A third party endorsement can position a new brand so that it’s poised for great success or, conversely, can blunt a serious problem before it gets out of hand and proves disastrous for a particular product or for a company overall.

—Daniel Edelman founder of Edelman PR Worldwide

Suppose we told you that this book holds the key to wealth beyond your dreams—and that it can make you stronger, healthier, more intelligent, and in every way a better person. More love in your life. Freedom from worry and want, and knowledge that will protect you from illness of all kinds.

As a discerning reader, you would probably greet these claims with skepticism. “These guys are obviously snake oil salesmen,” you might think. “They would probably dress up in chicken suits if they thought it might get me to buy their book. There’s no way I’m falling for this.”

Yet suppose we could supply testimonials from important-sounding people—from people whose names you’ve heard and respect, or who carry impressive titles and credentials. You’ll see that the publisher has placed a few testimonials on the back cover. We hope you’ll take a moment to read them and ponder their significance.

Better yet, suppose the testimonials came from people with no apparent connection to us. If that were the case, you might be less skeptical. And suppose we had some way of contriving things so that these other people were actually speaking on our behalf, while merely appearing to be independent. If we could put words of praise in the mouths of seemingly disinterested, knowledgeable third parties—if we could get a buzz going even among your friends and neighbors—and if we could do all that while keeping you completely in the dark about our behind-the-scenes scheming—then, ironically, you might start to believe us.

Of course, it’s highly unlikely that we could ever pull this off. Neither we nor our publisher could ever afford a scheme this grandiose. We’re doing the best that we can, but we’re no Microsoft.

Trust Us, We’re Anti-antitrust

In April 1998, as the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation of the Microsoft corporation began to evolve from a background nuisance into a serious challenge to the company’s future, a large binder of confidential company documents found its way into the hands of the Los Angeles Times. Leaked by an anonymous whistle-blower, the documents detailed a multimillion-dollar media campaign designed for Microsoft by Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, one of the world’s largest PR firms. The plan aimed to head off new antitrust investigations being considered by attorney generals in eleven U.S. states. The Times described the Edelman plan as “a massive media campaign designed to influence state investigators by creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the company.” It proposed to hire local PR firms as subcontractors in Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Freelance writers would be hired to write opinion pieces, which the local PR firms would then submit to local newspapers. “The elaborate plan . . . hinges on a number of unusual—and some say unethical—tactics,” noted L.A. Times writers Greg Miller and Leslie Helm, “including the planting of articles, letters to the editor and opinion pieces to be commissioned by Microsoft’s top media handlers but presented by local firms as spontaneous testimonials.” In the words of the leaked documents, the goal was to generate “leveragable tools for the company’s state-based lobbyists,” positive press clippings that “state political consultants can use to bolster the case” for Microsoft.¹

With documents in hand, the reporters played a cat-and-mouse game with Microsoft spokesman Greg Shaw, who denied knowing about the plan until they informed him of the internal memos in their possession, in which Shaw’s own name figured prominently. Presented with this reality, he smoothly adjusted his story, admitting that the Edelman plan existed but describing it as merely a proposal. “The idea that we’d hire people who wouldn’t identify themselves as representing Microsoft is totally false,” Shaw said. “Actually, the proposal we received is quite mundane.”²

After a few days of embarrassing editorials in the computer trade press, the Edelman plan was largely forgotten. A year later, it went un-mentioned when several news stories discussed an “Open Letter to President Clinton from 240 Economists” that appeared in the form of full-page advertisements in the Washington Post and New York Times. The ads were paid for by a California-based, nonprofit think tank named the Independent Institute, a conservative organization that had been a leading defender of Microsoft since it first came under fire from federal prosecutors. “Consumers did not ask for these antitrust actions—rival business firms did,” the Open Letter stated. “Many of the proposed interventions will weaken successful U.S. firms and impede their competitiveness abroad. . . . We urge antitrust authorities to abandon antitrust protectionism,” stated the economists, who came from institutions as far apart and as prestigious as the University of California, Johns Hopkins, the University of Miami, American University, Loyola, Ohio State, Dart-mouth, Northwestern, Columbia University, Stanford, and Cornell.³

Underneath the letter itself, a paragraph at the bottom of the newspaper ads advised readers that for more information they should read a new book titled Winners, Losers and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology, published by the Independent Institute and authored by two of its research fellows, economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. The book was attracting favorable reviews from publications such as The Economist of London and Wired magazine. “Henceforth, any judges, economists, pundits or journalists who discuss Microsoft . . . without first dealing with the Liebowitz-Margolis critique should have their wrists soundly slapped,” stated the Wall Street Journal.

