If you consider how little was known at the time about the dangers of smoking, you might be able to pass this off as a cute and clever campaign. (Bernays himself said before his death in 1995 that he would never have organized the event if he had known that smoking was to become one of the principal health threats of the century.) Yet even today, the “torches” parade is used in public relations courses across the country as an example of how you can earn free media attention and shift the public view of an issue in an indirect way. In the way people enjoy being fooled by a good magician, they seem willing to forgive Bernays for having tricked them with a public relations event that at the time he would have argued was harmless.
Less forgivable was Bernays’s participation in the campaign (and ultimate CIA coup) to oust the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 , an incident that put the interests of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) ahead of all others. Bernays also noted in his own autobiography that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels praised another of Bernays’s books, Crystalizing Public Opinion, as having been helpful in crafting the campaign against German Jews.
It would not be fair or accurate to draw some kind of Nazi propagandist thread from Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays through a whole century of public relations abuses and tie all of that to the campaign to confuse people about climate change. But it might be worth contemplating the slippery slope that faces people in public relations who forget their duty to society—the Public Relations Society of America’s caution to practice “professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.”
In an adversarial world full of lawyers, where you get used to hearing one person on one side of an issue and one on the other, a danger exists that public relations people will begin to think of themselves not as communicators with a responsibility to their audience but only as advocates. In court (and before you conclude that I am lawyer-bashing, I learned all this in law school myself), there is a convention that every accused person deserves the best possible defense, and it is the lawyer’s duty to mount that defense to the best of his or her ability. We have even grown to accept the idea that it’s acceptable to construct a case that is entirely—almost deceptively—one-sided, knowing that the lawyer on the other side will bring equal vigor to the case. This approach appears to have carried over to public relations and to the court of public opinion. Some public relations people act as though it is their duty to mount the most compelling— or most devastating—case possible on behalf of their client, leaving it to the opposition to mount a counter argument, and allowing the public to sort it out.
The problem is this: in court, there are rules of evidence (you have to tell the truth) and a judge who has the expertise and is given the resources to make an intelligent decision about what is being presented. But there are no such rules in the public conversation. There are only tactics, strategies, and spin.
Although it is not always successful in doing so, the court also endeavors to level the playing field when one party is rich and powerful and another is pressed for resources. In the court of public opinion, however, there is no such corrective. Rich individuals, large corporations, and industry associations can afford to muster a devastating campaign, against which environmentalists or conscientious scientists must always strain to respond.
At the end of the day, it comes back to the rules of ethical practice. As Edward Bernays might have said, it’s okay to put lipstick on a vice president (or a vice-presidential candidate), but you should always call a pit bull a pit bull. That’s not what’s been happening in the climate change conversation. A public policy dialogue that should have been driven by science has instead been disrupted by public relations—and if you look closely, it seems to be the kind of public relations that Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays practiced on their worst days, not the kind they recommended on their best.
[ four ] THE AGE OF ASTROTURFING In which industry steals credibility from the people
It was a conspiracy!
There’s something histrionic about that charge. The very idea of a cabal of rich and powerful people conspiring to fool the public about a fundamental point of science strains credulity and is offensive in its own right. Yet if you read on, you will see that there are conspiracies aplenty, documented and undeniable.
The first was organized by the Western Fuels Association, which as of April 2009 defined itself on www.westernfuels.org as “a not-for-profit cooperative that supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions.” The magic word in that description is “coal,” the most plentiful conventional energy source in the world and the number-one fuel for electric utilities in the United States, which has the second-largest known deposit of coal in the world, only slightly behind Australia. The problem is that coal is also the worst fossil fuel when it comes to generating carbon dioxide, and those coal-fired electrical generators are already the largest carbon dioxide point source in the country.
In 1991 Western Fuels joined with the National Coal Association and the Edison Electric Institute to create the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). This was a not-very-arm’s-length organization that would use its original US$500,000 budget “to reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)” and “supply alternative facts to support the suggestion that global warming will be good.” 1
ICE went into small U.S. markets that were heavily dependent on coal-fired electricity and, with advance planning from the D.C. public relations firm Bracy Williams and Company, tested a series of messages, including:
• “Some say the Earth is warming. Some also said the Earth was flat.”
• “Who told you the Earth was warming . . . Chicken Little?”
• “How much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?”
It actually wasn’t getting warmer in Minneapolis, and presumably the messaging went down well, especially on cold winter days, because ICE rolled out a campaign that included newspaper and radio advertising. ICE also learned that audiences didn’t take coal or electrical company officials very seriously when it came to arguing environmental issues, but that they were inclined to listen to “technical experts.” So ICE mobilized a group of scientists who in many instances were not climate change experts, but who would nevertheless make themselves available for newspaper and broadcast interviews and sign opinion page articles that could be distributed to local papers.
Parallel to the ICE operation, the Western Fuels Association also launched another “educational” entity called the Greening Earth Society, which produced a video called The Greening of Planet Earth, a thirty-minute love note to carbon dioxide that is still available for viewing on YouTube. This became the first public appearance of a group of scientific experts made up of people like Sherwood Idso—people who have since become famous for their willingness to argue climate science on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby. In the video they argue that Earth’s plants are starving for carbon dioxide and that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in a more fertile world. Ignoring the implications of climate change, especially the threat of lasting droughts that could turn much of the equatorial zone into a desert, The Greening of Planet Earth showed a time-lapse animation in which carbon dioxide-driven vegetation colonizes virtually every part of the Earth’s surface—even closing in happily over the Sahara. The message was clear: climate