New Book Exposes Corporate PR "Junk Science"

New Book By John Stauber & Sheldon Rampton,
Trust US We're Experts, Exposes Corporate PR "Junk Science"

<http://www.tompaine.com/features/2001/01/26/index.html>

Exposing PR Strategies and Examining Their Experts

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy are
co-authors of "Toxic Sludge is Good For You" and "Mad Cow USA."
<http://www.prwatch.org>
---
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Trust Us, We're Experts!,
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, published in 2001 by
Tarcher/Putnam. "The Smell Test" is the book's preface.
----

This book really began while we were researching our first book together,
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! In the course of that research, we came
across a striking passage in a public relations strategy document,
published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for marketing sewage
sludge as farm fertilizer. The document noted that there was a "major
public acceptance barrier" to this practice, namely, "the widely held
perception of sewage sludge as malodorous, disease causing or otherwise
repulsive. ... There is an irrational component to public attitudes about
sludge which means that public education will not be entirely successful."
In other words, people are irrational because they think sewage stinks.

We found a strikingly similar passage while writing our next book, Mad Cow
U.S.A., as we researched some of the unsavory practices used by the meat
industry to dispose of its waste. One practice, called "rendering,"
involves grinding up and cooking inedible animal parts and the corpses of
diseased animals, which often arrive at the rendering plant in advanced
stages of decomposition. It's a smelly process, as bad as or worse than
what goes on in sewage treatment plants. Once again, we were struck by the
way the industry dealt with odor complaints. Renderers had gone so far as
to devise an instrument called a "scentometer" a "small rectangular chamber
that contains two sniffing tubes for insertion into the nostrils." Using
the tubes, a rendering plant manager could inhale filtered, theoretically
odor-free air to get a sense of how it compared with "ambient air odors."
Based on this pseudoscientific testing system, the industry had managed to
convince itself that its odors were nonexistent or negligible. One industry
consultant termed neighbors' odor complaints a "form of Parkinsonian
madness."

Once again, it seemed, the public was crazy if it detected any unpleasant
odors. The evidence of neighbors' noses couldn't be trusted. Their
complaints were "anecdotal," as compared to the reliable, scientific data
produced by the "scentometer."

The amazing thing about these passages was the serious, authoritative tone
in which they were written. It would be one thing if these people were
joking, but they were serious. They didn't just think that they were
pulling off a good scam. They literally believed that their "analysis" was
rational, objective, and reasonable, while their critics were deluded,
prejudiced, and even emotionally unbalanced. They were the experts, and the
public merely needed to be "educated."

In the popular image, scientists are dispassionate, objective searchers
after truth. A scientist, this model assumes, is someone whose pursuit of
the truth begins with independent discovery, proceeds to criticism by
peers, and then to publication and use for the common good. In recent
years, however, this idealized image has come under challenge from a
variety of critics. Most academic critics of science focus on structural
and economic factors that create unconscious bias, whereas the activist
camps environmental activists as well as the pro-corporate activists who
campaign against "junk science"focus on deliberately deceptive
manipulations by "corporate whores" or "environmentalist fearmongers."
Unconscious biases do undoubtedly exist, as do deliberate deceptions. Yet
neither of these explanations is adequate. In order to understand the
manipulations that are practiced today in the name of science, it is
necessary also to understand the particular habits and practices of a
particular class of experts who specialize in the management of perception
itself, namely, the public relations industry.

"Perceptions are real," proclaims the website of Burson-Marsteller, the
world's largest PR firm. "They color what we see ... what we believe ...
how we behave. They can be managed ... to motivate behavior ... to create
positive business results" (ellipses in the original).

This credo does not necessarily tell you much else about what
Burson-Marsteller believes. Just as attorneys are hired to advocate the
point of view of their clients, Burson-Marsteller's job is not to hold
opinions of its own but to promote those of its clients. And yet companies
like Burson-Marsteller have become important arbiters in determining which
experts appear on the public stage. Burson's clients have included the
Philip Morris tobacco company, for which it created the National Smokers'
Alliance, and Union Carbide, whose reputation it helped repair in the wake
of the Bhopal disaster. Like the experts that Burson-Marsteller helps
cultivate and train to perform in the public arena, B-M's own experts in
perception management believe that the public needs to be manipulated for
its own good.

James Lindheim, B-M's worldwide director of public affairs,
offered an example of his reasoning in a speech to the British Society of
Chemical Industry. The key, he said, lay in "some very interesting
psychological and sociological research on risk perception," which
"suggests that the obvious, rational approach is not likely to succeed. ...
In fact, the research tells us that people's perceptions of the sizes of
various risks and the acceptability of these risks are based on emotional,
and not rational, factors. ... All of this research is helpful in figuring
out a strategy for the chemical industry and for its products. It suggests,
for example, that a strategy based on logic and information is probably not
going to succeed. We are in the realm of the illogical, the emotional, and
we must respond with the tools that we have for managing the emotional
aspects of the human psyche. ... 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 public's side that says these people are taking my concerns seriously."
How does Lindheim propose to serve as the public's "psychiatrist"? How does
he reconcile his role as a professional perception manager with his desire
for "trust on the public's side"? These are interesting questions, but it
is even more interesting to ask why he believes the public is emotional and
incapable of rational discourse. This assumption underlies the thinking not
only of the PR industry's own experts, but also the thinking of the experts
whom it promotes for public consumption.

While this assumption is somewhat amazing, it is not necessarily insincere.
It reflects a set of elitist values that have become all too common in
modern society. Functioning at a philosophical and psychological level, it
amounts to a kind of anti-popular prejudice that is dangerously corrosive
of democratic values. We have written this book both to expose the PR
strategies used to create many of the so-called experts whose faces appear
on TV news shows and scientific panels, and to examine the underlying
assumptions that make these manipulations possible.