Newsbytes magazine, a computer industry news service, noted that the Independent Institute’s position “sounds like a brazenly partisan argument for Microsoft,” but checked with a spokesman for the Independent Institute who said that Microsoft did not pay for either the Open Letter advertisements or the publication of Winners, Losers and Microsoft. The spokesman acknowledged that Microsoft was a member of the Institute, and “said membership dues for corporations start at approximately $1,000, but he would not comment on how much Microsoft has contributed to the institute over time,” Newsbytes reported.⁴

In September 1999, however, a second group of leaked internal documents found its way into the hands of another reporter, this time Joel Brinkley of the New York Times, who reported that Microsoft was the largest single outside donor to the Independent Institute. During the 1999 fiscal year, Brinkley wrote, Microsoft had provided 20 percent of the institute’s operating budget. In addition to helping pay for publication of Winners, Losers and Microsoft, the software company had paid for the newspaper ads in which the Open Letter appeared. Brinkley’s documents included a bill from Independent Institute President David Theroux to Microsoft attorney John Kelly, in the amount of $153,868.67—the full price of running the full-page ads, plus $5,966 in airfares and expenses for Theroux and a colleague to appear at a press conference timed to coincide with the ads’ release.

“Theroux has long acknowledged Microsoft is a dues-paying member of his institute,” Brinkley reported. “But he has insisted all along that Microsoft is ‘just one of 2,000 members’ and as such pays . . . an inconsequential part of the organization’s overall budget that gives the company no special standing. All Microsoft gets for that, he said, is ‘free copies of our publications, discounted tickets to our events.’ He has also maintained Microsoft had nothing to do with the newspaper advertisements. The ads, he said in the interview, ‘were paid for out of our general funds.’ ”⁵“⁵

The documents leaked to the New York Times put the lie to these claims, but Theroux was unfazed, attacking Brinkley’s story as a “smear campaign” based on “purloined” documents. “It appears that some people in the computer industry may now be stooping to any and all tactics that might be used to discredit the Independent Institute and our powerful new book,” he responded. “Mr. Brinkley credits as his source, ‘a Microsoft adversary associated with the computer industry who refused to be identified. ’ . . . Bottom line: Do Brinkley’s charges make our book and the Open Letter any less credible or accurate? Absolutely not.”⁶

The Independent Institute calls itself a “non-partisan, scholarly, public policy research and educational organization . . . that sponsors peer-reviewed, scientific studies on a wide range of economic and social issues.” That its defense of Microsoft was company-financed is irrelevant, Theroux claimed, because “the academic process we use is independent of sources of revenue.” There is some truth to these claims. It would be a little too facile to portray the Independent Institute as a mere mouthpiece for the company. As Theroux pointed out when its funding sources were uncovered, the institute was on record opposing antitrust laws since 1990, long before Microsoft came under federal scrutiny. And while professors Liebowitz and Margolis have worked on occasion as paid consultants to Microsoft, the positions they espouse in Winners, Losers and Microsoft were likewise developed years before the company became a target of government investigations.

Yet it is also ridiculous to pretend that the Independent Institute is truly independent. Microsoft had an obvious motive for helping the institute amplify its voice through major advertising, and it is precisely for this reason that the amount of its funding remained confidential until it was leaked to a newspaper reporter. David Callahan, a writer who has researched the relationship between corporate funders and conservative think tanks, notes that Microsoft’s relationship with the Independent Institute is “perfectly legal given current tax laws,” but adds, “At the same time, something is clearly wrong with this situation. . . . It is naïve to imagine that conservative think tanks aren’t extremely beholden to their funders in the business world or to the corporate leaders on their boards. This is simply the way that the power of the purse works. Just as politicians can’t ignore the demands of major donors if they want to survive, neither can institutions ignore their benefactors.”⁷

Potemkin Pundits

During the reign of Catherine the Great in Russia, one of her closest advisers was field marshal Grigori Potemkin, who used numerous wiles on her behalf. When Catherine toured the countryside with foreign dignitaries, Potemkin arranged to have fake villages built in advance of her visits so as to create an illusion of prosperity. Since that time, the term “Potemkin village” has become a metaphor for things that look elaborate and impressive but in actual fact lack substance.

