweet, Kraft

General Foods, Ajinomoto, Du Pont

and Calgene. Other research sponsors

included Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola,

Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and the

M&M/Mars candy company. The

goal of the research team was to

“develop actionable strategies, messages, and language that will express

information positively about the

process and products—without stirring fears or negative connotations.”

Dr. Rapaille is a Jungian psychologist who uses a technique that he

calls “Archetype Studies” which

claims to delve into the “primordial

cause for . . . opinions, attitudes or

motivations.” As his report to IFIC

explained, “For each element in the

world, there is a first meaningful experience called the Imprinting Moment.

The Archetype is the pattern which underlies this

Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is completely preordained by the culture, and it is common to everyone

in a given culture. . . . The Archetype is the Logic of

Emotion that forms the Collective Unconscious.” Discover these Archetypes, Rapaille’s theory promised, and

“You can ‘read’ the consumers like a book, and you can

understand their unconscious ‘logic.’”

Rapaille’s process for uncovering Archetypes was

similar in most respects to what another advertising or

PR person might term a “focus group,” but Rapaille liked

to refer to them as “Imprinting Groups.” Each group

consisted of 20-30 everyday Americans, which Rapaille’s

team of “Archetypologists” led through a series of “relaxation exercises and visualization” aimed at eliciting their

innermost feelings about biotechnology.

The result of these exercises, the team concluded, was

that the biotech industry stood at a crossroads. “In one

case, we have tremendous public support—we can be

viewed as farmers bringing new varieties and improved

foods to consumers. But if we do not position ourselves

and our products correctly, we can just as easily be

viewed in the same class as Hitler and

Frankenstein.”

The difference depended on which

“imprint” provided the Archetype for

public perception of the new foods.

And the public would choose its

Archetype based largely on the food

industry’s choice of words.

“In communicating about food

biotechnology and genetic engineering, we now know a variety of ‘trigger’

words that will help consumers view

these products in the same vein as

farming, hybrids, and the natural

order, rather than as Frankenfoods,”

the study concluded. In the category

of “words to use,” Rapaille suggested

terms such as beauty, bounty, children, choices, cross-breeding, diversity, earth, farmer, flowers, fruits,

future generations, hard work, heritage, improved, organic, purity, quality, soil, tradition and wholesome.

“Words to lose” included: biotechnology, chemical, DNA, economic,

experiments, industry, laboratory,

machines, manipulate, money, pesticides, profit, radiation, safety and

scientists.

In a memo accompanying the completed study,

IFIC’s Libby Mikesell and Tom Stenzel summarized the

lessons learned. “The technology in biotechnology has

‘scary’ overtones in connection with life in any form. …

Biotechnology may not be the optimal term to use in our

discussions,” they wrote. “Clotaire recommends that we

‘sandwich’ the word genetic between other words that

create an association with tradition and nature. Some

possible terms he suggested were ‘biogenetic gardening,’

‘natural genetics’ or ‘natural genetic gardening.’ He composed this sentence as an example of how to use the

terms: New genetic discoveries allow us to be successful gardeners of the 21st century and to accomplish cross-breeding

at a highly sophisticated level, fulfilling a vision of the gardeners of the 19th century.”

It is worth noting that many of the terms in Rapaille’s

list of “words to lose” are straightforward characterizations of the actual scientific process used in developing

10 PR Watch / Fourth Quarter, 2000

genetically engineered foods, while many of the “words

to use” are vague, pleasant-sounding euphemisms

designed to obscure the details about everything that is

new and unique about the process.

It is also worth noting the irony in IFIC’s choice of

someone like Rapaille to help design its strategy for

defending biotech foods. Whatever dangers biotechnology may or may not present to the public, it is undeniably an example of modern science in

action. When

talking among themselves, biotech’s promoters frequently invoke the name of science, characterizing their

opponents as irrational, fear-driven technophobes.

“We all are frustrated by the public’s emotional

response to scientific, factual issues,” stated the IFIC

report. Yet Rapaille’s advice to IFIC was not only calculated to evoke an emotional response and to avoid any

mention of science, his very methodology for arriving at

his analysis is at best a parody of the scientific method.

HARD SCIENCE AND FLUID TRUTH

The power that science wields in modern society is a

reflection of its ability to create knowledge that is as close

to infallible as any product of human endeavor. Reasonable people may disagree in their opinions about

Shakespeare or religion, but they do not disagree with

the laws of thermodynamics. This is because the theories

of science, especially the hard sciences, have been developed through methodologies that require verification by

multiple, independent researchers using clearly defined,

replicable experiments. If the experiments do not

bear out a hypothesis, the hypothesis must be rejected

or modified.

The very prestige that science enjoys, however, has

also given rise to a variety of scientific pretenders—disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics that merely claim

to be scientific. The great philosopher of science Karl

Popper gave a great deal of consideration to this problem and coined the term “pseudoscience” to help separate the wheat from the chaff. The

difference between

science and pseudoscience, he concluded, is that genuinely scientific theories are “falsifiable,”—i.e., they are

formulated in such a way that if they are wrong, they can

be proven false through experiments. By contrast,

pseudosciences are formulated so vaguely that they can

never be proven or disproven.

“The difference between a science and a pseudoscience is that scientific statements can be proved wrong

and pseudoscientific statements cannot,” says Robert

Youngson in his book, Scientific Blunders: A Brief History

of How Wrong Scientists Can Sometimes Be. “By this criterion you will find that a surprising number of seemingly scientific assertions—perhaps

even many in which

you devoutly believe—are complete nonsense. Rather

surprisingly this is not to assert that all pseudoscientific

claims are untrue. Some of them may be true, but you

can never know this, so they are not entitled to claim the

cast-iron assurance and reliance that you can have, and

place, in scientific facts.”

“You always try—you always serve

the truth. But again—but the truth

is often, you know, is often not

necessarily a solid. It can be a liquid.”

—public relations counselor John Scanlon

Judged by this standard, many of the “social sciences”

—including the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung

and others—are actually pseudosciences rather than the

real thing. This does not mean that Freud and Jung were

charlatans or fools. Both were creative thinkers with fascinating insights into the human psyche, but a research

methodology that derives its data from the dreams of

mentally ill patients is a far cry from the orderly system

of measurements that we associate with hard sciences like

physics and chemistry.

Regardless of their scientific limitations, theories of

human psychology figure prominently in the thinking of

the public relations industry. What is more important

than their actual effectiveness is the seemingly authoritative justification that they provide for the PR worldview—a belief that people are

fundamentally irrational

and that therefore a class of behind-the-scenes manipulators is necessary to shape opinion for the public’s own

good. But this belief is at odds not only with the ideals

of democracy but also with the fundamental and necessary ideological underpinnings of the scientific method

itself. Before scientists can reach any conclusions whatsoever about the elements in the periodic table or the

space-time continuum, they have to first believe that “the

truth is out there” and that their investigations will take

them closer to it.

The public relations worldview, however, envisions

truth as an infinitely malleable, spinnable thing. For consultants like Clotaire Rapaille, the truth is not a thing to

be discovered but a thing to be created, through artful

word choices and careful arrangement of appearances.

“Given a choice, do you serve your client or the

truth?” a reporter asked John Scanlon, one of today’s

leading spinmeisters, during a 1991 interview.

“You always try—you always serve the truth,” Scanlon replied. “But again—but the truth is often, you know,

is often not necessarily a solid. It can be a liquid. . . .What

PR Watch / Fourth Quarter, 2000 11

seems to be true is not necessarily the case when we look

at it and we dissect it and take it apart, and we turn it

around and we look at it from a different perspective. ...

Whose truth are we talking about, your truth or

my truth?”

