Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
Page 21
Proctor & Gamble uses similar tactics to peddle soaps, toothpaste, and diapers. Somehow, this company has enrolled a volunteer army of 240,000 or more enthusiastic teenagers (a battalion called Tremor) who advertise and influence by word of mouth. Why do they do it? Apparently because it gives them a sense of being in the forefront—knowing about a new product, for example, before others do. They like having access, being influential, being part of the “shaping” of opinion, and they like the free samples.
The founder of another word-of-mouth agency, BzzAgent, has also discovered the awesome power of personal persuasion. “Our goal was to find a way to capture honest word of mouth,” says David Balter, BzzAgent’s founder, “and to build a network that would turn passionate customers into brand evangelists.” His agents (who can redeem points to get prizes but typically don’t) just like to tell others what they are reading and what restaurant they’ve discovered and what gizmo they just bought. The company has more than 60,000 in its eager, enthusiastic ranks, and for a typical twelve-week campaign involving a thousand agents, it rakes in $95,000 or more.5
Who can you trust, now, when your best friend, or your mother, might be a covert commercial agent?
HOW MONEY TALKS
One of the most effective and powerful PR tactics is to fund “front groups” and give them very 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 debunk the “wrong” information. As Sharon Beder writes in Global Spin,
The American Council on Science and Health is funded by Burger King, Coca-Cola, NutraSweet, Monsanto, Dow, and Exxon, among others. As in other front groups, the organization’s scientists pose as independent experts to promote the corporate causes. The group’s members portray themselves as moderates, often using words like ‘reasonable,’ ‘sensible,’ and ‘sound.’ They downplay the dangers of environmental problems while emphasizing the costs of solving them.6
Front groups are staunch defenders of the rights of Americans, such as the right to smoke (the National Smokers Alliance); 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); 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.
Stauber, a director of the organization PRWatch, first became involved in watch-dogging the public relations industry when he was researching biotechnology through internal documents and interviews with industry insiders. “We saw strong evidence of collusion between Monsanto, a manufacturer of biotech products, and various government agencies and professional organizations,” he said. “The Journal of the American Medical Association urged doctors to wave the flag for genetic engineering and pump up the new industry. Government agencies like the FDA and USDA did their part by working with Monsanto to overcome farmer and consumer opposition to the emerging products. Government agencies are supposed to be watchdogs, but too often they are more like lap dogs.”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. Like the main character in the movie The Truman Show, we’ve never doubted that the sets are real. Corporations alone contract $15 billion to $20 billion in PR campaigns annually—campaigns that create consumer culture, buy political agendas, and “spin” scientific opinion. As the average underpaid journalist knows, public relations—not journalism—is the profession to be in if you want to live in one of “those” neighborhoods. “Journalism students—even at the best colleges and universities—are more likely to graduate and work in PR and business communications than as journalists,” Stauber says. “The schools combine PR and journalism classes as if they were one and the same.” Fact is, the kids are going where the money is.
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 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.”8
Bernays made sure publicity photos of the models appeared in the worldwide press, and the tobacco industry quickly added sex appeal to its glorious if deadly parade through the twentieth century. Responding to the “1954 emergency”— involving medical disclosures on the hazards of smoking—the tobacco industry hired PR firm Hill & Knowlton to launch a smoke-and-mirrors campaign to meet the enemy head-on. Among many other tactics, the firm combed 2,500 medical journals for any inconclusive or contrary findings about tobacco’s health effects and then showcased these gleanings of doubt in a booklet sent to more than 200,000 doctors, members of Congress, and news professionals.9 Tactics like these became standard procedures of the PR industry. “In a world of manufactured reality, the perception of a hazardous product or accident is what needs to be managed, not the hazard itself,”10 Beder explains.
GETTING THE LEAD IN
A similar 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 dozens. 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.”11
FLASHFLOODS OF INFORMATION
There’s no shortage of information in America. Search for just about any keyword on the Internet and the cyber-hounds will retrieve gigabytes of “matches” of all shapes and flavors. It’s true that a search for “art depicting the Madonna” may yield a colorful, profanity-spiked quote from a pop singer-actress by the same name —but hey, isn’t that information too? Every day, on average, Americans dodge 3,000 commercial messages, each of them shouting louder or purring more seductively than the last. Sound bites, fun facts, and bad-news nuggets also compete for our attention, along with the million words a week some of us process at work. Getting just the information we need is like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose.
Even more disturbing than the flood of information is its quality. We try to base intelligent civic, family, and marketplace decisions on vested-interest information. No wonder we can’t shake our affluenza—the economy is programmed for sickness. Drug companies teach us how to overcome depression, and pesticide companies tell farmers how much pesticide to use. In the mania of media, good news is no news because it doesn’t “work” on TV. The quality of our information is spiked throughout all sectors of our society, but we’re forced to drink it anyway because it’s the only information we can get.
‘GREENING THE EARTH WITH GLOBAL WARMING’
If the true facts about global warming are thought of as the flow of a mighty river, the average American ends up with only a cupful. The complexity of global warming makes a third of the information unavailable even to scientist
s, who tell us they don’t know enough yet about the relationships among oceans, biomass, and atmospheric physics. They do know without any doubt that CO2 levels have already increased by about 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution began, and that the decade from 1990 to 2000 was the warmest on record. They’ve known for a hundred years that a blanket of greenhouse gases like CO2 can warm the planet the same way a car with rolled-up windows overheats in a parking lot.
