CHAPTER 16

Spin doctors

We have transformed information into a form of garbage.

—NEIL POSTMAN,
author of Amusing Ourselves to Death

Government agencies are supposed to be watch-dogs, but too often they are more like lap dogs.

—JOHN STAUBER,
founder of PRWatch

In the public relations industry, the idea is to manage the outrage, not the hazard.

—SHARON BEDER,
author of Global Spin

What happens when we ignore the symptoms of a disease? It usually gets worse. That’s why the epidemic of affluenza is spreading around the planet. Although symptoms like the stress of excess, the anxiety of resource exhaustion, and the depression of social scars are right in our faces, we tend to look the other way as we’re told over and over again that the market will provide. But will it?

The author and “adbuster” Kalle Lasn tells a metaphorical tale about a large wedding party that takes place in a spacious suburban backyard. The party oozes affluence and the good life: the live music is incredible, and everyone dances with abandon. The problem is that they’re dancing on top of an old septic system, which causes the pipes to burst. “Raw sewage rises up through the grass,” writes Lasn, “and begins to cover everyone’s shoes. If anyone notices, they don’t say anything. The champagne flows, the music continues, until finally a little boy says, ‘It smells like shit!’ And suddenly everyone realizes they’re ankle deep in it.”¹

How many million Americans are now wheezing with affluenza, yet stubbornly in denial? “Those who are clued in apparently figure it’s best to ignore the shit and just keep dancing,” concludes Lasn. Meanwhile, the usual suspects (such as Phillip Morris, BP, the Fukushima nuclear power plant) may admit the pipes have cracked, but still, they try to convince us it’ll never happen again.

According to trend watchers, at least fifty million Americans are ready for recovery programs to beat affluenza, but where can we turn for the advice we’ll need? There seem to be as many quacks and spin doctors out there as real doctors. With a strict policy of concealing their funding sources, the quack scientists do their best to make the world “safe from democracy.” The first step is to encourage us to do nothing, to keep ignoring the symptoms. They tell us in voices that sound self-assured, “Go back to sleep, the facts are still uncertain, everything’s fine. Technology will provide. Just relax and enjoy yourself.”

“TOXIC SLUDGE IS GOOD FOR YOU”

We all know how pervasive advertising is, because it stares us in the face. In fact, we pick up the tab for advertising in the products we buy—at least $900 a year per capita. But as John Stauber, past editor of the online resource PRWatch, comments, “Few people really understand the other dimension of marketing—an undercover public relations industry that creates and perpetuates our commercial culture.” (In other words, it keeps us constantly exposed to the affluenza virus.) What is PR, exactly? “It’s covert culture shaping and opinion spinning,” says Stauber, whose informative book on PR is called Toxic Sludge Is Good for You. “Not only do PR professionals alter our perceptions, they also finesse the political and cultural influence that ushers those perceptions into the mainstream.”²

Unreported by the blindfolded eyes of the media, PR-managed initiatives are often signed into law and adopted as standard operating procedures while the public’s civic attention is diverted by the most current scandal, crime, or catastrophe.

Stauber first became involved in watchdogging the public relations industry when he was researching biotechnology. “We saw strong evidence of collusion between Monsanto and various government agencies and professional organizations,” he says. “Government agencies like the FDA and USDA did their part by working with Monsanto to overcome farmer and consumer opposition to the emerging products.” (The US Congress recently passed legislation referred to by stunned opponents as “the Monsanto Protection Act”—officially the “farmer assurance provision.” This limits the ability of judges to stop Monsanto or farmers from using genetically modified seeds even if courts find evidence of potential health risks.³

“It is now common for lawyers to sit in the actual drafting sessions where legislation is written and to provide the precise language for new laws,” writes Al Gore in his 2013 book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. “Many US state legislatures now routinely rubber-stamp laws that have been written in their entirety by corporate lobbies.” Gore notes that in the 1970s, only 3 percent of retiring members of Congress found work as lobbyists. “Now more than 50 percent of retiring senators and 40 percent of retiring House members become lobbyists.” In 1975, recorded expenditures by lobbyists were $100 million. By 2010, they had $3.5 billion worth of influence on politicians.⁴