John Scanlon specializes in representing high-profile

clients, especially clients embroiled in controversy. In

1997, the trade publication Inside PR ranked him as the

number two expert in the world at “crisis management”—the PR field that specializes in helping clients

fend off scandals and repair bad reputations. In 1999,

for example, he represented famed fellatrix and self-proclaimed liar Monica Lewinsky as she embarked on a

media tour to promote her book, Monica’s Story. Lewinsky too, it seems, had a version of the truth to tell, as did

the president whose sexual relationship with her

depended on what your definition of “is” is.

Scanlon’s other assignments have included PR for

CBS when it was sued for libel by Vietnam-era general

William Westmoreland. Later, he squared off against 60

Minutes when he went to work for the Brown &

Williamson tobacco company in its effort to discredit

tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, whose

story was dramatized in the recent movie, The Insider.

Scanlon also represented Ivana Trump during her

divorce from The Donald. “What we did was quite scientific,” he said. By “scientific,” however, he meant

something quite different from what a particle physicist

would mean. “I mean we sat down with Mrs. Trump,

with Ivana early on with her attorneys and talked about

what was the specific critical message that she wanted to

communicate. I mean, we had a very, very clear position.” But having a “very, very clear position” is an

entirely different thing than seeking the truth, which is

what an actual scientist would be doing.

It would be nice to imagine that Scanlon’s fluid attitude toward the truth is some kind of aberration, but it

is not. Richard Edelman, his one-time boss at Edelman

Worldwide, goes even further. Not only are there different versions of the truth, “In this era of exploding media

technologies,” Edelman says, “there is no truth except

the truth you create for yourself.”

One of the rules of PR is that spin cannot be a demonstrable lie, a point driven home in every PR textbook.

“Never lie to a reporter” has become an industry

mantra. Fortunately, there is a loophole. Spin is the art

of appearances, not substance. When there is no truth

except what you create for yourself, lies become unnecessary, even irrelevant. To lie is to respect reality enough

to falsify it. The practitioners of public relations do

not falsify the truth, because they do not believe that it

even exists.

BAMBI KILLERS

The PR industry’s preoccupation with imagery over

substance was evident again in its reaction to the May

1999 release of a Cornell University study showing that

pollen from Monsanto’s genetically-engineered Bt corn

could drift onto milkweed plants and poison Monarch

butterflies.

The Monarch is “sort of the Bambi of the insect

world,” according to Marlin Rice, a professor of entomology at Iowa State University in Ames. “It’s big and

gawdy and gets a lot of good press. And you’ve got school

kids all across the country raising them in jars.” The BtMonarch controversy came on the heels of other recent

studies showing that Bt crops kill non-target beneficial

insects such as lacewings and ladybugs, kill beneficial soil

microorganisms, damage soil fertility, and may harm

insect-eating birds. However, it was the image problems

associated with killing Bambi that sent industry

spokespersons scurrying to counter the damage. Discoveries like this could end consumer complacency “in

an instant,” worried one source quoted in PR Week,

which described the Cornell study as “a wake-up call”

for industry.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of PR Week’s

response to the Monarch butterfly study is the narrow

range of options that it considered possible for the public

relations industry. “Are we only limited to a defensive

role in talking about GE foods?” it asked, answering that

PR pros can also make a positive case by arguing that

biotechnology is “needed to adequately feed a growing

world population.” The choice, in other words, was

between playing defense or offense for the biotech team.

“The law of unintended consequences means studies

like the butterfly study are likely to surface, focusing on

something company researchers may never have considered,” PR Week admitted, but rather than take such

“unintended consequences” seriously, it advised public

relations professionals to treat them as “brush fires” to

be “quickly dealt with.” ■

12 PR Watch / Fourth Quarter, 2000

===

mapcruzin:

GREENWASH: Perspectives on right-wing and libertarian think-tanks, free-market and common-sense environmentalists, and their corporate sponsors

Industry Facts & Figures

Industry Size and Growth

According to private-equity firm Veronhis Suhler Stevenson:

- Spending on traditional and digital (word-of-mouth marketing) public relations services in the U.S. totaled $5.7 billion in 2010, a 12.8-percent year-over-year increase.
- Spending on traditional public relations services grew by 4.9 percent from 2005-10, to $3.7 billion.
- Annual U.S. spending on combined public relations and word of mouth marketing services will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 14 percent between 2010 and 2015, to $10.96 billion.
  - Annual spending on traditional public relations services will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent, to $5.4 billion.
  - Annual spending on word of mouth marketing services will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 22.3 percent, to $5.6 billion (up from $2 billion in 2010).

- Related: According to *The Holmes Repor*t 2011 Global Rankings, the global public relations industry grew by slightly more than 8 percent in 2010, ending the year with fee income of at least $8.8 billion and employing about 60,000 people.
- Edelman had the highest revenue for public relations agencies in 2010, with $531.5 million in income,according to *The Holmes Repor*t.
- The average annual public relations budget in a publicly-owned company is $9.9 million.
- The average annual public relations budget for a government agency is $16.4 million.

Spending on word-of-mouth marketing services, which is often managed by public relations, grew by more than 10 percent in 2009 and is fueling much of the industry’s growth.
According to the 2011 *PRWeek*/PRCA Industry Census, the U.K. public relations industry contributes £7.5 billion to the economy and employs 61,000 professionals.
Despite current economic uncertainties, a recent survey by mergers-and-acquisitions firm Stevens Gould Pincus reveals that U.S. public relations firms are optimistic for 2010.
- 64 percent expect increased revenues, while only 14 percent expect the slump to continue.
- 14 percent say client budgets haven’t been affected and are holding steady.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 7,000 public relations firms in the United States. The public relations community is even larger when considering the public relations function within America’s corporations, government bodies, health care institutions, military branches, professional services firms, associations, nonprofit organizations, and other public and private entities.
In 2008, there were 64,000 individuals employed as public relations managers (up from 63,000 in 2007) and 135,000 employed as public relations specialistts (up from 132,000 in 2007).

http://media.prsa.org/prsa+overview/industry+facts+figures

Lakewood Public Library

Wild Ideas Lecture Series — The Battle for Your Mind

Propaganda, PR and PsyOps

Quotron

presented by Kenneth Warren and John Guscott

October 15, 2000

——————————————————————————–

Propositions in Play

“No enlightened person wishes to be duped by his desires, his fantasies, his glands.” Gordon W. Allport

“All coercive techniques involve, on one level or another, frightening, or threatening, or intimidating a person, so that they move into survival mode.” Douglas Rushkoff

“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 their knowing it.” Edward L. Bernays

“Everytime you watch someone else doing something(or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain…” Arleen Raymond

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology….Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.” Bertrand Russell

“What we observe in the population today are the three destructive symptoms of persons whose minds are controlled by alien forces: 1. Amnesia, i.e. loss of memory. 2. Abulia, i.e. loss of will. 3. Apathy, i.e. loss of interest in events vital to one’s own health and survival.” Michael A. Hoffman II

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.” – Joseph Goebbels

“We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him…But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?” – Walter Lippmann

“The notion of rational man, capable of thinking and living according to reason, of controlling his passions and living according to scientific patterns, of choosing freely between good and evil–all this seems opposed to the secret influences, the mobilizations of myths, the swift appeals to the irrational, so characteristic of propaganda.” – Jacques Ellul

