Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  How do you achieve openness and accessibility while stonewalling? Lukaszewski’s recipe consists of first making a list of the ten or so questions that a client most dreads answering, plus another list of questions that the client wishes someone would ask. Then he writes out and rehearses scripted answers to each question.

  During actual interviews, he advises clients to use “bridging language” so that their answers actually respond to their preferred rather than the feared list of questions. He has developed a number of specific phrases that can accomplish this bridging function:• “I have heard that too, but the real focus should be . . .”

  • “Opinions can differ, but I believe . . .”

  • “Here’s an even tougher question . . .”

  (The question you wish they’d ask is “tougher”? This must be some strange new definition of “unconditional honesty” that isn’t in the dictionary.)

  Lukaszewski also puts a tight time limit on interviews, allowing reporters at most half an hour to interview his clients. Otherwise, he fears, reporters will start to ask “off-the-wall questions” that don’t fit the script. He advises clients to repeat all of their messages three times during the course of an interview, so that in reality reporters get only about 10 minutes’ worth of quotable material. To limit things still further, he has a standing rule that interviews should end as soon as a reporter hesitates for more than (literally) seven seconds between questions. To emphasize this point to the audience at Media Relations ’98, he counted deliberately from one to seven. “See? That’s plenty of time,” he said. “If they pause any longer than that, you shake their hand and say, ‘Thank you for coming.’ Here too, you want to use positive language.”20

  Lukaszewski even advises his clients who are being interviewed to give reporters printed versions of their scripted answers, which he calls “communications objectives.” “It’s amazing how accurate the reporters become when you give it to them,” he said. “The communications objectives become the core of the story, generally.”21

  Sweetspeak

  Pat Farrell, a PR executive at Ralcorp Holding, the human-feed company spin-off from Ralston Purina, understands and shares Lukaszewski’s passion to eradicate candor. Farrell’s résumé includes more than two decades “managing issues” like “restructuring, reengineering, downsizing, rightsizing, capital expansion, product improvement, technological advances, synergy, long-term plans, short-term outlook, new product introductions, cost-reduction initiatives, strategic alternatives, and renewed focus.” He has helped employers weather food tamperings, firings, and two fatal shootings in the workplace—“not at the same time,” he notes.

  Speaking at a November 1996 PR trade conference, Farrell described his experience managing the image of chemical giant Monsanto’s artificial sweetener, aspartame (trade name Nutrasweet). The product was having a hard time winning public acceptance, he said, because of “emotional and seemingly illogical responses” from the public. “This was important to our company because we were seeking to grow our franchise outside the accepted context of diet,” he explained. In order to understand the public’s resistance, Monsanto hired a psychologist. Farrell did not mention the psychologist’s name, but his advice was remarkably similar to Clotaire Rapaille’s suggestions for genetically engineered foods.

  For years, Farrell said, the company had described Nutrasweet as “an artificial sweetener.” But the word “artificial,” it realized, “conjures up cancer, headaches, rat studies, laboratories, dueling scientists, allergies, epilepsy, you name it, none of which are very appetizing.” Referring to Nutrasweet as a “sugar substitute” was also a mistake. “People don’t like it when you claim to be like sugar,” Farrell said, because “memories of sugar take them back to their childhood, a simpler time when there was less to worry about and sugar was a sweet treat, a reward. . . . Our own words were defining our product in a manner that created thoughts of being unnatural, unsafe, unsweet and led people to conclude that we believed Nutrasweet was better than the most beloved food product in history.” The psychologist also advised them that “the American public admires and takes great pride in discoveries and innovations gained through hard work.”

  Armed with this knowledge, Nutrasweet created “sweetspeak.” According to Farrell, “Words such as ‘substitute,’ ‘artificial,’ ‘chemical,’ ‘laboratory, ’ ‘scientist’ were removed forever from our lexicon and replaced with words such as ‘discovered,’ ‘choice,’ ‘variety,’ ‘unique,’ ‘different,’ ‘new taste.’ ”

  Using sweetspeak, Farrell gave an example of how Nutrasweet now responds to the question: How do you know aspartame is safe? The answer: “Aspartame was discovered nearly 30 years ago. Since that time, hundreds of people in our company and elsewhere around the world—people with families like yours and mine—have devoted themselves to making sure consumers can be confident of their choice when they choose the taste of Nutrasweet. People have looked at our ingredient in every which way possible, and we encourage that because we want consumers to be comfortable when they choose Nutrasweet. That has been our commitment for nearly three decades, and it will always be our commitment. You can feel confident choosing products that contain our ingredient, but if you don’t, you have other choices.”

  Euphemisms are not always enough, however. Sometimes, says Washington-based PR professional Jeff Prince, a public relations expert needs to speak sweetly and carry a big stick. A veteran of food wars fought by the National Restaurant Association, Prince spoke at the same 1996 trade conference as Farrell and described his years battling the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a media-savvy nonprofit organization that warns consumers about risks from sugar- and fat-laden foods. CSPI is the organization that documented the high fat content in movie theater popcorn and once garnered headlines by calling fettuccine Alfredo “a heart attack on a plate.” In recent years, it has campaigned heavily to inform the public about bowel discomfort and other health problems associated with Olestra, the “nonfattening fat” developed by Procter & Gamble and used in Wow brand potato chips.

