Trust Us, Were Experts PA

The authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! unmask the sneaky and widespread methods industry uses to influence opinion through bogus experts, doctored data, and manufactured facts. We count on the experts. We count on them to tell us who to vote for, what to eat, how to raise our children. We watch them on TV, listen to them on the radio, read their opinions in magazine and newspaper articles and letters to the editor. We trust them to tell us what to think, because theres too much information out there and not enough hours in a day to sort it all out. We should stop trusting them right this second. In their new book Trust Us, Were Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, offer a chilling exposé on the manufacturing of independent experts. Public relations firms and corporations know well how to exploit your trust to get you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral third party, like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged in order to make you believe what they have to say—preferably in an objective format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their opinions. For example: You think that nonprofit organizations just give away their stamps of approval on products? Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $600,000 to the American Heart Association for the right to display AHAs name and logo in ads for its cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol. SmithKline Beecham paid the American Cancer Society $1 million for the right to use its logo in ads for Beechams Nicoderm CQ and Nicorette anti-smoking ads. You think that a study out of a prestigious university is completely unbiased? In 1997, Georgetown Universitys Credit Research Center issued a study which concluded that many debtors are using bankruptcy as an excuse to wriggle out of their obligations to creditors. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen cited the study in a Washington Times column and advocated for changes in federal law to make it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy relief. What Bentsen failed to mention was that the Credit Research Center is funded in its entirety by credit card companies, banks, retailers, and others in the credit industry; that the study itself was produced with a $100,000 grant from VISA USA, Inc. and MasterCard International; and that Bentsen himself had been hired to work as a credit-industry lobbyist. You think that all grassroots organizations are truly grassroots? In 1993, a group called Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP) appeared, calling itself the largest womens environmental group in Australia, with thousands of supporters across the country. Their cause: A campaign against plastic milk bottles. It turned out that the groups spokesperson, Alana Maloney, was in truth a woman named Janet Rundle, the business partner of a man who did P.R. for the Association of Liquidpaperboard Carton Manufacturers—the makers of paper milk cartons. You think that if a scientist says so, it must be true? In the early 1990s, tobacco companies secretly paid thirteen scientists a total of $156,000 to write a few letters to influential medical journals. One biostatistician received $10,000 for writing a single, eight-paragraph letter that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A cancer researcher received $20,137 for writing four letters and an opinion piece to the Lancet, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and The Wall Street Journal. Rampton and Stauber reveal many more such examples of perception management—all of them orchestrated to make us buy or believe whatever the independent expert is pushing. They also explore the underlying assumptions about human psychology—e.g., the public must be manipulated for its own good—that make this kind of subliminal hard-sell possible. Destined to be hated by P.R. firms and corporations everywhere, Trust Us, Were Experts! is an eye-opening account of how these entities reshape our reality, manufacture our consent, get us to part with our money, even change our lives. A whole new spin on spin, it will forever alter the way we look at news, information, and the people who serve it up to us. Spin 101 The industry must be like the psychiatrist: rationally figuring out how it can help the public put things in perspective, but knowing that dialogue can only begin with the trust on the publics side that says these people are taking my concerns seriously. (Quote from public relations executive James Lindheim in a speech to the British Society of Chemical Industry, pg. 8) Put your words in someone s mouth. (Quote from public relations executive Merrill Rose, pg. 22) The best PR ends up looking like news. You never know when a PR agency is being effective; youll just find your views slowly shifting. (Quote from a public relations executive, pg. 23) Just as the invention of language made lying possible, the invention of mass media created newer, more sophisticated, subtle and elaborate techniques of propaganda. (pg. 24) Leaders offer the propagandist a means of reaching vast numbers of individuals, for with so many confusing and conflicting ideas competing for the individuals attention, he is forced to look to others for authority. (Quote from father of public relations Edward Bernays, pg. 23) Spin cannot be a demonstrable lie. (pg. 72) Never lie to a reporter. (pg. 72) Marketing is a battle of perception, not products. Truth has no bearing on the issue. (Quote by advertising executive Jack Trout, pg. 72) The minute you begin to view the public as something that doesnt operate rationally, your job as a publicist or journalist changes. The pivotal moment was when those who provided the public with its intelligence no longer believed the public had any intelligence. (Quote by public relations historian Stuart Ewen, pg. 72) A public relations expert needs to speak sweetly and carry a big stick. (pg. 81) Trust Us, Were Experts! Preface: The Smell Test Part I: The Age of Illusion 1. The Third Man 2. The Birth of Spin 3. Deciding What Youll Swallow Part II: Risky Business 4. Dying for a Living 5. Packaging the Beast 6. Preventing Precaution 7. Attack of the Killer Potatoes Part III: The Expertise Industry 8. The Best Science Money Can Buy 9. The Junkyard Dogs 10. Global Warming Is Good For You 11. Questioning Authority Appendix: Recommended Resources Notes Index If you want to know how the world wags, and whos wagging it, heres your answer. Read, get mad, roll up your sleeves, and fight back. Rampton and Stauber have issued a wake-up call we cant ignore. —Bill Moyers If youve ever wanted to see a TV spin doctor hog-tied and dragged through the streets, Rampton and Stauber do the next best thing. This book is modern muckraking of the best variety, skewering hype and showing us how to separate real experts from snake oil salesmen and hired corporate know-it-alls.  —Jim Hightower Trust Us, Were Experts is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism and a powerful vaccine against the stupefying effects of the corporate PR machine. Spread it around! —Barbara Ehrenreich Rampton and Stauber have once again exposed the ugly underbelly of corporate Americas psychological war on our citizens. Trust Us, Were Experts! shows how giant corporations employ sophisticated psychiatric techniques, unscrupulous public figures, paid biostitutes, junk science, tainted studies and clever PR mercenaries in a relentless effort to market products that routinely kill, maim, deform and poison consumers and our environment. —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Water Keeper Alliance Finally a long-overdue expose of the shenanigans and subterfuge that lie behind the making of experts in America. Rampton and Stauber take us behind the scenes, inside corporate boardrooms, where marketing chiefs literally manufacture their own independent experts to defend their products and practices. This groundbreaking book gives us a first look into the seamy side of corporate public relations, where academic experts of every stripe and kind are bought in various ways. An eye-opener. —Jeremy Rifkin This is a great book, and I think you should buy it. But since the point of the book is to get you to think for yourself and not trust experts, perhaps you should thumb through it yourself for a little while. I think of it as a field guide to the kinds of lies you can expect from the information age. —Bill McKibben Rampton and Staubers book explodes the cult of expertise and shows how easily the media and their readers can be misled by public relations claims masquerading as science. This book makes the best case I know for complete disclosure of the financial conflicts of interest of scientists and the corporate influence on university research. —Sheldon Krimsky, Tufts University Professor, author of Hormonal Chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis document.writeln( document.writeln(