“There are no facts.” – Michel Foucault

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” – Aldous Huxley

Propaganda

Context and Definitions

“If you think about how you think, you will find your mind is made of memories, facts, and that sort of thing; you picked these up through continual reinforcement… Using a computer metaphor, your mind is hardware (the grey matter, providing you with senses, nerve endings, neurons) and software (combined from that odd core of your being that is doing the reflecting, and the material it is reflecting upon, kind of like a computer program and its data). That isn’t the whole story, of course; there is an unidentified extra component, the ‘wetware,’ that gives you free will, volition, self-awareness. We know next to nothing about how this piece works; it appears to be an odd combination of chaotic and stochastic processes, transcending both. About the only thing we know for certain about the human mind is that we haven’t even begun to utilize it to its full potential.” Michael Wilson, from: “Memetic Engineering PsyOps and Viruses for the Wetware”

Propaganda – “systematic manipulation of public opinion, generally by the use of symbols such as flags, monuments, oratory, and publications. Modern propaganda is distinguished from other forms of communication in that it is consciously and deliberately used to influence group attitudes; all other functions are secondary. Thus, almost any attempt to sway public opinion, including lobbying, commercial advertising, and missionary work, can be broadly construed as propaganda.” Columbia Encyclopedia

Propaganda – “The deliberate attempt to influence mass attitudes on controversial subjects by the use of symbols rather than force. 2. A systematic effort to persuade a body of people to support or adopt a particular product, opinion, attitude, or course of action. Propaganda and Persuasion Techniques A Guide to Identifying Manipulative Information by Virginia Stewart, M.Ed.

“Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery. . . . Caesar had his officers; Napoleon had his armies. I have my divisions: TV, news, magazines.” — Archvillain Elliot Carver to James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies

“As generally understood, propaganda is opinion expressed for the purpose of influencing actions of individuals or groups… Propaganda thus differs fundamentally from scientific analysis. The propagandist tries to “put something across,” good or bad. The scientist does not try to put anything across; he devotes his life to the discovery of new facts and principles. The propagandist seldom wants careful scrutiny and criticism; his object is to bring about a specific action. The scientist, on the other hand, is always prepared for and wants the most careful scrutiny and criticism of his facts and ideas. Science flourishes on criticism. Dangerous propaganda crumbles before it.” Alfred McLung Lee & Elizabeth Bryant Lee, from: The Fine Art of Propaganda

“Propaganda seeks to induce action, adherence, and as little thought as possible. According to propaganda, it is useless, even harmful for man to think …. Action must come directly from the depths of the unconscious ….. This is the basic condition of the political organization of the modern world, and propaganda is the instrument to attain this effect. An example that shows the radical devaluation of thought is the transformation of words in propaganda; there, language, the instrument of the mind, becomes “pure sound,” a symbol directly evoking feelings and reflexes. This is one of the most serious disociations that propaganda causes. Propaganda sometimes deliberately separates from man’s real world the verbal world that it creates; it tends to destroy man’s conscience” Jacques Ellul, from Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

“It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.” Jacques Ellul, from Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

“… every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda.” Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion

“Our contemporaries only see the presentations which are given them by the press, the radio, propaganda, and publicity. . . . In his eyes, a fact becomes true when he has read an account of it in the paper, and he measures its importance by the size of the headlines!” Jacques Ellul, from: The Presence of the Kingdom

“Propagandists love short-cuts — particularly those which short-circuit rational thought. They encourage this by agitating emotions, by exploiting insecurities, by capitalizing on the ambiguity of language, and by bending the rules of logic.” Aaron Delwiche, from: “Why Think About Propaganda?

Categories of propaganda techniques are: “1. Characteristics of the content self-evident -No additional information is required to recognize the characteristics of this type of propaganda. “Name calling” and the use of slogans are techniques of this nature. 2. Additional information required to be recognized – Additional information is required by the target or analyst for the use of this technique to be recognized. “Lying” is an example of this technique. The audience or analyst must have additional information in order to know whether a lie is being told. 3. Evident only after extended output – “Change of pace” is an example of this technique. Neither the audience nor the analyst can know that a change of pace has taken place until various amounts of propaganda have been brought into focus. 4. Nature of the arguments used – An argument is a reason, or a series of reasons, offered as to why the audience should behave, believe, or think in a certain manner. An argument is expressed or implied. 5. Inferred intent of the originator – This technique refers to the effect the propagandist wishes to achieve on the target audience. “Divisive” and “unifying” propaganda fall within this technique. It might also be classified on the basis of the effect it has on an audience.” Dorje Carl, from “Propaganda Techniques”

“The five propaganda techniques generally used in advertisements: a. Bandwagon: persuading people to do something by letting them know others are doing it; b. Testimonial: using the words of a famous person to persuade you; c. Transfer: using the names or pictures of famous people, but not direct quotations; d. Repetition: the product name is repeated at least four times; e. Emotional words: words that will make you feel strongly about someone or something.” Lorraine Tanaka

“Command propaganda” seeks an immediate, specific response: NOW. Most commercial advertising does this. In much political advertising,* persuaders also use this same 5-part pattern of “the pitch”: Attention-getting starts with simple “name recognition”; Desire-Stimulating refers to the issues discussed (if any), the social (not individual) benefits promised; Urgency and Response focus on a simple act, “Vote for Me. Now.” Thus, election campaign rhetoric is a form of command propaganda. “Command Propaganda and Conditioning”

“Conditioning propaganda” seeks a future response: LATER. Conditioning propaganda is designed to mold public opinions, basic assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, myths, and world views, on a long-term basis, as the necessary prelude, climate, or atmosphere for eventually getting a response, later. Observers disagree on terms here: Jacques Ellul, the French scholar, in the classic study, Propaganda, called this “sub-propaganda”; the Nazi leader, Goebbels, called it “basic propaganda”; the Soviet leader, Lenin, called it “political education.” Recently, the terms “consciousness raising” and “awareness building” have been used by various cause groups (anti-abortionists, feminists, environmentalists, civil rights) in the United States. And, everyone argues over the distinctions and borderlines between “conditioning propaganda” and “indoctrination” and “education.” However, some political and social command propaganda uses a related 4-part pattern (the “pep talk”) which not only calls for immediate action, but also calls for “committed, collective action”: to join a group, to fight for a cause.” “Command Propaganda and Conditioning”

Agencies and Applications

Since WWII the U.S. government’s national security campaigns have overlapped with the commercial ambitions of major advertisers and media companies and with the aspirations of an enterprising stratum of university administrators and professors. Military intelligence and propaganda agencies such a the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency helped bankroll substantially all of the post – WWII generation’s research into techniques of persuasion, opinion measurement interrogation, political and military mobilization, propagation of ideology and related questions. The persuasion studies, in particular, provided much of he scientific underpinning for modern advertising and motivational techniques.” Christopher Simpson, from: The Science of Coercion

“What is the propaganda model and how does it work? The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses. Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack.” Edward S. Herman, from: “The propaganda model revisited” Monthly Review, July, 1996

“Nazism, the myth of Germanic racial superiority, is an interesting look at a common historical occurrence. Hitler provided the skeleton, but Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry put flesh on the bones. Use of constant reinforcement, triggering an amazing number of cultural responses such as ‘noble sacrifice’ and ‘total commitment,’ use of the ‘elite chosen by God’ metaphor, indoctrination of the young, all were a masterful implementation by a natural talent. The meme, however, had the roots of its destruction built in, with non-tolerance, the inability to conceive of losing, and the perpetration of unspeakable acts as side effects that combined to kill off those infected. Nazism also gives an example in recent history of a successful meme actually managing to become an operational paradigm for continuing generations.” Michael Wilson, from: “Memetic Engineering PsyOps and Viruses for the Wetware”