Microsoft’s financing of the Independent Institute is a modern-day public relations strategy that amounts to Potemkin punditry—the manipulation of public opinion by financing and publicizing views congenial to the public policy goals of their sponsors. When the Edelman plan was first exposed in the Los Angeles Times, PR industry trade publications interviewed public relations practitioners around the country who saw nothing remarkable or particularly disturbing about the campaign. “Based on what I’ve seen it’s a fairly typical PR plan. It’s what we do,” the manager of a major PR firm said to Inside PR.

One leading PR practitioner—Robert Dilenschneider of the Dilenschneider Group—did criticize the Microsoft plan, calling it “a synthetic campaign.” The strategy was ethically wrong, he said, and dangerous to Microsoft’s own interests besides. “The media got wind of it, and they made the story the sleaze alley of the computer industry,” Dilenschneider said. “It has made Bill Gates, the richest, mightiest person in the world, look a little bit like the Wizard of Oz; a little bit of smoke and mirrors, no substance.”⁸ But Dilenschneider’s critique was in the minority.

“Media plans are routine in PR although they don’t sound too good when they hit print,” said Jack O’Dwyer’s Newsletter, another leading PR trade publication, which went on to offer some advice that Microsoft might want to use to avoid getting caught in the future: “PR pros we asked about this said: ‘Don’t put anything in writing you don’t want to be on page one of your newspaper.’ . . . ‘Talking points’ on the subject matter should have been distributed but no media relations methodology. Then, if the points became public, the press could only report on the length and breadth of Microsoft’s arguments.”⁹

As Microsoft and its defenders pointed out, in fact, its corporate rivals were also aggressively spinning the public debate, using a similar “media relations methodology.” Netscape, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems pushed their side of the antitrust case by launching the “Project to Promote Competition and Innovation in the Digital Age” (ProComp). Netscape hired former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork as a spokesman, a casting decision that Hollywood might term “playing against type.” Bork is the author of The Antitrust Paradox, a 1978 book sharply critical of government antitrust rules. “Bork cannot easily be dismissed as a knee-jerk critic of big, successful companies,” noted the National Journal. “His reputation as Mr. Anti-antitrust goes back a long time; when he was a Yale law professor, his students nicknamed his course on the topic ‘Protrust. ’ ”¹⁰ Once in the employ of Netscape, however, Bork issued a 7,000-word position paper and opinion pieces for major newspapers, explaining that federal prosecutors were “simply stopping Microsoft from using its operating system as a club to bludgeon competition into the dust.”¹¹ The anti-Microsoft coalition also hired former presidential candidate Bob Dole, now with the high-powered Washington lobbying firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand. Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a recipient of $17,500 in campaign contributions from Netscape, Sun, and America Online, added further conservative firepower to the anti-Microsoft armada, as did the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), a think tank with links to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. PFF’s major financial donors included Netscape, Oracle, and Sun, along with other Microsoft adversaries, including Gateway 2000, IBM, Hewlett Packard, America Online, and CompuServe.

Even the exposé of the Independent Institute that appeared in the New York Times turns out to have been orchestrated by the Oracle company. In order to get the goods on Microsoft’s funding of the institute, Oracle had hired a detective firm to go “dumpster diving” through Microsoft’s garbage, and had used the Washington PR firm of Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates to circulate the incriminating documents.¹²

None of these tactics are in any way unique to the computer industry. “This kind of plan is . . . part of the standard arsenal of companies in the cable and TV industry, and in other industries where there’s government regulation,” one source told PC Week magazine after reviewing the Edelman PR proposal.¹³ Computer industry columnist David Coursey went further. “If you think Microsoft is political bad news, compare computing /software generally to the telecommunications, broadcast and cable industries,” he wrote. “Their political efforts make Microsoft look like the proverbial 98-pound weakling.”¹⁴

Grigori Potemkin, if he were alive today, would probably be amazed at the number and sophistication of the political facades that have been erected in today’s media landscape. Here are a few other examples of the process at work:

• After Nigeria’s military dictatorship executed playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995, the dictatorship and Shell Oil Company faced international condemnation. Nigeria’s security forces had massacred villages and terrorized the indigenous Ogoni tribespeople in order to quell protests against the company’s natural gas drilling operations. Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni leader, had denounced Shell for waging an “ecological war” against his people. Nigeria responded by ordering multipage, glossy color advertisements in black-owned U.S. newspapers and inviting newspaper editors on expense-paid “fact-finding tours” of Ogoniland. Minority newspapers in the United States are chronically strapped for cash, and the combination of windfall revenue and guided tours succeeded in blunting criticisms. In fact, several newspapers editorialized that it was “racist” to criticize Nigeria’s dismal track record on human rights.

