Not Your Typical Muckracker
Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future (Tarcher/Putnam, $24.95) looks like it’s good for you. With probing chapters like “The Birth of Spin” and “The Best Science Money Can Buy,” Trust Us, We’re Experts! thrusts readers right into the belly of the beast — the lying industrial/public relations beast that, for example, attempts to get us to think that global warming might not be such a bad idea after all. Unlike some writing from the left, however, Trust Us is not didactic or joyless. In fact, it’s not necessarily even a left-leaning book (read: not all “grassroots” organizations are grassroots). “People who pick up our stuff and expect us to be just typical lefty journalists or writing from the liberal perspective realize pretty quickly that there’s something different or additional going on here,” says John Stauber, the founder of Madison, Wisconsin’s nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy and the co-author with Sheldon Rampton of Trust Us, as well as Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!, and Mad Cow U.S.A. For five years, Stauber worked for the Foundation for Economic Trends, one of the major thorns in the side of agribusiness. When he began investigating Monsanto, the company in the forefront of developing genetically modified foods, he was certain that he had found collusion among the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and Monsanto and other manufacturers. “It was very invisible but it became visible to me,” Stauber says, “and it just dawned on me that every single issue that’s out there, if there’s a controversy, even before a controversy has occurred, whatever economic interests are on one side of the issue are using all these hidden PR strategies and tactics to manipulate the issue and no one was really reporting on it.”
In 1990, Stauber organized a small, by-invitation-only conference in Washington, D.C., for family farmers and consumer and animal welfare organizations that Stauber felt should know more about bovine growth hormone. Someone from the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council called Stauber and asked to attend. He agreed, to find out later that that particular organization was entirely bogus, and that the person who had called him and the person who had attended the conference was in the employ of Burston-Marsteller, the world’s largest PR firm whose clients were keenly interested in what Stauber had to say about their products. “And that was the final straw,” Stauber says. Thus, the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PR Watch: Public Interest Reporting on the PR/Public Affairs Industry.
“We feel like we’re in the tradition of muckrakers and investigative journalists,” Stauber says. “We definitely have a point of view but our point of view is somewhat unique because we accept the fact that there’s a tremendous amount of propaganda that comes to us from government, from corporations, and through the news media, and we go about trying to expose that propaganda. What we do really should be done by journalism and the news media every day but 40% or more of what is produced every day as the news is essentially spin and public relations and propaganda.” Stauber will give a talk at BookPeople on Monday, June 25, at 7pm.
This article appears in June 22 • 2001.