“Jacques Ellul, author of “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes” (1965) defines psychological warfare like this — “the propagandist is dealing with an adversary whose morale he seeks to destroy by psychological means so that the opponent begins to doubt the validity of his beliefs and actions.” “The incestuous relationship of the Monopoly Media Cartel and psychological warfare has a long history. Veterans of World War II, for example, the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, became the Cold War’s media giants. OSS agent William S. Paley became a CBS executive. C.D. Jackson worked at Time/Life. W. Phillips Davison became a Rand Corporation think-tanker. William Casey was an executive at Capital Cities, which merged with ABC and subsequently devoured by Disney. Casey himself, of course, became Director of the CIA. In other words, when former intelligence operatives get a new job in the media, does their psychological warfare ever stop? Mind control by mass media manipulation is just another variation of the Hegelian Dialectic, the concept that “conflict creates history.” The theory is simple — if you control the conflict, you control the outcome. In other words, an existing force (the thesis) generates an opposing force (the antithesis) and the conflict between the two creates the final effect (the synthesis). ” Uri Dowbenko, from “The General’s Daughter: Psyops & the Military Career Criminal”

“The alchemical processing of humans is performed with the props of time and space: what happens ritually in a series of significant places can “bend” reality. That’s what “wicker” means in its most subterranean signification. Wicca (witchcraft) is just a description of the end-result of the function of bending reality. How is reality bent? By the placing of ritual props in ceremonial places. These places exist both in the mind and in physical space.” Michael A. Hoffman II, from: “Profiling the FBI’s Unabom Charade”

Messages and Targets

“The average American is exposed to at least three thousand ads every day and will spend three years of his or her life watching television commercials.” Jean Kilbourne, from: Deadly Persuasion

Dell Computer and Web PC – (ca. January, 2000) Different people speak in turn. One says, “I was born to be bombarded by information.” Another says, “I was born to turn my mind over to the web.” –Nobody was born to be bombarded by information, or to turn their mind over to anything or anyone. A truly disgusting and Big Brotherish ad.” Mark Seely, from “Propaganda Watch It’s in the commercials Second Edition”

“Few Americans, however, know of a hidden government effort to shoehorn anti-drug messages into the most pervasive and powerful billboard of all — network television programming.” Daniel Forbes, from “Prime-time propaganda How the White House secretly hooked network TV on its anti-drug message”

“OnStar – (ca. January and February, 2000) A married couple talks about an incident where they were driving through the desert, got a flat tire, and the ground was crawling with rattlesnakes. They pushed the “OnStar” button on the car’s console, and “within seconds the OnStar advisor pinpointed our location and sent a tow truck… called the paramedics…” The announcer says, “The one touch connection to people who can help.” A caption on the screen reads, “Wherever you go, here we are.” –You bet they are. What they didn’t tell you was that they knew your location even before you pressed that button.This ad is rumored to be the first step in the establishment’s plan to put a tracking device in every car.” Mark Seely, from “Propaganda Watch It’s in the commercials Second Edition”

“In the summer of 1959, just before McCloy took his family for an extended trip to Europe, C.D. Jackson wrote to remind McCloy that later that summer a World Youth Festival was scheduled to take place in Vienna. Jackson asked McCloy to contribute an article, perhaps on the “benign and constructive aspects” of the U.S. occupation of Germany. The piece would appear in a daily newspaper to be published in Vienna in conjunction with the festival. McCloy agreed, and the article was published (in five languages) in a newspaper distributed by a twenty-five-year-old Smith graduate named Gloria Steinen… McCloy’s connection to Steinem went beyond contributing an article to the propaganda operation of which she was an editor in Vienna. Late in 1958, he and Jackson had discussed how the United States should respond to the expected Soviet propaganda blitz in Vienna. Previous gatherings of this kind had always been held in Moscow, East Berlin, or other cities in Eastern Europe. These events were major propaganda circuses, and the CIA was determined, in the words of Cord Meyer, a career CIA officer, ‘to compete more effectively with this obviously successful Communist apparatus.” Kai Bird, from The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 483-84, 727 as quoted by Daniel Brandt in “Gloria Steinem and the CIA”

“Lynne Cheney describes an incident at Vassar College where several male students were charged and then found innocent of date rape. Afterward, assistant dean Catherine Comins declared of the men: “They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’” Two University of Pennsylvania instructors explicitly justify such strategies in the Journal of Social History. “We are all engaged in writing a kind of propaganda,” they insist. “Rather than believe in the absolute truth of what we are writing, we must believe in the moral or political position we are taking with it.” Karl Zinsmeister, from “Propaganda in America?”

“Disinformation rules in The Siege. Here are the most obvious propaganda factoids. 1. Demonizing the Militia. Continuing the mainstream-media propaganda, Denzel Washington asks his fellow feds in the FBI office, “You think it’s militia?” “Not their style,” they answer, as if most militas were capable of “terrorism” without the active participation by undercover CIA, FBI, or BATF agent provocateurs. 2. Demonizing the Internet. “Everybody on the Internet knows explosives,” says Washington, spreading the lie about how the Internet is a tool of subversion and therefore must be controlled. Department of Justice has lobbied long and hard for anti-internet, anti-cryptography legislation. 3. Demonizing Cash. “Where does a guy like you come up with ten thousand dollars?” the FBI man berates the Arab suspect, implying that cash anywhere is immediately suspect. According to US State Propaganda, only “terrorists” or “money launderers” use cash. This reinforces the suspicion in moviegoers’ minds that only “criminals” would have any concerns about privacy.” Uri Dowbenko, from: “The Siege: PsyOps Movie Prepares U.S. for Martial Law”

Industry History and Profile

“The PR industry employs 200,000 people in the US. The PR industry in the UK employs more than 48,000 people, most of them in London. While in Australia there are 2,400 full-time members of the Public Relations Institute.” “The Rise of Corporate Propaganda”, new internationalist issue 314 – July 1999″

“…what makes advertising and PR work is that people see their own personal needs or interests being stoked, and … unless you acknowledge the appeal of this stuff — its eroticism — and the self-interest of the receiver of the message, it’s like presenting a machine without anything driving it; there’s no sense of what propels the apparatus.” Stuart Ewen

“An estimated $1.4 trillion is spent every year marketing goods and services worldwide.” Kim Cassino, American Demographics, November 1997.

“The first wave of PR strategy… is… rational reportage…laying out facts to persuade people the corporate position was in their best interest. It wasn’t particularly successful. Meanwhile, another intellectual tradition began to raise its head in the late nineteenth century. It has as its founder aFrench sociologist named Gustav Le Bon who wrote in 1895 a book called The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon was an anguished French middle-class academic who saw the growth of democratic politics and the old systems of hierarchy and deference breaking down. Particularly after the Paris Commune of 1871 he felt that the mob at any moment could seize society and destroy all he held sacred. Le Bon starts to examine the social psychology of the crowd. For him the crowd is not driven by rational argument, but by its spinal cord. It responds solely to emotional appeals and is incapable of thought or reason. Somebody interested in leading the crowd needs to appeal not to logic but to unconscious motivation. For Le Bon, the most effective way to do this is through the use of images. In a period of great social turmoil Le Bon’s ideas began to have a tremendous impact. The Crowd was available in 19 languages a year after publication. In the US it influenced everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to the founders of the modern PR movement. By the First World War rational journalistic PR gave way to a propaganda designed to pluck people’s heartstrings.” Stuart Ewen

“By World War I, middle-class fears of the rising tide of immigrants and the social turbulence borne on their wake were overtaking the progressive agenda; the Enlightenment faith in a reasoning “public,” susceptible to arguments founded on fact, was giving way to a vision of the masses as an irrational, unmanageable “crowd.” Informed by social science, public relations emerged as a tool for controlling cultural chaos and maintaining the status quo.” Mark Dery, from “Hidden Persuaders”

