Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy

Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy

David Miller, William Dinan, David Miller, William Dinan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781783711697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The public relations industry is not just about celebrity gossip. This book shows how, whenever big business is threatened, spin doctors, lobbyists, think tanks and front groups are on hand to push the corporate interest, often at the public's expense. Written by leading activists and writers, this book reveals the secrets of the PR trade including deception, the use of fake 'institutes', spying and dirty tricks. The impact can be devastating -- when the public is denied access to the truth, the results are rising inequality and environmental catastrophe. Exposing the misdeeds of famous companies including Coca Cola, British Aerospace, Exxon and Monsanto, and revealing information about the covert funding of various apparently independent thinks tanks and institutes, the authors offer a guide to campaigns that can help us roll back corporate power and resist deceptive PR.

Part I

Global Corporate Power and Corporate Spin

1

Public Relations and the Subversion of Democracy

David Miller and William Dinan

Public relations was created to thwart and subvert democratic decision making. It was a means for ‘taking the risk’ out of democracy. The risk was to the vested interests of those who owned and controlled society before the introduction of voting rights for all adults. Modern PR was founded for this purpose and continues to be at the cutting edge of campaigns to ensure that liberal democratic societies do not respond to the will of the people and that vested interests prevail. PR functions, in other words, as a key element of propaganda managed democracy. This is the precise opposite of PR industry spin, which boasts that PR facilitates debate and deliberation, and is the hallmark of pluralist democracy.

It is widely accepted that the PR industry arose at the same time as the great movements for democratic reform between 1880 and 1920. In the United States this involved coping with the feared elevation of the masses. ‘The crowd is enthroned’ according to PR pioneer Ivy Lee in 1914.¹ Lee believed in the necessity of ‘courtiers’ to ‘flatter and caress’ the crowd. The courtiers were the PR professionals, like himself. It was essential, wrote Walter Lippmann, the most important US theorist of the trend, that ‘the public be put in its place’ so that ‘each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd’.² Lippmann’s view was that ‘manufacture of consent’ was both necessary and possible: ‘within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government’.³ This development also had its counterparts in the United Kingdom, but this has been largely ignored in the UK historical record. By 1911 a hugely important and now virtually forgotten activist for big business, Dudley Docker, was organising ‘business leagues’ under the slogan ‘pro patria imperium in imperio’ (For our country; a government within a government).⁴ In other words, business rule. ‘If our League spreads’, wrote Docker in 1911, ‘politics would be done for. This is my object.’⁵

Edward Bernays was another key innovator in PR and perhaps its best known pioneer in the early twentieth century. He was one of the first to use ‘front groups’ – organisations set up with the intent to promote the message of Bernays’s clients. Bernays shared the same view as the other PR pioneers – that public opinion must be manipulated by ‘the relatively small number of persons’ who understand the masses. ‘It is they’, he wrote ‘who pull the wires which control the public mind’ and ‘constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.’⁶ Bernays made a career out of serving the ‘small number’.

We should also mention Carl Byoir. He was very fond of using third-party techniques to manipulate public debate. Front groups could be created by ‘influencing the leaders of complacent groups and by forming new “fronts”’. Byoir did both. ‘It is not’, he explained ‘what a client says about himself that scores, but what another person says about him that carries weight’.⁷ When word of Byoir’s activities in the 1930s and 1940s got out, he and his client were indicted for what the judge called ‘devious manipulations’.⁸ Byoir’s firm was fined $5,000.

From that day to this, manipulation and deceit have been the defining characteristics of the PR industry.

The main charges that can be made against public relations as a discipline are:

1. It is overwhelmingly carried out for vested powerful interests, mainly corporations.

2. It is not open and transparent about its means or even about its clients and the interests it is working for.

3. It characteristically involves deception and manipulation.

4. It does not engage in democratic debate, but rather seeks to subvert it in the interests of its clients.

5. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and other ‘ethical’ activities are all subordinated to corporate strategy.

