Aug. 27, 2008 - Issue #671: The Bullshit Issue

Exposing the bullshit industry

Watch groups shine the light on the public relations spin

‘We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production,” writes Laura Penny to open her 2005 bestseller Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit. “Never in history have so many people uttered statements that they know to be untrue ... saying not what they actually believe, but what they want others to believe—not what is, but what works.”
 

The sheer volume of falsehoods which barrage us all on a daily basis has spawned something of a protective adaptation, a savvy, knowing cynicism through which we view and filter the myriad messages aimed our way. We have become, in many ways, bullshit detectors.
 

As voters, we have developed a distrust for the rehearsed lines and the inevitably empty pledges of politicians. As consumers, we have learned that the promises offered by companies in their advertising—while they may still persuade us to buy—are at best half-truths.
 

But while we may be suspicious, we’re not universally distrustful. Studies show that what we believe depends to a great extent on who we hear it from—doctors, scientists, academics and our fellow citizens can be trusted; lawyers, salesmen, politicians and corporations cannot.
 

If McDonald’s says that we should all eat more hamburgers, we call bullshit without hesitation. But if the same message comes to us from, say, a non-profit group called Nutritionists for Food Options? Well ... 
 

“One term that’s sometimes used in the public relations trade to describe this is what they call the ‘third-party technique,’ which is to put your client’s message in someone else’s mouth,” explains Sheldon Rampton, the research director with the Center for Media and Democracy, a US-based watchdog group focused on the activities of the multi-billion-dollar-a-year public relations industry.
 

“One way to do that is to get your client’s message in the news so that it looks like a news story. Another commonly used technique is the third-party expert—someone who is presented to the public as an independent expert on some issue, such as tobacco and health or global warming or food safety or product safety, and either not disclosing or generally downplaying and not mentioning the fact that this person has actually been recruited and often paid by the industry itself to deliver its talking points.”
 

While it’s no secret that companies devote considerable time and resources to PR—a catch-all category of efforts ranging from innocuous media releases and staged photo-ops to the more insidious promotion of front groups and the creation and dissemination of one-sided research—Rampton says few people are familiar with just how much these efforts have come to dominate the media we consume.
 

“In terms of how pervasive that is in society, well, studies have been done of newspapers and their contents that typically find that approximately half of the content of the daily newspaper originated with some PR firm in some fashion or another—through news releases or other forms. It’s really a strikingly high percentage of the information that the public gets as news that’s actually something that started from someone deciding that they wanted to push that message out to the public.”

 

Over the past century, the public relations industry has grown from a small number of individuals offering consulting services to clients to help them get their message out to become an industry that operates largely out of public view to shape everything from the cars we buy to the politicians we elect to the opinions we hold.
 

While public relations has roots in the colourful publicity stunts of travelling carnival hawkers and circus promoters, Rampton says the industry as we know it really began in the United States in 1917.
 

“During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson set up something called the Committee for Public Information to mobilize support for the war effort. And they invented a lot of the techniques that later got taken up by the PR industry,” he explains. “A number of the people who went on to become founders of the public relations industry worked for the Committee for Public Information, and after the war ended they realized that there was a market and money to be made by providing similar services to companies.” 
 

The man often credited as being the “father of PR,” Edward Bernays, opened his first office in 1919. One of his early clients was American Tobacco, which was eager to increase demand for its cigarettes by reaching the largely untapped market of female smokers. Bernays staged an event which has become lore in the history of PR: sending a group of smoking models down Fifth Avenue challenging the patriarchy of the era with their “torches of freedom.” By 1930, Lucky Strike, American Tobacco’s main brand, had become the number one brand of cigarettes.
 

Over the next 40 years, Bernays worked for an estimated 400 clients, including General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and General Electric, pioneering and refining techniques such as product placement, direct marketing, product tie-ins and public opinion polling, while integrating elements of sociology and psychology into what he unapologetically called propaganda.
 

Bernays early involvement with American Tobacco also began a long relationship between the PR industry and big tobacco. In the 1980s and ‘90s, American PR giant Burson-Marsteller helped Philip Morris and other tobacco companies delay the introduction of public smoking bans and other restrictions on smoking and cigarettes by helping form industry front-groups like the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition and fake grassroots citizens groups (termed Astroturf groups) such as the National Smokers Alliance. 
 

While the tide eventually turned against the tobacco industry and restrictions on smoking are now widespread in North America, success in delaying the introduction of legislation  by years through the covert use of third-parties has become a mainstay of the PR industry.

 

Similar techniques have been used to great effect for two decades by industries opposed to action on climate change through measures such as a reduction in the use of fossil fuels and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.
 

Kevin Grandia is the project manager of DeSmogBlog.com, a PR-watch organization formed in 2005 by Jim Hoggan—himself a PR professional for over 35 years who became frustrated with what he calls “one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world”—to “clear the PR pollution that clouds the science of climate change.” 
 

