© 1996 by R. Louis Richards
Why did I view Russian cosmonauts pushing a big inflatable Pepsi can around the space-station on the TV news last night? How could something like that even be passed off as news? The answer probably involves the great thinkers inside some international public relations firm. The video clip had all the signs of being a VNR, or "video news release." It probably didn't come to the newsroom from any press agency. It likely originated in an advertising or PR firm hired by Pepsico, a giant of a corporation that is currently being boycotted for supporting the ruthless military dictatorship in Burma. No, sorry, that little fact hasn't been on the news.
A week ago, I hadn't yet heard of VNRs. That was before I read Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, by John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, ©1995 by the Center for Media & Democracy, 236 pp., published by Common Courage Press.
Have you, like many today, become more and more distrusting of more and more of the available information and its sources? Do you ever wonder if maybe you're becoming too cynical? You can put such fears to rest with this book that deserves to be read by all. It could give us direction for re-establishing a little public trust at our grassroots.
Our personal freedoms have unquestionably become secondary to our individual relationships to economy. 99.9% of the economy doesn't get out of bed in the morning without some big business or corporate establishment involvement. Today we are governed by pressures of economic survival wielded by forces we did not elect. Forces to whom the term "survival" might mean things quite different from a commoner's understanding. Things like market dominance or profit margin.
If the democratic component of our representative democracy is failing, it is because the perceptions of what is in the community's best interest are not the actualities. In cases where a community rises to address a common issue or concern, it will not usually be in everyone's economic interest to have the problem corrected or even made public. If a negative cat should escape from its bag, the story will be "spun" for damage control. As world economy eats up all the resources, and as it occasionally/unavoidably spills its wastes, stopping the destruction or cleaning up the mess may not be as cost effective as a good line of bull, spread nicely in just the right places.
Quoting from the book:
The values that dominate our lives today are corporate, not democratic values. Our system is first and foremost defined by the rules and regulations we follow as employees, customers, and consumers. Public relations firms are them-selves corporations which exist to serve the propaganda interests of their clients. And as everyone who works for a corporation knows, democracy does not exist at the workplace. Nor is democracy working in Washington and state capitols where corporate special interests control the political purses that put candidates in office and keep them there. Public relations exists to manufacture the necessary illusions that bridge the gap between the dream and the reality of American society. In those illusions, however, the dream remains visible.
We are faced with a subtle but polished, and at the same time, monumental case of "bait and switch." The national-gone-multi-national "con" has been a long time in the making. The book presents the 19th century antics of Phineas T. Barnum and goes on to the rise of PR to a science in this century. We learn about some pioneers of industrial strength artifice. There was Edward Bernays who hired women models to smoke Lucky Strikes while marching in the 1929 Easter Parade. This publicity stunt, presented as a political demonstration, tripled the sales of Luckys before the Easter Bunny could return with another load of eggs. Other early sultans of spin were Ivy Lee, inventor of "crisis management, and "George Creel, author of, How We Advertised America, 1920, who's Committee for Public Information sold the idea of World War One as, "the war to end all wars," that would "make the world safe for democracy."
Public relations in the tobacco industry easily generates a chapter of its own, as does the selling of the "friendly atom." Our personal and public life-and-death choices are too often based on the spin doctors. If you are vociferously reacting to a mega-corporation, or any large powerful interest group that is in your face, lungs, arteries, genes, or back yard, and so, begin to organize your friends and neighbors, expect the PR boys and girls to place operatives within your group as is related in the chapter, Spies for Hire, which documents such skulduggery. More industry tactics are described in the chapters; Divide and Conquer, and Poisoning the Grassroots.
Stauber and Rampton, with no specific intention to deal with sludge per se, faced the task of coining a catchy title for their book about public relations. The effort resulted in, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You. The authors borrowed this satire from a cartoon strip, thinking it an apt and able parody for the PR industry. Then, as if by magic, an entire chapter materialized when the publishers put out pre-publication advance notice of the title.