6. PR has played a crucial role at the cutting edge of corporate power in the neoliberal revolution.

Look at the client list of any big PR firm or at the lists of those lobbying firms which disclose clients.⁹ You will discover that their main clients are large corporations. This in itself suggests a large imbalance in resources between citizen groups and corporations. In recent years governmental bodies have increasingly hired PR and lobbying agencies. This advances the marketisation of public services, rather than simply broadening the base of PR users in the public sector.

Second, the PR industry is allergic to openness and transparency. Some PR agencies and some corporations disclose their clients or the lobbying groups that they fund, but many don’t and most do not fully disclose all this activity. More importantly, wherever there is a threat of greater transparency via regulation of lobbying, the creation of disclosure laws, the requirement to publish information about their activities, the industry opposes it. This is currently visible in the fierce efforts being made by the European lobbying industry to avert binding regulation as one of the outcomes of the European Transparency Initiative launched by Commissioner Siim Kallas.¹⁰

Third, PR and lobbying involve deception and manipulation. It should be said straight away that this does not mean that all PR people consciously lie, though PR does often seem to require some management of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps the least pejorative way to put this is that PR necessitates the effective operation of ideology – commitment to ideas that serve interests. In this case the interests served are almost invariably corporate. Perhaps it is unfair to talk of lying. It is plain that most corporate spin doctors and PR agency staff have little or no choice. At the most basic level their job is to attempt to align the sectional interests of their principals (employers or clients) with general interests. As public and private interests are not the same, this must of necessity involve manipulation and deception. But having said this, it is perfectly plain that there is a little more than ‘innocent fraud’ going on in PR.¹¹ We are not arguing that all public relations practitioners are actively or consciously engaged in a conspiracy against democracy. Rather, we think that one of the problems with PR and lobbying is that in seeking to position private interests as being the same as public interests the aggregate result of such spin is that the public interest is undermined.

Fourth, corporations and their PR and lobbying agencies do not engage in open and transparent debate. The alignment of sectional interests with general interests involves the use of deceptive techniques, such as front groups. Rather than corporations speaking for themselves, they disguise sources of information by funding scientists, apparently independent institutes, consumer and community groups and the like. Furthermore, much corporate political activity – or corporate spin – is not devoted to convincing the public one way or another. Often it is aimed at decision makers and regulators. In fact, opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom repeatedly show that the public want more effective regulation of corporations. One way in which this is undermined is by the direct involvement of corporations in political decision making via lobbying and other policy targeted activities.

Fifth, corporate involvement in ‘ethical’ activities such as corporate social responsibility and ‘sustainable development’ is actually subordinated to corporate strategy. This means firstly that corporations can appear to be ‘doing good’ on the one hand while continuing to lobby directly for their own interests on the other (as in the case of the involvement of Shell in the International Chamber of Commerce¹²). The mantra heard from devotees about building the ‘business case’ for CSR is about more than making money out of ‘ethical’ and ‘green’ activities. In fact the aim of such activities is invariably to use ethical activity as a tool to ensure that binding regulation is resisted and indeed rolled back.¹³

The sixth charge against PR is the most serious, which is that it has provided the cutting edge of the neoliberal revolution which has affected all advanced industrial countries (indeed all countries to a greater or lesser extent) from about the mid 1970s onwards.

The neoliberal revolution has been brought about by determined campaigning by corporations and their allies in the media and political elites. The cutting edge of this campaign has been waged by the public relations industry and the armies of lobbyists employed by the corporations, and by the captains of industry themselves through their peak business associations, to ensure that democratic decision making is consigned to the dustbin of history. Given the devotion of neoliberal theorists to the free market and its ‘invisible hand’ one might have thought that they would disdain public relations and lobbying as a market-distorting mechanism.¹⁴ But in reality they have been assiduous in their political campaign to re-establish the unchallenged rule of business.