“The best PR is never noticed” is an unwritten slogan of an industry whose arsenal includes backroom politics, fake grassroots activism, organized censorship, and imitation news. The weapon of choice is a kind of stun gun that fires invisible bullets of misinformation. You can’t remember how you formed a certain opinion or belief, but you find yourself willing to fight for it. For example, a popular corporate strategy staged by contracted PR firms is to form citizen advisory panels. This technique makes people feel included, rather than polluted. Citizens are carefully chosen to attend catered lunches around the corporate conference table, to discuss community issues. Similarly, on the advice of contracted PR experts, many corporations now fund and sponsor the very environmental groups that have dogged them for years. This “absorb the enemy” tactic accomplishes several things at once. It gives the company a buffed-up, green-washed image, and it distracts the environmental opponent-partner. Said one corporate partner, “We keep them so busy they don’t have time to sue us.”⁵

HOW MONEY TALKS

One of the most effective and powerful PR tactics is to fund “front groups” and give them friendly, responsible-sounding names, like the American Council on Science and Health, whose experts defend petrochemical companies, the nutritional value of fast foods, and pesticides. The mission of front groups is to supply the “right” information on a product or industry and to debunk the “wrong” information.

Front groups have a history of being staunch defenders of the rights of Americans, such as the right to have employee accidents (Workplace Health and Safety Council, an employer organization that lobbies for the weakening of safety standards); the right to pay more for less health care (the Coalition for Health Insurance Choices, founded in the 1990s to defeat the Clinton health care plan); the right to choose large, fuel-inefficient cars (the Coalition for Vehicle Choice); and the right to dismantle ecosystems for profit (the Wise Use Movement). Front groups portray themselves as champions of free enterprise—strongholds of fairness and common sense—an image that helps their PR products get circulated in influential circles. For example, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who has publicly admitted he has no scientific training) poses in various media as an expert who’s very skeptical of climate change. In a Forbes magazine article titled “Love Global Warming” he does what he’s paid to do by funders like American Petroleum Institute and the extremist Koch Family Foundations: cast shadows of doubt on the urgent realities of climate change. “Rising sea levels, if they happen, would be bad for a lot of people,” he writes. “But a warming trend would be good for other people. More people die from blizzards and cold spells than from heat waves.”⁶

The problem is, crafted (and lucrative) statements like these have been working all too well; about two-thirds of Americans still believe that the consensus of real scientists is indecisive and controversial. Another industry and billionaire-funded front group is the Heartland Institute, called “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change” by The Economist magazine. Between 2008 and 2012 Heartland Institute sponsored seven International Conferences on Climate Change, convening a cadre of skeptics like Myron Ebell and Heartland’s climate go-to guy, James Taylor, who’s on record warning that taking action to reduce emissions would be a huge mistake that could cause a return to the “the Little Ice Age and the Black Death.” Heartland Institute was on a roll until it launched an absurd billboard campaign associating acceptance of climate science with “murderers, tyrants, and madmen “including Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson, and Fidel Castro. The first billboard featured the Unabomber’s ungainly mug shot, with the caption, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?”⁷

INVASION OF THE MIND SNATCHERS

In effect, America’s PR professionals create stage sets in which the rest of us play-act our lives. The PR industry cut its teeth in the 1920s on campaigns that promoted tobacco and leaded gasoline—products whose health effects badly needed to be swept under the carpet. Mark Dowie describes a classic perception coup executed by the PR pioneer Edward Bernays in 1929: “On the surface it seemed like an ordinary publicity stunt for ‘female emancipation.’ A contingent of New York debutantes marched down Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Parade, each openly lighting and smoking cigarettes, their so-called ‘torches of liberty.’ It was the first time in the memory of most Americans that any woman who wasn’t a prostitute had been seen smoking in public.”