• In the fall of 1997, Georgetown University’s 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. Lobbyists for banks and credit card companies seized on the study as they lobbied Congress for changes in federal law that would make it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy relief. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen cited the study in a Washington Times opinion column, offering Georgetown’s academic imprimatur as evidence of the need for “bankruptcy reform.” 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. The study itself was produced with a $100,000 grant from Visa USA and MasterCard International, Inc. Bentsen also failed to mention that he himself had been hired to work as a credit-industry lobbyist.¹⁵

• In Oxford, England, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) calls itself an “independent, non-profit organization founded to conduct research on social issues.” It has issued a call to establish a British “code of practice” governing what reporters should be allowed to write about issues of science and public safety. Designed to put a stop to “irresponsible health scares,” the code stipulates that “scientific stories should be factually accurate. Breaches of the Code of Practice should be referred to the Press Complaints Commission.” Such a code is necessary, SIRC suggests, because of the public’s “riskfactorphobia,” a term it has coined to describe a condition of excessive sensitivity to health concerns related to genetically engineered foods and foodborne illnesses. SIRC has also published popular reports in the British press about the pleasures of pub-hopping. When the British Medical Journal took a close look at the organization, however, it found that SIRC shares the same offices, directors, and leading personnel as a PR firm called MCM Research that claims to apply “social science” to solving the problems of its clients, who include prominent names in the liquor and restaurant industries. “Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR initiatives?” asked MCM’s website in a straightforward boast of its ability to deceive the public. “MCM conducts social/psychological research on the positive aspects of your business,” the website continued. “The results do not read like PR literature, or like market research data. Our reports are credible, interesting and entertaining in their own right. This is why they capture the imagination of the media and your customers.”¹⁶

• Corporate sponsors have formed “partnerships” with a number of leading nonprofit organizations in which they pay for the right to use the organizations’ names and logos in advertisements. Bristol-Myers Squibb, for example, paid $600,000 to the American Heart Association for the right to display the AHA’s name and logo in ads for its cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol. The American Cancer Society reeled in $1 million from SmithKline Beecham for the right to use its logo in ads for Beecham’s NicoDerm CQ and Nicorette anti-smoking aids. A Johnson & Johnson subsidiary countered by shelling out $2.5 million for similar rights from the American Lung Association in its ads for Nicotrol, a rival nicotine patch. In 1999 manufacturers spent $630 million on these and similar kinds of sponsorship deals, some unseemly, such as a deal between the Eskimo Pie Corporation and the American Diabetes Association, which was designed to create the impression that Eskimo’s “Sugar Freedom” line of frozen desserts was endorsed by the American Diabetes Association, when in fact the desserts contain high levels of both total and saturated fat—a risky dietary choice for diabetics, who have a propensity for obesity and heart disease. Although the nonprofit organizations involved in these deals deny that the use of their names and logos constitutes an endorsement, the corporate sponsors have no such illusions. “PR pros view those third-party endorsements as invaluable ways to build goodwill among consumers for a client’s product line,” notes O’Dwyer’s PR Services Report. For propriety’s sake, however, a bit of discretion is necessary. “Don’t use the word ‘endorse’ when speaking to executives from non-profits about their relationships with the private sector,” O’Dwyer’s advised. “The preferred non-profit vernacular is: recommended, sponsorship, approved, or partnership.”¹⁷

• An organization called “Consumer Alert” frequently pops up in news stories about product safety issues. What the reporters almost never mention is that Consumer Alert is funded by corporations and that its positions are usually diametrically opposed to the positions taken by independent consumer groups such as Consumers Union. For example, Consumer Alert opposes flame-resistance standards for clothing fabrics issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and defends products such as the diet drug dexfenfluramine (Redux), which was taken off the market because of its association with heart valve damage. In contrast with Consumers Union, which is funded primarily by member subscriptions, Consumer Alert is funded by the industries whose products it defends—companies including Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Philip Morris, Allstate Insurance Fund, American Cyanamid, Elanco, Eli Lilly, Exxon, Monsanto, Upjohn, Chemical Manufacturers Association, Ciba-Geigy, the Beer Institute, Coors, and Chevron USA. ¹⁸