This has been accomplished by more than half a century of campaigning by the corporations, going back at least as far as the creation of the shadowy Mont Pelerin Society in the immediate postwar period – a gathering of free-market ideologues around Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. They met to plot how to roll back the possibility of democratic decision making and put the market in the driving seat.¹⁵

Out of this emerged a host of pro-business organisations determined to take on and roll back the frontiers of social democracy. In Britain this meant the creation of a series of right-wing think tanks, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Social Affairs Unit, and the Centre for Policy Studies (set up by Keith Joseph). These groups supplemented the more open campaigning organisations like National Propaganda (from 1919, later called the Economic League) and Aims of Industry (from 1942). In the United States similar aims were advanced by elite business associations such as the Conference Board (from 1916), and the Business Roundtable (from 1973), the latter playing a key role in the passing of the North America Free Trade Area agreement in the 1990s.¹⁶ Internationally one of the earliest groups was the International Chamber of Commerce (set up in 1916 and still extremely active today).

It is a well-established fact that these groups were out to enact an economic counter-revolution, which was able to take power in the United Kingdom and the United States with the election of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes in 1979 and 1980. Both governments unleashed the market on their own citizens, and on the world, giving the process of corporate-led globalisation a decisive boost.

THE GLOBAL INDUSTRY

It is crucial to recognise that the neoliberal victory was not put in place by abstract forces but had to be won by argument and action and that it proceeded by means of vastly increased investment in the machinery of information management. This helps explain the emergence and global spread of the public relations industry. In the United Kingdom the PR industry expanded rapidly in the 1980s, facilitating the process of privatisation and buoyed up by its rich pickings and consequences.¹⁷

The reshaping of the global communications industry in the 1990s saw a wave of mergers and acquisitions between advertising, marketing and PR agencies. PR groups with offices in over 100 countries became a reality. By the turn of the century, the industry had concentrated so much that the top four global groups owned more than half the global market in advertising, marketing, PR and lobbying combined. Most people will never have heard of these corporations which were among the top 500 global corporations in the early part of the twentyfirst century. The big three, WPP, Omnicom and Interpublic, are deeply obscure organisations. WPP, a company originally called Wire and Plastic Products, used to make supermarket trolleys before it became the business vehicle for a multi-million pound communications conglomerate. Today it owns hundreds of firms engaged in spin and in putting corporate wishes into action. Among the largest and most well known are Burson-Marsteller and Hill & Knowlton, both famous for their de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Unearthing Corporate Spin
• Part I Global Corporate Power and Corporate Spin
• 1. Public Relations and the Subversion of Democracy
• 2. Achilles Has Two Heels: Crises of Capitalist Globalisation
• 3. A Tour of the United Kingdom’s Public Relations Industry
• Part II How Corporations Use Spin to Undermine Democracy
• 4. Powers Behind the Throne: Washington’s Top Political Strategists
• 5. Spinning Farmed Salmon
• 6. Exxon’s Foot Soldiers: The Case of the International Policy Network
• 7. Biotech’s Fake Persuaders
• 8. Fighting Dirty Wars: Spying for the Arms Trade
• 9. Manufacturing a Neoliberal Climate: Recent Reform Initiatives in Germany
• Part III The Subterranean World of the Power Brokers
• 10. Globalising Politics: Spinning US ‘Democracy Assistance’ Programmes
• 11. Behind the Screens: Corporate Lobbying and EU Audiovisual Policy
• 12. Spinning Money: Corporate Public Relations and the London Stock Exchange
• 13. The Atlantic Semantic: New Labour’s US Connection
• Part IV Fighting Back: Campaigning Against Spin and Rolling Back Corporate Power
• 14. Unmasking Public Relations
• 15. Corporate Power in Europe: The Brussels ‘Lobbycracy’
• 16. Killer Coke
• Conclusion: Countering Corporate Spin
• Contributors
• Index