To get around its lack of credibility and to hide its hand in influencing public beliefs, PM created additional front groups. The company hired PR firms to create artificial third-party organizations and assign each one a cause, like counteracting government health warnings about its industry’s products. This allowed the company to create entirely separate, far more credible mouthpieces to advance its political ends.
In 1993, at PM’s instigation, multinational tobacco companies created a European social engineering front group called Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment (ARISE). PM was ARISE’s primary funder, but the group got additional financing from RJR, Rothmans, and British American Tobacco in the United Kingdom—as well as from the companies’ respective food and drink subsidiaries, like Kraft, Miller Beer, and Nestlé. The tobacco companies created ARISE to counteract a U.S. surgeon general’s report that compared nicotine addiction to heroin and cocaine addiction.
This likening of nicotine to heroin and cocaine sent up red flags throughout the global tobacco industry. The answer—without letting the public know that the industry was behind it—was ARISE, whose job was essentially to undermine government efforts to warn people about the highly addictive characteristic of nicotine. Of course, as with other front groups, the management of ARISE was farmed out to a PR firm, Fishburn Hedges, in the United Kingdom.11
ARISE’s “expert” members were portrayed—through press releases, articles, interviews, and media tours—as impartial academic and scientific authorities who felt compelled to address the “science of pleasure.” They held conferences, published books, toured continents, generated media events and newspaper and magazine articles, created video news releases and press releases, and wrote letters to the editor, all while keeping secret the fact that the group’s activities were backed by the tobacco industry.
PROMOTING THE IDEA OF “JUNK SCIENCE”
After the Environmental Protection Agency declared secondhand smoke a Class A human carcinogen in 1993, PM once again desperately needed a powerful “group” to rise up, this time to help discredit the EPA’s findings. So it created The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC).
PM looked around for help funding such a group, and the chemical, paper, metal, petroleum, and other environmentally dubious industries were thrilled to help a group of “committed experts” who would say publicly that scientific warnings against their activities were a bunch of baloney, too. So, with other willing industries waiting with wallets open, PM created TASSC—working, as with all its other groups, through a PR firm later favored by the health insurance industry, APCO Worldwide. After a feasibility study conducted with PM’s law firm, Covington and Burling, APCO began the campaign.
APCO did an admirable job of recruiting members for TASSC. The “supporters list” included everything from down-home-sounding businesses like the Family Loompya Seafood Market and Pinckneyville Lighting to sawmills and mining and chemical companies (including W. R. Grace, Amoco, and Dow Chemical). TASSC was assigned three basic talking points: (1) Science should never be corrupted to achieve political ends; (2) economic growth cannot afford to be held hostage to paternalistic overregulation; and (3) improving indoor air quality is a laudable goal that will never be accomplished as long as tobacco smoke is the sole focus of regulators.12
TASSC worked to hang the label of “junk science” on warnings that secondhand smoke caused health problems for nonsmokers. Eventually, the group hung the same junk-science label on environmentalists, and it went on to advance industry-friendly positions on a wide range of topics, including global warming, phthalates, and pesticides. Diversifying this way helped PM continue obtaining other industries’ help with funding the group, and with further disguising the group’s tobacco origins.13
THE PLAYBOOK FUNDAMENTALS
The tobacco industry’s PR strategies have been so broad based, well funded, and stunningly successful that other industries—not just health insurers—are adopting them rapid-fire. The tobacco industry has, in effect, injected its negative, manipulating DNA into corporate culture worldwide, to the detriment of people everywhere.