“PR was originally a tool for damage control or crisis management. If a company committed a wrongdoing or had some other disaster on its hands, it would employ PR defensively to save face. Managing image perception (or “manufacturing consent,” to use the words of PR pioneer/pollster Walter Lippmann) soon became a much more active process. Now crisis management is but a small subset of the ever-expanding field of public relations.” Carrie McLaren

“Press releases were invented by public-relations expert Ivy Leein the early years of the twentieth century in an effort to control media coverage of railway accidents for his client, Pennsylvania Railway. He decided that if the press was going to report the accidents it would be better to make sure they reported them from the company point of view. The strategy was so successful that by the late 1940s almost half the news was based on press releases from public-relations departments and firms.” Sharon Beder, from “The Best Coverage Money Can Buy”

“The daily tonnage output of propaganda and publicity… has become an important force in American life. Nearly half of the contents of the best newspapers is derived from publicity releases; nearly all the contents of lesser papers… is directly or indirectly the product of PR departments.” Fortune magazine 1949 as cited by Sharon Beder in Global Spin

“Edward L. Bernays…became one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations…In the twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when-while working for the American Tobacco Company-he persuaded women’s rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic “Torches of Freedom.” In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar “global media event,” when he dreamed up “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” a worldwide celebratory spectacle commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored-behind-the-scenes-by the General Electric Corporation.” Stuart Ewen, “Visiting Edward Bernays” from PR!: A Social History of Spin

“The Torches of Freedomcampaign was a classic instance of using sexual liberation as a form of control. It proposed addiction as a form of freedom. In this, it was an early version of the Virginia Slims, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” campaign, which made repeated reference to the suffragette movement as a way of associating cigarettes with freedom…All the gullible consumer saw was women wanting to be free, whereas in reality the women who marched in the parade smoking their Luckies were being manipulated by the Tobacco Industry into a sort of bondage that was both literal, in terms of physical addiction, and moral in the sense that it was motivated by a subliminal understanding of sexual liberation.” E. Michael Jones, Ph.D., from: “The Torches of Freedom Campaign: Behaviorism, Advertising, and the Rise of the American Empire”

“Bernays regarded Uncle Sigmund as a mentor, and used Freud’s insights into the human psyche and motivation to design his PR campaigns, while also trading on his famous uncle’s name to inflate his own stature. There is, however, a striking paradox in the relationship between the two. Uncle Sigmund’s “talking cure” was designed to unearth his patients’ unconscious drives and hidden motives, in the belief that bringing them into conscious discourse would help people lead healthier lives. Bernays, by contrast, used psychological techniques to mask the motives of his clients, as part of a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the public unconscious of the forces that were working to mold their minds.” John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton on The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society…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 understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” Edward Bernays, from: Propaganda

Applications and Effects

“By initiating the story, PR people are better able to shape the angle it gets told from and determine which people get interviewed. The ultimate pre-packaged news is the video news release. This is sent to TV stations and often aired with little change or indication to the audience that what they are watching is not independent reporting. Most broadcasters, whether in Europe or the US, make use of these releases in putting together the news. Sharon Beder, from “The Best Coverage Money Can Buy”

“…public relations, broadly defined, includes advertising. The difference being that, while advertising appears as an explicit commercial message, good PR is invisible. If PR is done right, you can’t tell it’s PR, it just looks like good business.” Carrie McLaren

“The vast increase in corporate and government PR worldwide means that those with power are falling over themselves to let us in on the good things they are doing for us… It’s an enterprise whose collective purpose is to ‘administer’ democracy, eliminating risks for clients. The key ‘project’ is not to reform reality, but to manage our perceptions of it.” Richard Swift, from “Mindgames It’s just a short step from political propaganda to corporate public relations”

“The powerful techniques of coercion — from Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to the diabolical CIA Interrogation Manual — have poisoned our lives. All personal interactions, from our daily workday encounters to our most intimate relationships, have been tagged, even perverted, by the meta-language of “sales.” Uri Dowbenko, from “Media, Manipulation and the Cult of Consumerism An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff”

.”The logic is clear — propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state and that’s wise and good because again the common interests elude the bewildered herd, they cant figure them out. The public relations industry not only took this ideology on very explicitly but also acted on it, that’s a huge industry, spending hundreds of..by now probably on the order of a billion dollars a year on it or something and its commitment all along was to controlling the public mind. “Chomsky on Propaganda”

“Using the latest communications technologies and polling techniques, as well as an array of high-level political connections, PR flacks routinely “manage” issues for government and corporate clients and “package” them for public consumption. The result is a “democracy” in which citizens are turned into passive receptacles of “disinfotainment” and “advertorials” and in which critics of the status quo are defined as ignorant meddlers and/or dangerous outsiders.”Carmelo Ruiz, from Burson-Marsteller: PR For the New World Order”

“Founded in 1923, Hill & Knowlton (H&K) are an international public relations company…H&K… fabricated the story that Iraqi soldiers had removed 312 babies from their incubators and left them to die on the cold hospital floor of Kuwait City’… The story was first reported to the London Daily Telegraph (September 5th, 1990) by exiled Kuwaiti housing minister and member of CFK Yahya al-Sumait. Because of the high emotional content of the story, it was repeated globally by much of the media, none of whom adequately checked the source… the senior account people on the Kuwaiti account included Craig Fuller, Bush’s former chief of staff when Bush was Vice President’. Using this connection, H&K set up a hearing with the Congressional Human Rights caucus on October 10th 1990 where they produced Nayirah’, a 15-year Kuwaiti who gave the following statement: ‘I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.’..According to MacArthur (1993), H&K ‘made a brilliant little video news release out of it, which they beamed all over the world. It was on NBC Nightly News and millions and millions of people saw this’. This story was then presented to the United Nations Security Council during an audio-visual presentation on the 27th November 1990. In addition to Nayirah’, seven other witnesses were produced, five of whom ‘coached by Hill & Knowlton – had used false names without saying they were doing so’ …Nayirah was, in fact, ‘the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States’ (1), and had been coached by Lauri Fitz-Pegado to deliver the testimony which (according to Strauber & Rampton) ‘even the Kuwaitis’ own investigators later confirmed was false’. Not only had she never seen the atrocity she had alleged to, but had never been to the hospital, much less worked there.” Darl Turner, from “Hill & Knowlton: Exporting Propaganda Engineering Warfare through Public Relations”

“Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser,” explained Nancy Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency.” Gary Ruskin, from: “Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children”

More than anything, they want your children’s minds. “Kids marketing in general is becoming more sophisticated,” says Julie Halpin, CEO of Gepetto Group, which specializes in marketing to kids. It is a competition for what she calls “share of mind.” Gary Ruskin, from: “Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children”

‘‘Persuasion, by its definition, is subtle. The best PR ends up looking like news. You never know when a PR agency is being effective; you’ll just find your views slowly shifting.” A PR executive

“You have pollsters and demographers going around asking people questions, usually more about what they feel than what they think. From that fairly fragmentary data they put together an agglomeration called ‘public opinion’.” Stuart Ewen

“It was in the post-War period that the PR industry, the advertising industry, the press agent industry, what the psychologist Robert Shalldini calls ‘the compliance industries’, really took off. These things grew exponentially in the 1920s in the US and provide the world with a model – and the world of course includes Germany. Goebbels himself was a reader of the work of Edward Bernays. Bernays was Freud’s nephew on both sides of his family. Here is a guy for whom the idea of the unconscious was his mother’s milk. What makes Bernays important is that he is the first PR guy to apply social psychology strategically and use theories of the unconscious in propaganda technique. Bernays is no mere theorist. He put his ideas to work for a number of corporations as well as for government.” Stuart Ewen