• In late 1993, a group called Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP) appeared, calling itself “the largest women’s environmental group in Australia with thousands of supporters across the country. . . . The group comprises mainly mothers and other women concerned with the welfare and rights of Australian women.” MOP’s cause: a campaign against plastic milk bottles, centering on the issues of waste disposal, the carcinogenic risks of milk in contact with plastic, and reduction in the quality of milk as a result of exposure to light. “The message to the consumer is never buy milk in plastic containers,” said spokesperson Alana Maloney. Membership in MOP was free, which prompted some people to wonder how the group could afford to carry out expensive publicity in support of its cause. Although MOP claimed branches across Australia, Alana Maloney seemed to be its only spokesperson. Searches of basic public records, such as voting rolls, could find no such person. MOP’s letterhead listed three addresses in different cities, each of which turned out to be a post office box. Finally, in February 1995, an Australian newspaper discovered that “Mrs. Alana Maloney” was in fact Janet Rundle, who heads a public relations company called J. R. and Associates. Rundle is also a business partner of Trevor Munnery, who owns his own PR firm called Unlimited Public Relations, which works for the Association of Liquidpaperboard Carton Manufacturers (ALC)—the makers of paper milk cartons. In the wake of these public revelations, MOP sank from public view and has since disappeared. ¹⁹

Someone Else’s Mouth

These examples share a common reliance upon a public relations strategy known within the PR industry as the “third party technique.” Merrill Rose, executive vice president of the Porter/Novelli PR firm, explains the technique succinctly: “Put your words in someone else’s mouth.”²⁰ How effective is this strategy? According to a survey commissioned by Porter/Novelli, 89 percent of respondents consider “independent experts” a “very or somewhat believable source of information during a corporate crisis.” Sometimes the technique is used to hype or exaggerate the benefits of a product. Other times it is used to create doubt about a product’s hazards, or about criticisms that have been made of a company’s business practices. The “someone elses” become Potemkin authorities, faithfully spouting the opinions of their benefactors while making it appear that their views are “independent.” You used to see this technique in its most obvious and crude form in the television commercials that featured actors in physicians’ lab coats announcing that “nine out of ten doctors prefer” their brand of aspirin. But advertisements are obvious propaganda, and the third party technique in its more subtle forms is designed to prevent audiences from even realizing what they are experiencing. “The best PR ends up looking like news,” brags one public relations executive. “You never know when a PR agency is being effective; you’ll just find your views slowly shifting.”²¹

It is hard to say exactly when or where the third party technique originated as a conscious tactic for manipulating public opinion. Since antiquity, debates on important issues have frequently turned on appeals to the reverence that most people feel for a famous name. During the medieval period, the authority of priests and kings was considered a transcendent standard of truth, even when their doctrines clashed with the evidence of people’s actual experience and scientific experiments. People who questioned officially accepted religious views were labeled heretics and could be arrested and killed on the grounds that he or she must have made a pact with the devil.

“It was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that argument from authority commonly came to be treated as a fallacy,” notes University of Toronto philosophy professor Douglas Walton in his book, Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. “The rise of science brought with it a kind of positivist way of thinking, to the effect that knowledge should be based on scientific experiment and mathematical calculation and that all else is ‘subjective.’ ”²²

The rise of science accompanied a communications revolution, beginning with the printing press and continuing into the modern age of electronic media, and as Umberto Eco has observed, every new means of communication carries within itself a means of deception. Just as the invention of language made lying possible, the invention of mass media created newer, more sophisticated, subtle, and elaborate techniques of propaganda. Just as the anonymity of the Internet would eventually enable 14-year-old boys to pretend to be 24-year-old lingerie models, the mass media made it possible for the first time to conceal the identity of the voices that appeared within it, to deliver messages while hiding the identity of the messenger. It became possible to accomplish this act of concealment without ever committing an act of overt deception. Edward Bernays, the legendary “father of public relations” whose career we examine in Chapter 2, demonstrated an inkling of this potential during one of his early assignments as adviser to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which was plagued by rumors that it was about to close. Bernays knew that denying the rumors directly would only give them more credence. Instead, he advised his client to prominently announce the signing of a ten-year contract with its world-famous chef. The mere identity of the celebrated chef became a symbolic statement of the message that the hotel wanted to deliver.