Chapter 8, The Sludge Hits the Fan, documents the quintessential case study of the PR industry at work. It spontaneously evolved when the Director of Information for the industry's trade organization, the WEF, called to voice concerns that the image their fine product (sewage and industrial sludge) might be soiled if the title was not changed. The WEF (Water Environment Federation, formerly the Water Pollution Control Federation, formerly the Federation of Sewage and Industrial Wastes Associations, and originally founded as the Federation of Sewage Works Associations) had created a new and better term that the sludge lobby could use in its efforts to gain new and better (more profitable) resting places for its condensed blend of human and industrial excreta, now called "Biosolids." (I guess Bio/Chemo/Toxi-solids would never fly, far too unwieldy.)
The fusion of resource-extraction money and burgeoning national environmental organizations is found in Chapter 9, Silencing Spring. The two sides cross-pollinate, sharing PR reps, directors, and finances. With the advent of Earth Day 1970, the big corporations saw a threat in the prodigious rise of grassroots environmental movements. By the 25th anniversary in 1995, the pipers were set to play the tunes called for a slickly staged corporate-wet-dream-gala in the nation's capitol--Earth Day USA. The industry was busy arranging for "Astroturf" to replace the grassroots. National enviro was having its teeth pulled out as the so-called "Wise Use Movement" was rising on a spring tide of deep pocketed industrial funding.
Not only corporate clients seek improved images. In Chapter 10, The Torturers' Lobby, we find just how effective some death-squad wielding governments can be at donning the smiley face. In places where only small elites ever have nice days, it remains business as usual with U.S. establishments, public and private. There is a continuing history here that we don't think much about for some reason. Perhaps that reason is the thirty million dollars that funnel into PR firms annually for Peru, Kuwait, Indonesia, Israel, China, Egypt, Turkey, Guatemala, South Korea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Columbia, etc., etc. Many of these PR dollars are coming right out of U.S. foreign aid payments, received of course as result of the PR lobbying. It is a neat little closed system, and likely driven by the arms industry, that invaluable instrument of repression, pulling strings in any direction that points to profits.
The Authors devote a chapter to the ongoing coopting of the press by the PR industry. The lines between news and advertising blur in the blizzard of VNRs and their radio and print equivalents. Today, more people write copy for press releases than for all news production, and "the gap is getting wider." All but the big name journalists are paid minimally. Reporters and copy writers can do better bending the truth for a biased buck than protecting it for ethical reportage. The big names get rich, coming and going through revolving doors between news-rooms and PR think tanks. Cokie Roberts knocked down $35,000 for a single speech, anted up by an importer of Toyotas. Will she look for any dirt on them or their products? We only have to wait for the internet to clog up enough for a little well placed "regulating" to help out. Will the net go the way of the nominally publicly owned airwaves?
The book is full of humorous section titles that help us savor the ironies; The Nestlé Crunch, A Brief History of Slime, Our Sludge Doesn't Stink. Over all, it is as easily readable as it is important for arming ourselves against state-of-the-art manipulations. Beyond exposing the magnitude of the artifice and how it works, this book names the names. In the appendices there is a list of the top 15 mega-liars, ranked by income. And, there is a revealing "leaked" corporate crisis plan, penned by the seventh largest PR firm in the country.
The final chapter, Taking Back Your Own Back Yard, relates a case study of one woman, bucking a powerful industry and winning. They used an arsenal of PR and dirty tricks against her and lost. We can still exercise the powers of community and democracy more easily here than in some of those other parts of the world we've mentioned. If we should wind up like them, please let it not be because we were hoodwinked into it by over-paid flim-flammers flacking for fascism.
From the book:
The fact that corporations and governments feel compelled to spend billions of dollars every year manipulating the public is a perverse tribute to human nature and our own moral values. The public relations industry has stolen our dreams, and returned them to us packaged as illusions. It must be our duty to dream more deeply, and to participate in the process of transforming those dreams into reality.