Trust Us, We're Experts! Is About The P.R. Tools Corporations Use to Influence Opinion

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber walked into MUGGER's office looking a little like Christians entering the Colosseum. These guys are classic liberal do-gooders, and MUGGER's office couldn't look more like a node of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy if he installed a stone altar where Baptists in Antonin Scalia masks sacrificed the children of registered Democrats to the great god W. An oversize caricature of Michael Moore as an obese, money-eating beast glowers down at Rampton the whole time I'm interviewing them and makes him visibly ill at ease. Stauber turns his back to it.

Rampton is a journalist-turned-activist, Stauber an activist-turned-journalist. They run the nonprofit Center for Media & Democracy in Madison, WI, where they worry about the tobacco industry, Frankenfood, nuclear waste, global warming, all that. Their latest book is Trust Us, We're Experts! (Tarcher/Putnam, 360 pages, $24.95), subtitled How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future. Their previous books were Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! and Mad Cow USA. They also put out the quarterly PR Watch, which dogs the public relations industry's efforts to snow the public about tobacco, Frankenfood, et al. Trust Us, We're Experts! is about the p.r. tools corporations use to influence opinion?things like biased scientific studies, fake grassroots organizations and promotional videos disguised as news.

I tell them I'm suspicious of books that look like I don't need to read them to know what they say. When Dinesh D'Souza writes his next book on the descent of Western culture, with jacket blurbs by William Bennett and William Kristol, my response will be tell me something I don't know. When these two guys put out a book on evil corporations, with cover art by Tom Tomorrow and blurbs from Bill Moyers, Bill McKibben, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jeremy Rifkin and Jim Hightower, I have to ask them if they're not just preaching to the choir in the Church of St. Utne.

"It's true that no one needs to have us tell them that the media is full of manipulation and propaganda," Rampton replies. "But what we try to do in our books is explain something about how the techniques work."

So we talk about some of these techniques. One disheartening lesson in their book is the way that big nonprofits like the American Heart Association or the American Cancer Society whore out their endorsements to corporate donors. Bristol-Myers Squibb gave the Heart Association $600,000 to slap its logo?in effect, its seal of approval?on the drug Pravachol; the Cancer Society got $1 million for putting its logo on NicoDerm CQ packaging, and the American Diabetes Association even took money to endorse Eskimo Pies.

"People hear 'nonprofit' and think that this is some organization that is above profit, when in fact most nonprofits gladly accept funding?sometimes millions of dollars?from corporate interests," Stauber says. Indeed, he points out, just flaunting the term "nonprofit" is one of the ways industry gets us to let our guard down.

In a more insidious variant, p.r. firms often help beleaguered industries like tobacco or genetically modified foods create dummy grassroots organizations that look and sound just like actual concerned citizens' groups?as Rampton puts it, "plain folks like you and me, people who are angry about some cause, like the National Smokers Alliance or Citizens for a Sound Economy"?but exist solely to pump out the industry line. It's a measure of how good publicity firms have gotten at this that you'll often see a reporter quoting one of these groups, clearly unaware that it's an industry creation.

You also have to be very careful whenever scientific studies are cited, the authors say. Universities have a terrible habit of publishing studies that support their big industry donors. Scientists and medical professionals can be bought, too. Tobacco companies have paid scientists to write letters to influential medical journals; drug trials will often be suspiciously biased in favor of the drug companies who funded them.

How then does the average reader distinguish between the hoax "research council" and the real one, or know which scientific study to trust?

"They make it as difficult as they can possibly make it," Stauber says. "One thing that is clear is that we really need to have better information available on the funding of nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations."

"You're right that you can't trust studies unequivocally," Rampton adds, "but it's also equally true that you can't avoid having to trust the experts and studies. We rely on the information they provide on all sorts of levels. The practical fact of the matter is we do end up having to trust them or accept them. So it's not a question of trust versus not trust. It's about verifying, and knowing the limits to how much you can trust. And part of the answer to that is knowing that everyone has an agenda, including Consumers Union, including the Union of Concerned Scientists. Also, having standards of disclosure, so that it becomes harder for the institutions that we have to trust to put ideas forward without also disclosing the potential biases behind them."

"And here is an instance where the mainstream media has completely fallen down," Stauber argues. "Let's take the genetically engineered food issue. What the mainstream media has done is repeated the assertions of genetic engineering scientists that the stuff is safe, but never asked for the proof. A lot of people assume that the FDA tests food and drugs, and it doesn't. What it does is examine mountains of data supplied by the companies, who have invested billions of dollars in some cases in attempting to develop new drugs and want to get them on the market as fast as possible. And then once the stuff is on the market, after the FDA has evaluated that information, that information is not provided to university researchers, the public or public interest scientists, because it's protected as confidential business information. This becomes very problematic." Stauber speaks about "the need to break the stranglehold of secrecy that industry and government impose on scientific information in the name of confidential business data."

Being lefty do-gooders, the authors don't write anything in this book about public relation-abuses committed by approved liberal causes like PETA or Greenpeace. Some of PETA's goofy p.r. tactics are just as misleading as any smoke the tobacco industry blows, and annoying as well.

Rampton points out that PR Watch "devoted two whole issues last year to a pretty blunt expose of Greenpeace in Australia"?though that was for cooperating with the Olympics on siting the games on a former toxic dump. He agrees with me that PETA's anti-fur antics can be lame. "But that said, I think the public has a lot less to fear from PETA than it has to fear from industry," he continues. "I'd point out too that PETA actually has some common ground with groups like the [chemical industry-sponsored] American Council on Science and Health, because they both go around saying you can't trust animal studies about human health. So PETA is generally perceived as a left-wing organization, but you can put a different spin on it."

Stauber adds, "I think there's an awful lot of bad and counterproductive p.r. that goes on among activists. Part of it is in an effort to catch up with these much larger industry p.r. campaigns. I mean, Greenpeace can spend thousands of dollars scaling a building, hanging from ropes, dropping a banner and getting a photo in The New York Times about global warming, and that's all well and good. But it's a one-shot deal. The auto industry, the coal industry, they have the last word, because they're managing this issue all the time. Does that burst of p.r. from Greenpeace in any way measure up with what industry can do? Apparently not, or there'd be a lot more serious attention and regulatory control given to global climate change."

Rampton concurs that "the p.r. being done by activist groups looks almost laughably amateurish by comparison... Basically all the activist p.r. that you're talking about is publicity stunts, which, from a p.r. point of view, are the equivalent of football plays that were outmoded in Vince Lombardi's days."

"Everyone on the left thinks they know everything about propaganda," Stauber says. "But the reality is, we're the most propagandized people in history, only advertising and p.r. is how propaganda is waged. You would expect news media to investigate propaganda, but of course it's just the opposite. More and more of what we see is rip-and-read news releases, or video news releases, aired by the thousands, heavily managed and spun."

Asked how public relations professionals have responded to the books and PR Watch, Stauber replies, "What they say to us, almost invariably, is 'You really hit the nail on the head. You really get it right?but it's even worse than you can imagine.' And then what I say is, 'Look, we're just two shmucks from the Midwest; this happens to be our beat. You've worked for all these firms, you need to write the book.' They get sort of pale and the conversation is cut off."

I ask Rampton and Stauber why I should believe them, either.

"Evidently you have misread the title of our book," Rampton smiles. "Perhaps you thought that was meant ironically..."

"You really can trust us," Stauber chimes in. "We're experts."