  Prince described CSPI as “the megabeast of science hype.” He pointed with particular alarm to a CSPI study which found that a mushroom cheeseburger with fried onion rings at TGI Friday’s contains about 1,800 calories and the same amount of fat as five strips of bacon, four chocolate frosted donuts, three slices of pepperoni pizza, two banana splits, and a Big Mac combined.22 “The restaurant industry needs to be concerned,” Prince said, because eventually CSPI’s nutritional information will lead to “a decline in consumer confidence, a growing sense of guilt about eating out.”

  The National Restaurant Association has developed three different themes to counteract the CSPI message. First and foremost, it has stressed “variety and choice—arguing that studies show that only 31 percent of restaurant-goers are not concerned about nutrition when they eat out, and restaurants cater to customers by offering low fat items. The second thing the restaurants have pushed, of course, is the ‘food police’ line, and they push that as far as possible,” Prince said. “The idea is simply that people . . . don’t need a third party interfering and making those choices for them especially when this third party seems inhuman, inflexible, puritanical, rigid.” The third tactic employed by the restaurant industry is to raise questions about CSPI’s science, its accuracy, and its procedures. So far this has been underutilized, Prince said, urging “a concerted effort to make the case against CSPI’s science and to raise the whole question of how and when and where you report scientific studies. . . . Raise the question of proper use of science and you begin to chip away, as you do that, at CPSI’s credibility.”

  Rather than attacking CSPI directly, however, he recommended that interested companies employ the third party technique. “If it is the National Restaurant Association and Procter & Gamble out there making the case, nobody is going to believe them. Their ox has been gored. . . . What I am talking about is doing briefings behind the scenes to ed
ucate the media, and you would have to distance it from interested companies . . . and you would have to get the scientific community involved,” he said. “The whole project would, I think, require considerable scientific expertise, it would require considerable skill in media management and almost infinite tact, but through a concerted effort I think it could be done, because the press no longer wants to believe CSPI. They would like to find an excuse not to carry those stories, but we haven’t given it to them yet. It may well be a job for some currently underfunded organization, or perhaps for some new organization, but it seems to me the food industry ought to get together and get this job done soon. . . . We would need well written objective backgrounders. We would need expert testimony, perhaps even a panel. We would need to win the support of media critics such as Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. . . . We’d need their support and I think we could get it.”

  In the months immediately following Prince’s remarks, CSPI indeed came under intensified attack from conservative think tanks, several of which receive heavy funding from Procter & Gamble. There is no paper trail to prove that this was a coordinated campaign, but to CSPI head Michael Jacobson at least, it seemed like more than mere coincidence. “The whole operation reeks of behind-the-scenes manipulation,” he said. Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution wrote a blistering op-ed, defending Olestra and attacking CSPI, that ran in the Wall Street Journal and was subsequently republished by the Washington Times and the Cincinnati Inquirer. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, which received about $125,000 from Procter & Gamble’s foundation, wrote a column for USA Today that accused the CSPI of attempting to intimidate the FDA into blocking Olestra and called the Center a “national nanny.” The Detroit News published a column by two writers affiliated with the industry-funded organization Consumer Alert, who characterized the CSPI as “food police” offering “the uninvited opinion of nutrition activists.” Another article, titled “Attack of the Food Police,” ran in Reader’s Digest, which counts Procter & Gamble as its third-largest advertiser. In the New Republic, CSPI was accused of “using sloppy data” and “misleading” the public by Stephen Glass, a New Republic assistant editor who had previously worked for Policy Review, the journal of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. (When it comes to misleading the public, Glass turned out to be in a class by himself. His later firing from The New Republic became one of journalism’s most embarrassing scandals, after it was discovered that he had habitually fabricated information and that some of his stories were in fact completely fictional.)a

  Perhaps the most interesting attack on CSPI came from an industry-funded group calling itself The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). After CSPI released a study about high levels of fat and cholesterol in breakfast foods, TASSC issued a news release via PR Newswire titled “Much Ado About Nothing—Sound Science Group Responds to the Latest CSPI Scare.” Rather than disputing CSPI for being wrong, however, the news release attacked the study on the grounds that its conclusions were too obviously correct to deserve mention. “The CSPI Sherlocks have discovered that eggs, sausage and butter contain fat and can push up cholesterol. So what?” the news release scoffed.