Bernays made sure publicity photos of the models appeared in worldwide press, and the tobacco industry quickly added sex appeal to its glorious if deadly parade through the twentieth century. In recent years, tobacco lobbyists persuaded the furniture industry to add flame retardant materials, so sleepy cigarette smokers were less likely to be blamed for burning down houses. A similar, hidden PR tactic was used in the 1920s to promote leaded gasoline (ethyl). The mission was to boost both automobile performance and the profits of General Motors, DuPont, and Standard Oil. These allies soothed and massaged the American public’s justified fear of leaded gasoline by performing health effects research in-house, with precedent-setting approval from the federal government. Word from the corporate labs was “no problem,” even as factory workers making ethyl were dying by the dozen. A 1927 ad in National Geographic urged, “Ride with Ethyl in a high-compression motor and get the thrill of a lifetime.” The overt message was “Don’t let others pass you by,” but the hidden tag line was “… even if it kills you.”

GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS

Journalists simultaneously supply and divert the information stream. Depending on a journalist’s sources and biases, we may come away from a news article knowing less than when we started. On perpetual deadline, and with a mandate for objectivity as well as controversy, journalists present both sides of an issue, often creating a sense that the truth is uncertain. Marching orders for the news media come from one of the half dozen or so remaining media conglomerates—including NBC, News Corp, CBS, Viacom, Disney, and Time Warner—whose CEOs and editors and producers dictate what’s newsworthy and what’s not. As recently as the 1980s, fifty corporations still had a slice of the media pie, but that elite clan has now shrunk to an incestuous handful that invest in each other’s companies, are fattened by the same group of mega-advertisers, and get in-the-field reports from the same large wire services. These companies, whose primary goal is turning a profit, construct a reality that’s either fearful or fun, merging entertainment and news. Everyone gets the same slice of reality, no matter what region they live in. Stories that interpret the underlying meaning of an event become an endangered species, making George Orwell’s 1984 prophecies nearly complete: “The special function of certain Newspeak words … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.”⁸

According to the former managing editors of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, at least 40 percent of the news in those papers is generated by “spin doctor” PR journalists.⁹ Because newspaper, magazine, and Internet writers must also compress their stories into a given number of inches, they have little room for context and complexity. The same is true of TV news, sandwiched between the commercials and crime reporting that now make up a third of network news content. In 1968, the average interview sound bite was forty-two seconds; in 2013, the standard is eight seconds.¹⁰ Instead of political process, we get isolated events. Instead of context, we get vignettes about novelty and conflict. Information about change and reform takes too long to explain, so we are fed high-speed chases and newborn zoo animals instead. The goal is to keep us watching, not to keep us informed.

After journalists “dumb down” and abbreviate the remnants of the information stream, deep-pocketed advertisers divert more of the flow, often exerting enough pressure on editors to mop up a story altogether. Some advertisers issue policy statements to editors and news directors, requesting advance notice on stories that may put their products in an unfavorable light. Phone calls from CEOs of advertiser companies are like delete buttons on editors’ computers: There goes a story from the front page of tomorrow’s paper, or the six o’clock news.

By the time the truth about a subject like “fracking” reaches the American citizen, it’s been siphoned and filtered down to a trickle of questionable pop science. Fracking—the hydraulic fracturing of drilled well sites to harvest natural gas—is coming soon to your town, it’s not already there. In 2012, another 19,000 wells were drilled, bringing the grand total close to half a million. Yet how many Americans are aware of the hazards of this scraping-the-pot technology? The truth is, our impressions of fracking have been formed mostly by corporate PR. Many Americans believe fracking is completely safe because they’ve seen images in TV ads of cows grazing next to a fracking well. They’ve seen smiling faces of Americans who are prospering from the natural gas boom, and they’ve heard how these new energy supplies can reduce pollution and the threat of climate change.