To emulate that industry’s success, here are actions that you, as an embattled CEO (or your trade association), must take:
• Hire a big and well-connected PR firm, preferably one that has established a reputation not so much for public “relations” as for public “deception.” The firm should pay little or no attention to the Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Ethics, which, among other things, insists that PR practitioners disclose who they are working for and refrain from engaging in deceit. Fortunately, many of the biggest firms pay little heed to such ethical guidelines. They are more than happy to take your money to:
• Set up and operate a coalition or front group, which, if at all possible, should have words like “American” or “freedom” or “choice” in its name. You can launder your money through your PR firm so that no one has to know you have any association with the front group. The PR firm will also:
• Recruit third parties to list as members of your front group. Depending on the scope of your problems and the issues you are battling, the members can range from mom-and-pop bodega owners and motel operators to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, both of which, by the way, have long track records of lending their names to stealth campaigns. Your PR firm will also maximize the effectiveness of your third parties by helping them:
• Write letters to the editor and op-eds and place them in local and national publications. In fact, the PR firm will do all the writing and placing. The third parties won’t have to do a thing except lend their names. The letters and op-eds will convey all the key messages that you yourself would convey but cannot because doing so would be perceived, correctly, as self-serving. To be sure those letters and op-eds get published in the right places, your PR firm must:
• Cultivate close relationships with editors and publishers. Chances are, your firm will have PR pros on staff who once worked at the publications and other news outlets important to you and your industry. Because of their relationships with key reporters, those PR people will also be able to:
• Influence the tone and content of articles that those reporters write about your company and your industry. This is especially important if you are in the midst of a well-publicized crisis. To bolster your point of view and give reporters an all-important angle, your PR firm might need to:
• Conduct a bogus survey or slice and dice data with the intent of misleading, or “lying with statistics.” And your firm’s PR pros will also know how to:
• Feed talking points to TV pundits and frequent contributors to op-ed pages. They will know how to get talk show hosts with big audiences like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck to say things on the air to support your point of view and discredit your opponents. Lastly, using varying tactics that will depend on the nature of your problem, your PR firm will:
• Develop and carry out a duplicitous communications campaign. Whenever you need to comment publicly, your firm will help you make sure that what you say is perceived to be positive, that you are seen as being responsible and cooperative, and that the public and lawmakers feel that they can count on you to do the right thing and be honest and straightforward. This is the charm offensive I’ve talked about. To distract from the fact that your product is widely considered to be a problem, your PR firm will develop a creative campaign to position your company or industry as part of the solution. It will also broaden the issue to take attention off your maligned product, and it will stress how many people your company employs and how much it contributes to the local or national economy. Behind the scenes, your firm will be using the front groups and their devious tactics to do the necessary dirty work for you.
These are the fundamental tools of the spin business. There are many others, of course, but these are tried-and-true and have worked for big corporations and their trade groups fo
r decades. Following are some “ripped from the headlines” examples of how they are being deployed today by three big industries.
BIG OIL
When an offshore drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, killing eleven people and creating a massive oil spill, BP launched a multipronged PR strategy as soon as it had begun efforts to try to cap the gusher, which threatened miles of U.S. coastline.
In an attempt to persuade Americans, especially those living and vacationing along the Gulf Coast, that it was a socially responsible company doing all it could do to contain the mess it had made, BP enlisted the support of local businesses and state tourism agencies to allay concerns that the region’s beaches and flora and fauna were threatened.
The Daily Beast Web site reported on May 19, 2010, that BP had quietly shelled out more than seventy million dollars to produce and air commercials ostensibly meant to lure tourists to the area but subliminally implying that BP had done what local businesses and governments had expected it to do in cleaning up the oil spill.14
“It’s one piece of an enormous, largely stealth PR campaign that BP has been waging over the past few weeks … as the enormity of the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster sinks in,” Daily Beast reporter Rick Outzen wrote. He added that “the ground operatives in this propaganda blitz are locally-owned or affiliated companies—mostly those that either supply or own BP stations.”
“Specifically,” he continued, citing sources inside the oil industry, “while BP has commandeered the state’s tourism marketing, the oil giant wants its local marketers to buy ads, distribute flyers at their stations, hold customer appreciation days and use BP-supplied talking points to build a word-of-mouth campaign to ‘diffuse or deflect negative commentary’ about the BP oil spill.” BP had pledged to cover all their expenses.
Originally known as British Petroleum, the company changed its name to BP in 2000 “to project a more environmentally friendly image, saying the initials stood for ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ ” Newsweek noted in a May 17, 2010, article about how before the catastrophe in the Gulf the company had vigorously fought additional federal regulation of oil drilling in coastal waters.15 The article quoted Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics as saying that BP had in recent years—which coincided with the company’s multi-million-dollar campaign to reinforce its image as a “green” company—increased its lobbying in Washington “exponentially” to dilute new laws on the prevention of oil-spill pollution.
Thus, on the one hand it had been quietly lobbying Congress to loosen environmental-protection laws, while on the other it had been promoting itself publicly as environmentally friendly. By most accounts, the company’s ongoing campaign to paint itself green was a big success. “BP is running a greenwashing campaign, and from a sales and marketing perspective, it is brilliant,” said John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) in the January 14, 2008, edition of Adweek.16
Big oil companies have worked closely with other energy and fossil fuel industries—coal companies in particular—to persuade Americans that climate change not only is nothing to worry about but also is not even happening. The modus operandi of these industries—and the front groups that they have their PR firms create and run—is to create fear that efforts to address a problem that they contend doesn’t really exist will hurt the economy and cost jobs.
One of the leaders in the campaign to diminish concerns about the role that coal-fired power plants play in climate change is the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (previously known as the Center for Energy and Economic Development, or CEED). A leaked 2004 memo from the organization, obtained in 2009 by the CMD, described how it was working behind the scenes to keep both the legislative and the judicial branches of government from taking any actions on climate change that would affect the industry in a negative way.