“How can the persuader reach these groups that make up the large public?” Bernays asked in one of the early formulations of the third party technique. “He can do so through their leaders, for the individual looks for guidance to the leaders of the groups to which he belongs. . . . They play a vital part in the molding of public opinion, and they offer the propagandist a means of reaching vast numbers of individuals, for with so many confusing and conflicting ideas competing for the individual’s attention, he is forced to look to others for authority. No man, in today’s complicated world, can base his judgments and acts entirely on his own examination and weighing of the evidence. . . . The group leader thus becomes a key figure in the molding of public opinion, and his acceptance of a given idea carries with it the acceptance of many of his followers.”²³

For Jack O’Dwyer, the third party technique is what distinguishes public relations from advertising. “Your firm may want to deal directly with the public or with your employees, customers, suppliers, etc.,” he says, “but this is not the best use of a PR firm. The most leverage will be when the firm supplies useful information to influential reporters and analysts who have large audiences. You get third-party endorsement and wide readership or viewership at comparatively low cost. . . . Look for third-party endorsements, not booklets, sales promotion and ads.”²⁴

From a PR point of view, the third party technique offers several advantages:

• It offers camouflage, helping to hide the vested interest that lurks behind a message. If Philip Morris were to come out itself and declare that “attorneys need to be stopped from suing tobacco companies,” the message would be laughed into oblivion. Similar skepticism is bound to greet Bill Gates when he writes an editorial on his own behalf, or a polluting company when it claims that pollution doesn’t cause illness. Putting the same message in someone else’s mouth gives it a credibility that it would not otherwise enjoy.

• It encourages conformity to a vested interest, while pretending to encourage independence. Sometimes, in fact, the message is designed to look like the very epitome of rebellion. Take, for example, a legendary publicity stunt orchestrated by Edward Bernays, which used suffragettes as third party proxies for the tobacco industry. In 1929, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company and charged with the task of persuading women to smoke—an activity that was then considered “unfeminine” and socially unacceptable. Bernays set out to turn this liability into an advantage by establishing cigarettes as symbols of women’s liberation. At his instigation, ten New York debutantes marched in the city’s 1929 Easter Sunday parade, defiantly smoking cigarettes as a protest against women’s inequality. Bernays dubbed it the “torches of liberty” brigade. “Front page stories in newspapers reported the freedom march in words and pictures,” Bernays would recall later. “For weeks after the event, editorials praised or condemned the young women who had paraded against the smoking taboo.” Women began lighting up in droves, and a few weeks later a Broadway theater let women inside its heretofore men’s-only smoking room.²⁵

• It replaces factual discourse with emotion-laden symbolism. Sometimes the identity of the messenger becomes symbolically more important than the content of the message itself. Timber industry consultant Ron Arnold, who founded the “Wise Use” movement as a pseudo-grassroots campaign against environmentalism, explains the rationale behind his use of the third party technique: “The public is completely convinced that when you speak as an industry, you are speaking out of nothing but self-interest. The pro-industry citizen activist group is the answer to these problems. It can be an effective and convincing advocate for your industry. It can utilize powerful archetypes such as the sanctity of the family, the virtue of the close-knit community, the natural wisdom of the rural dweller. . . . And it can turn the public against your enemies. . . . I think you’ll find it one of your wisest investments over time.”²⁶

Serving the Self-Serving

When they talk among themselves, PR professionals can be remarkably candid about their reasons for using the third party technique. During the Clinton/Lewinsky drama, O’Dwyer’s noted that “what the Clinton Administration needs are credible third parties—both in quantity and quality—rising to its defense. In a word, it needs PR.” Why? Because “third parties can say things that participants in a debate cannot.”²⁷