“:… to make the transition from effective policy interlocutor to effective public communicator, it is essential to shift from issues-based communications to stories-based communications. There are no issues-oriented media with any broad appeal, and the selling of complex issues coverage is a difficult task in any event because it contains little or no news value. Good stories, on the other hand, go around the world in minutes. That’s the way adversaries play. That’s the way industry must play.” Leaked Document on Europabio PR Strategy”

“The 1930s and then the 1960s were periods in which the challenge to the business system became widespread. If you want to see the flowering of corporate public relations strategies look at the decade following those periods. After World War Two a kind of gung-ho corporate public-relations strategy tries to present the private business system as the quintessence of the American Way – a kind of commercialistic rendition of democracy. This became almost a national ideology used to roll back policies and ideas that came out of the 1930s New Deal – for example, the very idea that government might compete with business by providing public housing. In the 1960s people began to wonder if democracy was being violated by a destabilized business system. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the triumph of Reagan and Thatcherism, there comes to fruition a set of national public relations strategies catalyzed by the political issues of the Sixties.” Stuart Ewen

Perhaps the biggest – and certainly the most expensive – PR effort on a Southern issue was the campaign undertaken by the Wexler Group for the ratificaction of the Northern American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico in 1993. Wexler worked for a coalition of Fortune 500 companies to reassure a worried US public about job losses and environmental deterioration. NAFTA’s broken promises were so under-reported that Project Censored named them ‘one of the top-ten censored stories of the year’, just one year after Wexler’s successful sales job.Richard Swift, from “Mindgames It’s just a short step from political propaganda to corporate public relations”

Subliminals and Technology

“High-tech mass persuasion has achieved levels of sophistication far beyond what most individuals imagine. Most still desperately cling to the delusion that they think for themselves, determine their own destinies, exercise both individual and collective free will (the great myth that underlies democratic ideology); that advertising works in the interest of the consumer; and perhaps the greatest self-deception of all — that they can easily discriminate between fantasy and reality.” Wilson Bryan Key

“With the onset of the machine technology known by the interesting sobriquet, “Virtual Reality,” the immersion of mankind into the counterfeit, computer-generated cryptosphere, intensifies, and the march of induced hallucination, digital money, junk from Wal-Mart and miracles by priests in lab coats, accelerates, commensurate with the spiritual and mental deaths of animated corpses of the walking dead in America.” Michael A. Hoffman II, from: Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

“Subliminal visuals surround us as well. They’re airbrushed into print ads and billboards, they flicker past during commercials at a hardly noticeable, barely legal rate. To heighten the hypnotic effects of moving video, producers need only place one blank, black frame for every 32 frames of film. Every hour that you spend watching tv, your right-brained, endorphin-numbed, glassy-ass trance state is deepened. So don’t be too hard on yourself for accidentally “staying tuned” all the way through 7th Heaven—you were literally held against your will.” Sven Golly, from “Learn the Deadly Secrets of Mind Control”

“Wayne Chilicki, a General Mills executive, agrees: “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Proctor & Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave,’” he says. “We believe in getting them early and having them for life.”" Gary Ruskin, from: “Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children”

“Advertising targeted at elementary school children,” Professor McNeal says, “on programs just for them works very effectively in the sense of implanting brand names in their minds and creating desires for the products.” Gary Ruskin, from: “Why They Whine: How Corporations Prey on Our Children”

“”I was working with one firm that was doing focus groups with cult members about how they got pulled into their cult and what the cult did… They interviewed some people from Scientology. Some of them were still in. And [they interviewed] those who were in cult-like organizations like Amway or Hells Angels…They were looking for ways to apply the techniques of cult indoctrination to ‘cult brands.’ They’re called ‘cult brands.’ In other words — how to take a brand and have an off-the-shelf set of rules that they can apply. If a client comes in and says ‘We want our brand to be a cult brand,’ they say, ‘Well, this is how to do it.’” Douglas Rushkoff

“Advertising is everywhere, and people everywhere are united by it. Perhaps for the first time, young people of all ethnic and geographic origins share images and experiences, thanks in large measure to mass media and mass advertising. Advertising offers youth entertainment, diversion, a way to manage their mood states, and information on how to satisfy personal needs. Its first-class graphics, music, and humour give advertising the potential to teach children language, cognitive, social, and artistic skills… What youngsters get are ideas for satisfying their needs for identity, belonging, and independence. They use information in commercials, and the commercials themselves, to help them achieve their personal goals. ” Jeffrey Goldstein, Ph.D., Department of Mass Communications, University of Utrecht, from: “Children and advertising – the research”

“Recent tests by researcher Herbert Krugman showed that, while viewers were watching TV, right-brain activity outnumbered left-brain activity by a ratio of two to one. Put more simply, the viewers were in an altered state, in trance, more often than not. They were getting their Beta-endorphin “Fix.” To measure attention spans, psycho – physiologist Thomas Mulholland of the Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, attached young viewers to an EEG machine that was wired to shut the TV set off whenever the children’s brains produced a majority of alpha waves. Although the children were told to concentrate, only a few could keep the set on for more than 30 seconds! Most viewers are already hypnotized. To deepen the trance is easy. One simple way is to place a blank, black frame every 32 frames in the film that is being projected. This creates a 45 beat ñ per – minute pulsation perceived only by the subconscious mind, the ideal pace to generate deep hypnosis. The commercials or suggestions presented following this alpha-inducing broadcast are much more likely to be accepted by the viewer. The high percentage of the viewing audience that has somnambulistic-depth ability could very well accept the suggestions as commands, as long as those commands did not ask the viewer to do something contrary to his morals, religion, or self-preservation.” “Battle for Your Mind: Subliminal Programming”

“McDonald’s spends $1.8 billion a year on various PR.” Joel Kovel, Z magazine, September 1997.

“The biotech industry has chosen a slam dunk strategy to gain public acceptance for its products: Slip unlabeled genetically engineered food into the food supply and hope too many people don’t notice or object. Deal with those who do notice and object with an army of “experts” that stand ready to refute any criticisms or critics of the technology….If plans run awry for some reason, mount a full public relations offensive…” Karen Charman, from: “Force Feeding Genetically Engineered Foods”

Europe’s most powerful biotechnology industry has contracted the government and public affairs PR agency, Burson Marsteller, to manage the crisis that the biotech market is facing as a result of the widespread resistance to genetic engineering and its products in this part of the world. “Leaked Document on Europabio PR Strategy”

“Subliminal perception occurs whenever stimuli presented below the threshold or limen for awareness are found to influence thoughts, feelings, or actions. The term subliminal perception was originally used to describe situations in which weak stimuli were perceived without awareness. In recent years, the term has been applied more generally to describe any situation in which unnoticed stimuli are perceived.” Philip M. Merikle, from “Subliminal Perception”

“Mental illness, the Twentieth Century Plague, may be related to subliminal stimuli. What is vaguely called schizophrenia, for example, could be involved with an individual’s perception of subliminal stimuli.” Wilson Bryan Key, from: Subliminal Seduction

“According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspician.” Douglas Rushkoff, from Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say

“Kilbourne, Painton and Ridley created a test of subliminals using an original Chivas Regal ad with a subliminal nude and an additional picture retouched to take out the nude. They reported their results in Psychology Today. The picture with the subliminal nude was preferred over the picture without the subliminal nude (Natale, 1988; Kilbourne et. al., 1984). They point out that part of the problem with Key’s reports is his ambiguous use of the word subliminal. Key makes no distinction between innuendo, metaphor, embeds and subliminals. The phenomenon that Key is most concerned with are actually visual embeds, also known as hidden pictures.” B. Diane Miller Blackwood, from: Sex and the Single Sociologist: An Essay on Subliminal Advertising”