He says the aim of the “climate denial” industry hasn’t been to change people’s behaviour so much as to promote a false debate, first questioning the scientific consensus about anthropomorphic climate change and more recently about solutions.
 

“In this case all they were trying to do—and they still do—is try to create seeds of doubt,” he says. “The goal is not to persuade. Persuasion is much more difficult—to actually make people change the way they think or change the way they do things is much harder than just giving people a reason not to do something, like be concerned about an issue.
 

“And doubt is very easy to create by creating a debate in the media around the science of climate change,” he continues, “which 10 years ago may have been somewhat legitimate, but now we’re seeing not only the effect that the climate scientists were predicting, we’re also seeing certainty levels higher than ever before and still the only ‘scientific argument’—and I wouldn’t even call it that, I’d call it an argument—is being played out against climate change in the media, not in the scientific literature.”
 

In the late-2002 lead up to Canada’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, Burson-Marsteller’s Canadian PR affiliate, National Public Relations, spearheaded the creation of the short-lived and unsuccessful industry front-group Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions to try to scuttle ratification by pressing for a “made in Canada” solution.
 

Grandia says that groups in Canada like the Calgary-based Friends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Council, along with similar groups in the US like the Cooler Heads Coalition, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are continuing industry efforts to delay action on climate change, but have largely moved on from denying the problem exists.
 

“It’s really started to move away from the denial of the climate science. That has changed now to ‘Oh, well it’s happening, but it’s natural.’ They don’t actually have any science, but they have their own opinions of that. Outside of that kind of argument that’s really fringe—just a few strange people who just can’t let go or have been convinced by people who can’t let go—the argument is really moving towards the solution-side of things and you’re seeing industry and government coming in on that,” he says.
 

“So you’re seeing arguments around the carbon tax, of course. [Stephen Harper has] been saying it’s going to kill the economy, but he has no proof of that. You’re seeing arguments around why we shouldn’t be doing renewable energy. You’re seeing dirty energy sources, like the tar sands, being spun to be environmentally friendly.”
 

Rampton says that efforts by industry and PR firms to promote and push concepts like “clean coal” are another important part of PR.

“Language is something that, of course, is very important in framing issues for people. And that’s a term that a lot of PR people use in talking about how they use language: framing. Quite a bit of effort goes into figuring out the right terminology to talk about issues.”
 

He points to similar examples such as the rebranding of sewage sludge as “biosolids” and the Bush Administration’s “no child left behind” program.
 

“Who can be against the idea of not leaving a child behind? The very names of things become advertisements for them instead of descriptions as a result of these kinds of things,” he says. “That’s, of course, something George Orwell talked about quite a bit in his book 1984—that if you can control the vocabulary people use to talk about things then you can control the way they think about them as well.”

 

While Rampton believes many of the activities PR firms undertake on behalf of their clients—things like crisis management, publicity for product launches and providing information about their clients’ activities to the public—are legitimate, he believes that more covert efforts deserve far more public scrutiny.
 

“Where I have a problem with it is when PR works to conceal the relationship between the client and the message,” he says. “Usually when they’re doing that it’s because there’s something about the message that is suspect. I find that, in general, the worse the behaviour of the corporation, the more likely they are to use suspect methods. The more good a company is doing and the less harm, the less need it has to resort to covert methods to get its message out.”
 

While he thinks that there should be more government oversight to ensure transparency and disclosure about the source of things like video news releases that PR firms provide to news outlets, which often run them unedited and without attribution, he cautions against too much regulation.
 

“I think people do need to be careful about regulation because a lot of the techniques of public relations are really using communications tools that are guaranteed to everyone in a democracy. And I think we do have to be careful about not restricting use of those tools in a way that would undermine democracy itself. Free speech is pretty important.”
 

He says that the efforts of organizations such as the Center for Media and Democracy and DeSmogBlog.com in exposing the activities of the PR industry can go a long way in limiting the influence on the public of covert forms of PR.
 

“People would do well to just generally have a careful attitude about information that they get from the media in particular—to realize that the information may have an agenda behind it,” he says. “Simply realizing that will sometimes help in identifying who is the source of the message. Understanding the techniques used by the PR industry, understanding that some of it is designed to look like independent news and approaching the information you get with something of a skeptical eye, I think goes a fair way to helping people see what’s going on.” 

“The best advice a good PR person can give is the first thing you have to do is do the right thing,” adds Grandia. “No amount of greenwash, no amount of public relations ‘spin’ is going to help your company in the long term. You will be found out, just like the tobacco companies were. Start doing the right thing and start telling people you’re doing the right thing—that’s not greenwashing if you’re actually doing the right thing. You can communicate that and you can communicate it well and people will believe it over time if you continue to prove that what you’re saying is what you’re actually doing. That’s how you build a good reputation.” V 

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