In 1994 Neal Cohen, of the Washington-based PR and lobby firm APCO & Associates, used similar reasoning at a conference organized by the Public Affairs Council, a trade association for some of the nation’s top lobbyists. APCO was among the principal PR firms orchestrating the “tort reform” movement, which campaigns against “excessive” consumer liability lawsuits and is heavily financed by the insurance and tobacco industries. On the face of it, Cohen observed, tort reform is difficult to sell to the public. “It’s not a very sexy issue,” he said. “ ‘Tort’ to the average person is dessert, it isn’t a legal principle.” The whole purpose of tort reform, moreover, is to make it harder for everyday citizens to sue corporations. This is hardly the sort of cause that brings masses into the streets. In fact, he said, people would reject the tort reform movement out of hand if they knew that the insurance and tobacco companies were behind it. “We want to pass a bill in Mississippi,” he said by way of example, “and we’ve got a problem: Our industry can’t pass the bill. If the legislators know we’re the only industry that wants this bill, it’s an automatic killer. And just to make it a little more difficult, we’ve joined up with one other industry to fund this effort, and they are worse than us. People dislike them more intensely, and in fact they don’t even have any facilities in the state of Mississippi, not to mention the product they manufacture. . . . In a tort reform battle, if State Farm is the leader of the coalition, you’re not going to pass the bill, it’s not credible. OK? Because it’s so self-serving.”

In order to give tort reform any credibility at all, APCO had to figure out a way to reframe the issue, which they did by tapping into the public’s distaste for attorneys. “We built a coalition around the concept of ‘lawsuit abuse,’ ” Cohen explained, “and we enlarged the scope of the concept so that people understood how it would affect their pocket book, how it would address their fear, how it would deal with their anger at the legal profession. . . . Rule number one for me is stay away from substance. Don’t talk about the details of legislation,” he advised. “Talk about . . . ‘law-suit abuse,’ ‘trial lawyer greed,’ ‘increasing jobs.’ ”

When building a coalition, Cohen advised, “you’d better have a committed leader, a spokesperson, and you’d better train that spokesperson, and it should only be one person. . . . And if you can, find somebody who has stature and is not perceived as somebody who is typical. Somebody who . . . has the stature with the legislators.” If possible, the public should be brought in as well, but as props, not as participants. “We made sure that it was typical people mixed in with large employers and political contributors,” he said. “We had 1,500 Mississippians mixed in with who our clients were. . . . We had broadened the issue so it was identified . . . with a much broader group, and it was focused in as a constituent grassroots issue.” But appearances are one thing, reality another. “The problem with broad-based membership is—don’t confuse that with broad-based leadership,” Cohen advised. “Broad-based membership is ‘What does the public see?’ ‘What do the legislators see?’ Decision-making is, you need a core group, three or so people, who have similar interests and are going to get the job done and not veer off.” Other adornments, such as advertising and research-for-hire, help decorate the coalition tree. “We used every tactic we could think of to get a message out there,” Cohen said. “We also used polls to get the media’s attention. . . . We did a research study using a local professor, we spent $5,000 on a study. . . . It was to get the media’s attention. . . . We used television [ads] in part to get the media’s attention. . . . We also did billboards.”²⁸

Making News

The news media is a natural target for the third party technique, both because of its ability to reach millions of people and because the public expects journalists to serve as neutral sifters of the truth. The PR industry has mastered the art of putting its words into journalists’ mouths, relying on the fact that most reporters are spread too thin to engage in time-consuming investigative journalism and therefore rely heavily on information from corporate- and government-sourced news releases. The news release as we know it today was invented in the 1920s by early PR practitioner Ivy Lee, a former journalist himself who realized that the more information his clients provided to reporters, the less likely the reporters would be to go out and investigate for themselves. Early news releases were simple typed statements. Today, PR firms produce regular syndicated columns and have their own wire services, such as PR Newswire, that deliver the news releases instantly via the Internet to both print and electronic journalists. Jennifer Sereno, the business editor for a major daily paper in Wisconsin, says she prefers electronic news releases because “the stories come up on our screens, as other wire stories do. We see them more quickly than we see faxes. . . . It’s very convenient. We can send it electronically right to the reporter working on the story. Oftentimes it saves them some typing as well.”²⁹

There is nothing inherently deceptive about issuing a news release, but this sort of practice has changed the modern information environment in subtle yet important ways. A comparison of PR Newswire releases to actual newspaper stories shows that they are frequently repeated, verbatim or nearly verbatim, usually with no disclosure to tell readers that what appears on the page as a journalist’s independent report is actually a PR news release. A study by Scott Cutlip found that 40 percent of the news content in a typical U.S. newspaper originated with public relations press releases, story memos, or suggestions. In 1980 the Columbia Journalism Review scrutinized a typical issue of the Wall Street Journal and found that more than half of its news stories “were based solely on press releases.” Often the releases were reprinted “almost verbatim or in paraphrase,” with little additional reporting, and many articles carried the slug “By a Wall Street Journal Staff Reporter.”³⁰ There is no reason to think that the situation has improved since or that it is much different at other papers. “Most of what you see on TV is, in effect, a canned PR product. Most of what you read in the paper and see on television is not news,” says the senior vice president of a leading public relations firm.³¹