“In March of 1994, someone discovered that Jessica Rabbit had no underwear for a very short time during the animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Globe & Mail, March 17, 1994). In this example, there were at least three offending frames-unnoticeable unless the tape is advanced frame by frame. Were they deliberately planted there for some nefarious reason, or were the artists just saving some ink or playing a practical joke? It’s hard to know, but the physical presence of an uncovered Jessica tells us nothing about the perceptual or psychological consequences of her undressed state. It is probable that under normal viewing conditions the contents of the frames are completely and thoroughly masked by the subsequent material. In the absence of the appropriate tests, however, one cannot simply assert that stimuli are (or are not) subliminal. In none of these examples is it possible to know definitively if the signal or image was subliminal, nor if it was deliberately planted.” Timothy E. Moore, from: “Scientific Consensus and Expert Testimony: Lessons from the Judas Priest Trial”

“Certain studies seem to show that subliminal visual or aural conditioning in movie theaters can increase sales of refreshments. However, the results are not significant enough to be regarded as evidence of a real effect. Additionally, experiments have shown that any changes in behavior occur only immediately after the subliminal message is given and they disappear just as quickly. It is only a temporary modification of the subject’s reactions, and not a durable conditioning.” Jean-Marie Abgrall, from Soul Snatchers: The Mechanics of Cults

“In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company.” Douglas Rushkoff, from Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say

“Gore staffers alerted at least one news organization and were contacting others about an RNC ad in which the word “RATS” appears briefly on screen in an ad that criticizes Gore’s prescription drug plan. A Bush spokesman brushed aside suggestions of subliminal advertising as “bizarre, ridiculous and absurd.” The RNC had no immediate comment.” Candy Crowley, from “Gore campaign smells ‘rats’ in RNC ad”

“…on a slow news day in a laggardly news week, the Gore campaign called Berke with its “scoop.” It said a clever viewer in Seattle had noticed the “r” word in a Republican ad, insinuating that the rodentine reference constituted dirty, lowdown, filthy politics at its worst. Berke snapped at the bait. He wrote a piece, which the Times splashed across its front page. It alleged deep and troubling ugliness in the heart of the Republican camp — all because of four letters only a highly vigilant viewer would notice. The story fingered Alex Castellanos, a GOP ad man, and fulsomely quoted some of Castellanos’ most ardent enemies. It gave him a sentence or two for rebuttal. The original item carried no mention of Fox News, meaning Berke had no idea he had been fooled into touting a stale story about an ad scheduled to go off the air the day his piece appeared. Gore operatives thus transformed the Times into a purveyor of all the news that’s fit to reprint.” Tony Snow, from “Rodentine Reference”

“Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books on political ads, told MSNBC.com that the technique used in the GOP spot is known in psychological literature as “priming” — a word or image is flashed at the viewer to predispose him to view a subject negatively.” Tom Curry, ‘Rats’ joins famous ad gallery”

“As the presidential campaign gives every sign that it can’t wait to be upstaged by the Olympics, we are suddenly thrust back into the 1950s with the hyped-up fear that subliminal advertising is tampering with our brains. A Republican commercial deriding Al Gore’s prescription-drug plan flashes the word “RATS” on the screen for one-thirtieth of a second, right after the phrase “Bureaucrats Decide.” Detected by Fox News two weeks ago, then given front-page treatment by The New York Times Tuesday, this ad flap suggests a 3-D movie about a mad social scientist. The whole thing makes about as much sense as the widespread 1950s belief that crouching under a schoolroom desk would protect children against a Russian atomic attack. The only coherent explanation was belatedly provided by Alex Castellanos, who made the 30-second spot for the Republican National Committee (RNC). He claimed that the rodent language was coincidental and that the oversize letters were designed to create visual interest. “People get bored watching TV,” Castellanos told the Associated Press. “You’re trying to get them interested and involved.” Walter Shapiro, from “Fear of subliminal advertising is irrational”

“A research project by Jacob Jacoby, a Purdue University psychologist, found that of 2,700 people tested, 90 percent misunderstood even such simple viewing fare as commercials and “Barnaby Jones.” Only minutes after watching, the typical viewer missed 23 to 36 percent of the questions about what he or she had seen. Of course they did, they were going in and out of trance! If you go into a deep trance, you must be instructed to remember, otherwise you automatically forget.” “Battle for Your Mind: Subliminal Programming”

PsyOps

Definitions

“PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS: (DOD) Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign government, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives. Also called PSYOP. See also perception management.

PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS: (NATO) Planned psychological activities in peace and war directed to enemy, friendly, and neutral audiences in order to influence attitudes and behavior affecting the achievement of political and military objectives. They include strategic psychological activities, consolidation psychological operations and battlefield psychological activities.

PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS: (IADB) These operations include psychological warfare and, in addition, encompass those political, military, economic, and ideological actions planned and conducted to create in neutral or friendly foreign groups the emotions, attitudes, or behavior to support the achievement of national objectives.” Propaganda And Psychological Warfare Studies: Glossary Department of Defense Military and Associated Terms”

The PSYOPS “process”… is divided into six parts: intelligence gathering, target audience analysis, product development, media selection, media production, and dissemination.” Benjamin Richardson, from: “The Use of the Psyops Against High School Terrorism”

Brains and Targets

“Once you have a brain harnessed to imitation, you can transmit behavior non-genetically, thus giving rise to “culture” or “memes.” Richard van Ort, on “Mirror Neurons”

“Santa Claus is a meme that parents deliberately infect their children with; the purpose for it is quite unfathomable, and seems to run along two paths–it didn’t seem to hurt the parent when they had it, and it helps to explain the odd behavior that people go through once a year. The Claus meme in a child helps the way cowpox helped with smallpox; part of growing up is the ‘trauma’ of learning, once old enough, that Santa is a myth, and that people, including one’s own parents, have systematically lied to you. This may seem a callous way to view it, but from the viewpoint of building cognitive mechanisms, this is one of the earliest we gain that fosters the ability of disbelief.” Michael Wilson, from: “Memetic Engineering PsyOps and Viruses for the Wetware”

“…the astonishing truth is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or experimenter performing the same action), e.g., tasting a peanut!” Arleen Raymond, on “Mirror Neurons 2″

“In the study of mind control and psychological warfare, it is not enough to simply review the latest technology of coercion, the most recent gadgetry and techno-junk littering the hardware and supply depots of governments and cults. Far more dangerous PSYOPS “use specially constructed communications to manipulate the actions of target groups without the use of physical force. PSYOPS, in one form or another has been used against the enemies of the United States for hundreds of years. Most people think of PSYOPS as something directed at the nation’s foreign enemies. Today, however, there are new, domestic threats to United States’ security that may also pose legitimate targets for such operations. The sudden surge in high school terrorism in the last five years has created a conundrum for the nation. The youths that commit such violence are American citizens. They are teens that, on the surface, differ very little from the millions of other high school students in the United States. The federal government cannot simply order anti-terrorist units like Delta Force to hunt them down. The public would find such tactics too drastic. These are, after all , just kids. Thus, the need for less severe countermeasures makes PSYOPS very attractive. These techniques are well grounded in research and have been copied by others like advertisers and marketers. If properly implemented, the legitimate use of PSYOPS to reduce future high school terrorism would be both appropriate and effective.” Benjamin Richardson, from: “The Use of the Psyops Against High School Terrorism”

“Naval Reserve United States Atlantic Command Psychological Operations Unit is a special purpose radio/television production unit whose dedicated mission is to train audiovisual personnel for mobilization and to produce audiovisual products in response to CINCUSACOM Special Operation Requirements.” Mission Statement