  “This is just another example of how CSPI cloaks common sense with a mantle of ‘science’ for no purpose other than garnering free publicity from the all-too-willing news media,” complained TASSC director Garrey Carruthers. “It’s time for everyone to say no to this junk science.”23

  What is interesting about this line of attack is the way it recasts the definition of science itself. For TASSC, the distinction between “sound science” and “junk science” hinged not on the empirical question of whether facts are true, but on the PR question of how the facts might appear. In the empiricist tradition, scientists do not attack their colleagues for repeating widely accepted facts. If a physicist says that gravity exists, you would not expect other physicists to accuse him of “junk science.” TASSC’s rejoinder, however, was not intended to raise factual questions about the CSPI study but rather to persuade journalists that the study was not newsworthy. People already know how much fat is in the food they eat, the argument went, so why make a big deal out of it? “There’s no news,” said Michael W. Pariza, a food industry-funded researcher at the University of Wisconsin and TASSC adviser who was quoted in their news release.24

  The following year, CSPI released another study. This one surveyed 203 registered dietitians to assess their ability to estimate the nutritional content of restaurant meals. “Trained dietitians underestimated the calorie content of five restaurant meals by an average of 37 percent and the fat content by 49 percent,” the study reported. “The survey revealed that not even one of the 203 dietitians surveyed estimated the calorie or fat content of all meals within 20 percent of the correct values.”

  “The survey proves that even nutrition professionals can’t estimate accurately the calorie and fat content of restaurant meals,” said Dr. Marion Nestle, who chairs New York University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies and participated with CSPI in conducting the study. “If nutritionists can’t tell what’s in restaurant meals, consumers certainly can’t,” Nestle added. “Huge restaurant meals are one of the reasons why so many Americans are gaining weight.”

  Indeed, a June 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that more than half of U.S. adults and more than 20 percent of children are overweight. “We are facing a real epidemic of obesity,” said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “All segments of the population are getting fatter, but the highest increase is among the youngest ages. . . . There is no worse harbinger of what’s to come.”

  “It’s so subtle,” said Dr. Robert Kushner, a clinical nutrition researcher. “People aren’t even aware of what’s happening to them. Tongue in cheek, I say it’s an alien plot to fatten up Americans. . . . I believe you can liken the restaurant industry to the tobacco industry in the 1960s. The industry’s attitude is, we are responding to what the public wants. . . . Most Americans struggle with estimating how much food they consume. You would get 100 different guesses from 100 people if you put a plate of food in front of them.”25

  But so what? Apparently it’s our choice. And besides, it’s not news. Have you tried those Wow brand potato chips?

  PART II

  RISKY BUSINESS

  In Peter Bernstein’s book Against the Gods, he notes that a few hundred years ago, risk as we understand it today did not exist. Death and disease certainly existed alongside myriad other miseries, but people regarded them as the inevitable consequences of divinely appointed destiny over which they had little control. Rather than risk, they thought of fate. People did not weigh the consequences of different career choices, technologies, and social policies, because for most people those options did not exist. Risk-taking was the province of gamblers with dice and cards—the first people to seriously study ways of measuring, quantifying, and managing risk, thereby pioneering many of the systems and assumptions that rule the world today.1

  The emergence of global capitalism, in tandem with science and technology, has created benefits that few people would be willing to forgo, but it has also transformed us into gamblers on an unprecedented scale. As we enter the twenty-first century, we face a mind-blowing array of technological possibilities: cloning, genetically engineered babies, replacement of food with “nutraceuticals,” surgically implanted cyborg enhancements of the human body. Technological change continues to accelerate, and with it come unintended consequences and risks that no one can predict in advance. The globalization of economics and politics means that events in remote locations affect us more rapidly and more intensely than ever before. In a world this complicated, it is hardly surprising that experts have become our guides, shaping our buying habits, health decisions, and public policy debates. But the experts who have created these technologies and the experts who encourage us to use them can be appallingly blind to the problems
that they pose.

  The downside to progress during the twentieth century included technological advances that enabled wars and government-sponsored atrocities to kill some 180 million people—a far larger total than for any other century in human history.2 And that’s just the number of people whose deaths were deliberately engineered by government planners. The list of other problems, accidents, and mayhem linked to technological advance would include, for starters, train wrecks, toxic chemical releases, and emerging antibiotic-resistant diseases. Progress has given us air pollution, groundwater contamination, burgeoning landfills, extinctions of living species, deforestation, risks from transport of nuclear material, explosions, dietary exposure to chemicals, and nerve gas attacks by Saddam Hussein in the Middle East and terrorists in Japan. The worst disasters, such as global thermonuclear war, have not yet occurred but remain real possibilities.

  Clearly, there are some gambles that we dare not take, yet as technological change accelerates, the economic interests that stand to benefit from those changes have become increasingly skillful at imposing their view of the respective risks and benefits upon society at large. The chapters in this section examine how industry experts think about the issue of risk and their strategies for discussing it with the public.

  4

  Dying for a Living

  They shrug at the pleas of workers whose health they destroy in order to save money. They hire experts—physicians and researchers—who purposely misdiagnose industrial diseases as the ordinary diseases of life, write biased reports, and divert research from vital questions. They fight against regulation as unnecessary and cry that it will bring ruination. They ravage the people as they have the land, causing millions to suffer needlessly and hundreds of thousands to die.