“In the climate change arena,” the memo stated, “CEED focuses on three areas: opposing government-mandated controls of greenhouse gases (GHG), opposing ‘regulation by litigation,’ and supporting sequestration technology as the proper vehicles for addressing any reasonable concerns about greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
The CMD also discovered that CEED’s PR firm was the Hawthorn Group, a Virginia-based firm that the health insurance industry has hired to fight anti-managed-care legislation and litigation. (I participated in numerous strategy-development sessions with Hawthorn Group staffers and my counterparts from other big insurers after several class action lawsuits were filed against our employers on behalf of physicians and their patients in 2000.)
The Hawthorn Group crowed about its successes on behalf of CEED in a 2008 newsletter it sent to “friends and family.” Two paragraphs are particularly noteworthy:
The program also had an impact on the perception of coal among public opinion leaders. In September 2007, on the key measurement question—Do you support/oppose the use of coal to generate electricity?—we found 46 percent support and 50 percent oppose. In a 2008 year-end survey that result had shifted to 72 percent support and 22 percent oppose. Not only did we see significantly increased support, opposition was cut by more than half. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain addressed a crowd wearing “Clean Coal hats” in Pennsylvania.
Building on our existing 200,000-strong grassroots citizen army, we leveraged the presidential candidates’ own supporters, finding advocates for clean coal among the crowd to carry our message. We got these on-the-spot advocates to show strong public support to the candidates and to the media, and enhanced that visibility by integrating online media that created even more of a buzz. We did this by sending “clean coal” branded teams to hundreds of presidential candidate events, carrying a positive message (we can be part of the solution to climate change) which was reinforced by giving away free T-shirts and hats emblazoned with our branding: Clean Coal. Attendees at the candidate events wore these items into the events.*
Another front group funded by oil companies, the American Energy Alliance, began running ads in late 2009 warning that American taxpayers would pay a heavy price if legislation designed to slow global warming were approved. The AEA was formed in 1993 by the American Petroleum Institute and several large corporations to defeat a bill that would have made companies polluting the environment pay for their emissions.
The AEA ads claimed that the bill would cost families more than three thousand dollars a year in new taxes. Headed by a former staff member of Tom DeLay (the former Republican House majority leader), the AEA got that number from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study estimating that the bill would cost roughly that amount per taxpayer. What the AEA did not disclose was that the MIT study said that taxpayers would not pay any of it.17 The author of the study, John Reilly, said that the claims made by the AEA and its allies in Congress were false.
In addition, the Web site NaturalNews noted, “The AEA ads fail to mention the bill’s emphasis on increased energy efficiency, which would actually save consumers and businesses money—an estimated $465 billion per year, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists study. If the government uses money raised by the bill to finance tax breaks or other incentives for consumers to retrofit their homes for more efficiency, the average household would save $900, including $580 on fuel and $320 on electricity, heating and cooking.”
One of the world’s leading experts on climate change, Joseph Romm, told the online magazine Guernica that the campaigns on behalf of the industry to manipulate public opinion have been stunningly successful. “The fossil-fuel companies and the right-wing have been very effective in their disinformation campaign,” said Romm, a physicist and founder of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, whom Time magazine named one of its Heroes for the Environment in 2009. “It’s the most successful disinformation campaign in human history.” As a result, he said, even progressive politicians “have been persuaded not to talk so much about global warming.”18
BIG SODA
With e
vidence mounting that sugary sodas and other beverages are a leading contributor to the obesity epidemic in the United States, Congress, some states, and several American cities have considered imposing a special tax on the drinks to reduce consumption and also generate needed revenue to help pay for municipal services. In early 2010, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter proposed a two-cents-per-ounce tax on all sweetened drinks, and in Washington, D.C., city council member Mary Cheh proposed a one-cent-per-ounce tax on bottled and canned soda that contained sugar.
Alarmed, the beverage industry sprang into action to defeat efforts to impose a special tax of any amount on its products. Among the first things the industry did was hire a big PR firm to set up a front group, Americans Against Food Taxes. Funded primarily by beverage and food companies and their lobbying groups, AAFT was formed initially to fight a proposed three- to ten-cent tax on sodas and other sugary drinks that health care reform advocates in Congress had proposed to help pay for the expansion of insurance coverage in the new health care bill.
To obscure its real source of funding, AAFT describes itself as a “coalition of concerned citizens—responsible individuals, financially strapped families, small and large businesses in communities across the country” opposed to any government-proposed tax on sugar-sweetened drinks. But as disclosed on the CMD’s SourceWatch Web site, the group’s membership consists mainly of lobbying groups for packaged-food and soda companies, chain restaurant corporations, and large food and soft drink manufacturers and distributors—including the Coca-Cola Company, Dr Pepper–Royal Crown Bottling Company, PepsiCo, Canada Dry Bottling Company of New York, the Can Manufacturers Institute, 7-Eleven Convenience Stores, and Yum! Brands.
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