“In 1950 the CIA’s budget for “psychological warfare was $34 million; over the next two years that figure quadrupled.” Laura Brahm, from “The Culture Vultures,” In These Times, May 15, 2000

Applications, High Technology, Memes and the Religious Impulse

“Religious strivings…often originate in the desires of the body, in the pursuit of meanings beyond the range of our intellectual capacity, and in the longing that values be conserved. Do we not then merely “rationalize” our yearnings with manufactured beliefs that are egomorphic, fashoioned to satisfy private desire or inner compulsion? Does not the very prominance of the fear motive indicate that we have invented a God to protect us against anxiety? And if life or society demands many renunciations from us, are we not prone to invent an after-life that will compensate us for present deprivation? Gordon W. Allport, from The Individual and His Religion

“Back in the 1950s, during the rebellion in the Philippines, U.S. Air Force General Edward Lansdale, then head of CIA PsyOps in the islands, used the legend of Philippine vampires to chase the Huk rebels from their various areas of operation. The asuag, or Philippine vampire, struck terror in the hearts of the superstitious population, a fact exploited by the CIA. When a Huk patrol would pass by, the last member of the patrol was silently captured, and then killed. Two holes were punctured in the Huk’s neck, and he was hung upside down to drain the blood from his body. The corpse would then be left where it would be found by his comrades – a victim of the vampire.” W. Adam Mandelbaum, from: The Psychic Battlefield

“In occult crimes the objective is not linear, that is to say, is not solely bound to the achievement of the immediate effects of the attack on the victim, but may in fact be a part of a larger, symbolic ritual magnified by the power of the electronic media, for the purpose of the alchemical processing of the subconscious Group Mind of the masses. If we are observing a ritual working, we should be looking for relevant synchronicities (coincidences that have meaning) in the days following ‘Unabom’s’ explosive attacks, which would form a pattern, on the hypothesis that his bombing is the Introit to a kind of public, subliminal Black Mass that plays for days. Consciously we don’t apprehend the connection, but our subconscious may and it is the subconscious that is being addressed in occult ritual, in a process CIA behavioral scientist Dr. Ewan Cameron termed, “psychic driving.” Like other Group Mind imprinting, such as the Son of Sam series, the ‘Unabomber’ has a high media profile as a communicator, as someone having a message for the masses.” Michael A. Hoffman II, from: “Profiling the FBI’s Unabom Charade”

“PSYOP has a vital role to play in the effective use of military force. This is especially so as the world becomes increasingly urban and interconnected through the internet and satellite television, media which decrease the likelihood that US forces can use force against an adversary indiscriminately. PSYOP’s role is also magnified as the US military finds itself more involved in protracted struggles at the lower end of the spectrum of conflict. As a US Army study once noted, “Low-intensity conflict is basically a struggle for people’s minds . . . . And in such a battle, psychological operations are more important than fire power.” Steven Collins, from: “Army PSYOP in Bosnia: Capabilities and Constraints”

“Historically in Haiti, any change of power was a very bloody deal. This was accomplished with minimal bloodshed,” Crawmer said. “…I personally feel that because of [the psyop soldiers'] ability to influence the media environment in Haiti, the effect was to soothe the Haitians and get their cooperation.” Katherine McIntire Peters, from Haitian Mission Is Smoothed By Psyops Getting Out The Word”

“Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN’s hq in Atlanta. CNN is up in arms about our report in the last issue of CounterPunch concerning the findings of the Dutch journalist, Abe de Vries about the presence of US Army personnel at CNN, owned by Time-Warner. We cited an article by de Vries which appeared on February 21 in the reputable Dutch daily newspaper Trouw, originally translated into English and placed on the web by Emperor’s Clothes. De Vries reported that a handful of military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, part of the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, had worked in CNN’s hq in Atlanta.” Alexander Cockburn, from “CNN AND PSYOPS”

“Think of this new domain as ‘applied sociology’ or ‘cultural engineering.’ Neither name is sufficient description to a field that encompasses information theory, general semantics, semiotics, cybernetics, neurolinguistics, statistical theory, advertising/propaganda, conditioning, epistemology, epidemiology, game theory, cognitive psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology. If your eyes have glazed over, or you have already decided that you shouldn’t be reading such ‘trash’ as this, then resign yourself to being one of the sheep. Careful study of Nazism (and Goebbels), Marxism, or Scientology (and Hubbard) give clear indications that the concepts work; from there, it is simply a matter of analysis of the phenomenon to build a new form of engineering, which in deference to its roots, can be referred to as memetic engineering.” Michael Wilson, from: “Memetic Engineering PsyOps and Viruses for the Wetware”

“A meeting sponsored by Defense & Foreign Affairs and the International Strategic Studies Association was held in Washington DC in 1983. High-level officials from many countries met for this conference. They discussed psychological strategies related to government and policymaking. A summary of the agenda reads: “The group will be discussing the essence of future policymaking, for it must be increasingly clear to all that the most effec- tive tool of government and strategy is the mind… If it’s any consolation to the weapons-oriented among defense policymakers, the new technologies of communications — satellites, television, radio, and mind-control beams — are ‘systems’ which are more tangible than the more philosophically based psychological strategies and operations.” Judy Wall, from “Aerial Mind-Control: The Threat to Civil Liberties”

“Those are things ranging from using low-frequency [electromagnetic] waves in battlefield situations to intimidate your enemy to using smells. There’s a lot of scents now that chemo-reception scientists have figured out make people upset and make people intimidated…And those are real, and more than enough to talk about. I’ve seen them being [used in field test situations] or read research reports about them being used. I’ve interviewed people in the military who have used them. I’ve read the public relations materials — bill collection agencies that use pheromones in the ink in collection letters.” Douglas Rushkoff

“The March 23, 1991 newsbrief, “High-Tech Psychological Warfare Arrives in the Middle East”, describes a US Psychological Operations (PsyOps) tactic directed against Iraqi troops in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. The manoeuvre consisted of a system in which subliminal mind-altering technology was carried on standard radiofrequency broadcasts. The March 26, 1991 newsbrief states th

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No Appetite for Change

Low-Hanging Climate Commitments

Transitioning With the Times?

‘Enabling deception’

Sending the wrong message

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‘Proud of the advice we provide’

Fossil Fuel Solutionism

[oil ch intl twt]

the History of Junk Science, Alarmists, and Climate Prophets

The Supposed Church of Climate Change

Don’t Worry, Just Adapt!

CIC’s Trade Associations PR Investigation in the Media

Energy and Corporate Trade Associations Spend $1.4 Billion on PR Campaigns

The playbook in action for Nestle

Elements of the formula[

If you see something, say something

The Junkyard Dogs

Global Warming Is Good For You

excerpted from the book

Trust Us, We're Experts!

by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam Publisher, 2001, paper

The Junkyard Dogs

p222

p229

For big tobacco, the industry campaign against "junk science" presented an interesting opportunity-a chance to reposition itself as something other than a pariah in the scientific community.

For help, the tobacco industry turned in the 1950s to what was then the world's largest PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, which designed a brilliant and expensive campaign that was later described as follows in a 1993 lawsuit, State of Mississippi vs. the Tobacco Cartel:

As a result of these efforts, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC), an entity later known as The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), was formed.

p265

***

Global Warming Is Good For You

... For the oil, coal, auto, and manufacturing industries, warnings of the sort involve another kind of high stakes. Any measures to control emissions of greenhouse gases threaten their long-standing habits of doing business.

Lobbying for Lethargy

p283

Stormy Weather

p287

Trust Us, We're Experts!

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