By financing and publicising views that support the goals of corporate sponsors, PR campaigns have, over the course of a century, managed to suppress the dangers of lead poisoning for decades, silence the scientists who discovered that rats, fed on genetically modified corn had significant organ abnormalities, squelch television reports about the risk of bovine growth hormone, and place enough confusion and doubt in the public's mind about global warming to suppress any mobilisation for action.

Evidently, these elaborate PR campaigns are created for our own good. According to public relations officers, the public reacts emotionally to topics related to health and safety and is incapable of holding rational discourse.

Metro Media speaks with author John Stauber:

MM: What was the most surprising or disturbing manipulation of public opinion you reveal in your book?

JS: The most disturbing aspect is not a particular example but rather the fact that the news media regularly fails to investigate so-called 'independent experts' associated with industry front groups. They all have friendly sounding names like 'consumer alert' and 'the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition' but they fail to reveal their corporate funding and their propaganda agenda, which is to smear legitimate community health and safety concerns as 'junk science fear mongering.'

The news media frequently uses the term 'junk science' to smear environmental health advocates. The PR industry has spent more than a decade and many millions of dollars funding and creating industryfront groups which wrap them in the flag of 'sound science.' In reality their 'sound science' is progress as defined by the tobacco industry, the drug industry, the chemical industry, the genetic engineering industry, the petroleum industry and so on.

MM: Is the public becoming more aware of PR tactics and false experts? Or are these experts and tactics becoming more savvy and effective?

Stauber: The truth is that the situation is getting worse, not better. More and more of what we see, hear and read as 'news' is actually PR content.

On any given day, much or most of what the media transmits or prints as news is provided by the PR industry.

It's off press releases, the result of media campaigns, heavily spun and managed, or in the case of 'video news releases' it's fake TV news-stories completely produced and supplied for free by former journalists who've gone over to PR. TV news directors air these VNRs as news. So the media not only fails to identify PR manipulations, it is the guilty party by passing them on as news.

MM: What's the solution for the excesses of the PR industry? Should the PR industry be regulated in some way?

Stauber: In our last chapter,'Question Authority' we identify some of the most common propaganda tactics so that individuals and journalists and public interest scientists can do a better job of not being snowed and fooled. But unltimately, those who have the most power and money in any society are going to use the most sophisticated propaganda available to keep democracy at bay and the rabble in line.

There are some specific legislative steps that could be taken without stepping on The First Amendment. One is that all non profit, tax exempt organisations -charities and educational groups, for instance, should be required by law to reveal their institutional funders of say, $500 dollars or more.

That way when a journalist or citizen hears that a scientific report is from a group like the American Council on Science and Health, a quick trip to the IRS website could reveal that this group gets massive infusions of industry money, and that the corporations that fund it benefit from its proclamations that pesticides are safe, genetically engineered food will save the planet, lead contamination isn't really such a big deal, climate change isn't happening and so on.

The public clearly doesn't understand that most nonprofit groups take industry and government grants or are even the nonprofit arm of industry.

Detroit Metro Times: Feb.6 2001.