However, PR firms and the PR environmental offices of oil, mining, and automobile companies have a different story to tell—a story that sends a large portion of the information flow into a calculated whirlpool. Their mission is to craft “customized” information to create doubt, confuse the public, and protect the client’s profits. Scientists are found whose skeptical views support the fossil-fuel industry. These “third-party experts” have an appearance of objectivity that sometimes fades when the scientists reveal, under oath, that their research funding comes from utilities and fossil-fuel consortiums. Even if the earth is warming, they maintain, it could be a natural occurrence. In a recent Frontline-Nova program, What’s Up with the Weather?, one fossil-fueled scientist summarized his stance on global warming: “Americans are moving to the Sun Belt by the millions,” he said, “which proves we like warm climates.” The question is, do we also like the spread of tropical diseases, drought, hurricanes, and economic disruption, and a rising sea level?
A video titled Greening the Planet Earth exposed many a congressional staff office to fantasy science. Produced by the Greening Earth Society, the industry-funded program begins with dramatic narration: “The year 2085. The atmospheric level of carbon dioxide has doubled to 540 parts per million. What kind of world have we created?”
The Carbon Dioxide Spike
“A better world,” answers a corporate-funded scientist. “A more productive world. Plants are the basis for all productivity on earth. . . . And they’re going to be much more effective, much more efficient when the earth is warmer”.12 (Never mind that two thousand of the world’s most eminent scientists signed a statement saying global warming will be a catastrophe and that a 2004 UN report projects a temperature rise of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.) With pseudoscience like that of the Greening Earth Society in hand, fossil-fueled politicians are equipped to create happy-face scenarios about abundant cotton fields and prolific citrus trees. Who knows, maybe ferns three stories tall and, someday, the reappearance of dinosaurs—wouldn’t that be cool?
Well, no, not really. Street theater recently performed in Australia illustrates why: melting ice sculptures of kangaroos and koalas are symbols that the warmest decade in recorded history is taking a heavy toll on the world’s ecosystems, with more in the forecast. But somehow, despite all the scientific research, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through.
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 newspaper article knowing less than when we started (but thanks to the adjacent ads, we’ll know where brassieres are on sale!). On perpetual deadline, and with a mandate for objectivity as well as controversy, journalists present both fabricated science-for-sale and its exaggerated, Chicken Little opposite. Effectively, they stage a “media clash of the titans.” (Which expert will you root for, the kept professor or the chicken?)
Marching orders for the news media come from one of the half dozen or so remaining media conglomerates—including Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, GE’s NBC Universal, and Comcast Corporation—whose CEOs dictate what’s newsworthy and what’s not (when you’re one of them you buy newspaper companies like the rest of us buy newspapers). As recently as the 1980s, fifty corporations still had a slice of the media pie, but that elite clan has 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. Alarmingly, these companies are pushing for the privatization—as opposed to the licensing— of the airwaves. When these invisible yet very tangible wavelengths are controlled by a few multibillionaires, George Orwell’s 1984 prophecies will be nearly complete: “The special function of certain Newspeak words. . . was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.”13
Because journalists are usually short on time, they are tempted to interview and quote experts conveniently supplied by PR firms through services like Profnet. PR shadow-journalists also supply press releases, video news releases, and radio scripts by the thousands. One company, PR Newswire, pumps out 100,000 news releases every year for fifteen thousand private clients. RadioUSA supplies broadcast-quality scripts to five thousand radio stations, and MediaLink distributes more than five thousand “video news releases” to TV stations every year, ready to be aired as is, free of charge.14
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.15 Because newspaper, magazine, and many 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 make up a third of network news content. In 1968, the average interview sound bite was forty-two seconds; in 2000, the standard is eight seconds. 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 highspeed 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 advertising 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 global warming reaches the American citizen, it’s been siphoned and filtered down to a trickle of questionable pop science.
DELAYED, DISCOUNTED, AND DILUTED FEEDBACK
Scientists like Donella Meadows have argued that we need to be sensitive to scientific signals—“feedback”—or we risk crashing our civilization into a brick wall. Meadows compared our world to a speeding automobile on a slippery road: “The driver goes too fast for the brakes to work in time.”16
At the scale of an entire society in overdrive, she observed 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 jobs. 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 racecar speeds as always, even if the tank is almost empty.
PART THREE
treatment
CHAPTER 21
The Road to Recovery
This situation imagined by Affluenza coproducer Vivia Boe has not occurred. Not yet.
You’re watching TV, in the middle of a program, when the screen goes black for a moment. The scene cuts to a breaking news story. A large crowd is gathered outside an expensive home with some equally pricey cars parked out front. A well-dressed family of four stands on the stairs, looking grim. One of the children is holding a white flag. The reporte
r, in hushed tones, speaks into his microphone: “We’re here live at the home of the Joneses—Jerry and Janet Jones—the family we’ve all been trying to keep up with for years. Well, you can stop trying right now, because they have surrendered. Let’s eavesdrop for a moment.”
The shot changes, revealing a tired-looking Janet Jones, her husband’s hand resting on her shoulder. Her voice cracks as she speaks: “It’s just not worth it. We never see each other anymore. We’re working like dogs. We’re always worried about our kids, and we have so much debt we won’t be able to pay it off for years. We give up. So please, stop trying to keep up with us.” From the crowd someone yells, “So what will you do now?” “We’re just going to try to live better on less,” Janet replies. “So there you have it. The Joneses surrender,” says the reporter. “And now for a commercial break.”
The Joneses haven’t really surrendered. Not yet. But millions of Americans are looking for ways to simplify their lives. And in the rest of this book, you’ll learn about some of those ways, and how people are coming together to help create a more sustainable society, free from the clutches of affluenza. We suggest that you start by taking our affluenza self-test, an admittedly unscientific, but we think useful, means of determining whether you’ve got affluenza, and if so, how serious your case is.