But they haven’t heard the other side of the story, because ads don’t have to tell the other side. The media advocacy group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) dug into television archives to compare the number of news stories on fracking that had aired from 2009 through 2011 on national TV news stations (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News Channel). “All told,” says FAIR magazine (Extra!) reporter Miranda Spencer, “we found only nine stories focused specifically on fracking.” In contrast, during that three-year slice of news programming, there were 530 advertisements for “America’s Oil and Gas Industry” or “America’s Natural Gas.” Says Spencer, “Consider this typical don’t-worry-be-happy ad from the advocacy and lobbying group America’s Natural Gas Alliance:

All energy development comes with some risk. But proven technologies allow natural gas producers to supply affordable, cleaner energy while protecting our environment. Across America, these technologies protect the air, by monitoring air quality and reducing emissions; protect water through conservation and self-contained recycling systems; and protect the land by reducing our footprint and respecting wildlife. America’s natural gas. Domestic, abundant, clean energy to power our lives. That’s smarter power today.

“As the voiceover proceeds,” Spencer explains, “images of workers at high-tech consoles and modest, tidy-looking drill rigs alternate with frolicking kids and tranquil nature scenes.”¹¹ Contrast those rosy images with the realities of this nature-oblivious technology, summarized by Artists against Fracking:

Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking) wells require large industrial sites, ranging from 5–15 acres.… Millions of gallons of water are mixed with sand and over 600 different chemicals, including known carcinogens and toxins like lead, uranium, and methanol. For each “frack,” chemical fluid gets pumped deep under the earth’s surface, where it can contaminate groundwater that cities and towns often use for drinking water. Finally, after the oil or natural gas is extracted, the waste fluid is left in open air pits to evaporate, releasing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere, contaminating ground level ozone and causing smog and acid rain.¹²

The waste from a Pennsylvania fracking well was recently rejected at a hazardous waste dump because it was ten times as radioactive as the town’s allowable level. That wouldn’t be much of a surprise to Jacki Schilke, a cattle farmer in northwest North Dakota whose teeth are falling out and who often has blood in her urine. When fracking began on thirty-two oil and gas wells within three miles of her 160-acre ranch, the first sign of trouble was five dead cows. Then, other cows stopped producing milk for their calves. They lost from sixty to eighty pounds in a week, and their tails mysteriously dropped off. When a certified environmental consultant tested the ambient air, he detected elevated levels of benzene, methane, chloroform, butane, propane, toluene, and xylene—all compounds associated with drilling and fracking and also with cancers, birth defects, and organ damage.¹³

Schilke’s story is just one of many that are finally coming to light, mostly in local and regional media. Fortunately, Josh Fox’s Gasland, a documentary about natural gas drilling, was nominated for an Oscar in 2011 and has captured a wide national audience, helping concerned Americans understand what lies behind the PR. A chart measuring Google searches for the terms fracking, shale gas, and Gasland shows that before the release of the film, few people were searching for information about fracking. Only after a sharp spike in searches for the term Gasland is there a strong, steady rise in search activity for fracking and shale gas.

DELAYED, DISCOUNTED, AND DILUTED FEEDBACK

Scientists like Donella Meadows argue that we need to be sensitive to scientific signals—”feedback”—or we risk crashing our civilization into a brick wall. She compares our world to a speeding automobile on a slippery road. “The driver goes too fast for the brakes to work in time.”¹⁴

At the scale of an entire society in overdrive, she observes that “decision makers in the system do not get, or believe, or act upon information that limits have been exceeded.” Part of our dilemma is from insufficient feedback: We don’t even realize that caution is necessary. Another part of the problem is the speed we’re traveling: Our “pedal to the metal” economy is based on beliefs that resource supplies are limitless and that the earth can continually bounce back from abuse. These beliefs are in part scripted by public relations and advertising experts, just doing their job. What the heck, no harm done, right? Not exactly. Because of low-quality, incomplete information, we may be overlooking an obvious, and ominous, concept: The car will still achieve race car speeds as always, even if the tank is almost empty.