This tendency is especially pronounced in the electronic media. Some PR firms specialize in the production of prerecorded public service announcements and “video news releases” (VNRs)—entire news stories, written, filmed, and produced by PR firms and transmitted by satellite feed or the Internet to thousands of TV stations around the world. “In the early 1980s, as news staffs were cut and airtime for news programming was expanded with cable television, we entered the golden age of VNR production and placement,” noted Kevin Foley of KEF Media Associates in Chicago. By 1991, ten VNRs a day were being produced—4,000 per year.³² Today the number is much higher, although no one has an exact count. VNRs are used heavily by the pharmaceuticals and food industries in particular, which provide a steady stream of stories touting new medical breakthroughs and previously unknown health benefits that researchers attribute to oat bran, garlic bread, walnuts, orange juice, or whatever product the sponsoring client happens to be selling. A subtle touch is needed to make sure that the VNR looks exactly like real news. PR consultant Debra Hauss advises VNR producers against seeming “too commercial. Don’t try to sneak in too many product mentions.”³³ Sometimes VNRs will use narrators who have previously worked as on-air reporters. That these scripted stories are actually cleverly disguised advertisements is well understood by the people who work at TV stations and networks, but is rarely mentioned within earshot or eyeshot of the news-watching public. On the evening news every night you see—but probably don’t recognize—VNR footage mixed in with stories that reporters have gone out and gathered themselves. Sometimes VNRs are used as story segments without any editing whatsoever, let alone a disclaimer to inform audiences that what they are watching was produced by a PR firm on behalf of a specific client with a specific propaganda interest.

Kenneth Feather, director of the FDA’s Division of Drug Advertising and Labeling, noted that medical VNRs manipulate the public when they promote drugs for unapproved uses or imply that the VNR sponsor’s product is superior to other products. A major problem, he said, is that virtually none of them state that they came from the drug company but rather imply a third party. They use on-screen testimony from well-spoken doctors who have been coached so that their delivery perfectly fits the format of a news program, and the VNRs rarely mention that the doctors have been hired by the drug suppliers to test and promote their products. Often, in fact, pharmaceutical companies use VNRs to make claims for their products that would not be permitted under the FDA’s rules for paid advertising. They can be used to promote unapproved uses of a drug, for example, or to create public pressure for the government to approve a drug that is still undergoing regulatory scrutiny. “Until recently, the drug companies have been largely discouraged from using TV commercials targeted at the public,” said Eugene Secunda, a professor of marketing at Baruch College in New York. “However, they have been less constrained in their use of new media techniques like the VNR, for which the FDA has not yet established formal guidelines.”³⁴

Virtual Surrealities

The extent to which today’s media can manufacture false realities was satirized in the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, in which government advisers created a fictional war on a Hollywood sound stage to distract public attention from a presidential sex scandal. When Wag the Dog first appeared, critics praised its humor but thought its plot seemed implausible. Then President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky became public knowledge. When Clinton announced a bombing strike against “Arab terrorists” on the eve of his own impeachment hearings, more than a few people began to wonder if the movie was really so far-fetched. The question lingers: How far will people in power go to manipulate and control our perceptions of reality?

The notion that we live in an elaborate, technologically manufactured illusion has become a recurring theme in modern cinema. In Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger discovers that his own memories are government-manufactured implants. In The Net, Sandra Bullock’s identity is erased by a corporation that controls the world’s information databases. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey lives in a giant Potemkin village, unaware that his entire life is a made-for-TV fabrication. Virtual reality also figures prominently in later episodes of Star Trek, which feature a “holodeck” where people go to experience synthetic adventures in a room that can be programmed to realistically simulate a Parisian café, a lush rain forest, or any other pseudo-environment that the programmer requests. In The X-Files, agents Scully and Mulder spend their days exploring a vast, labyrinthine conspiracy, convinced that “the truth is out there” but never quite able to discover it or even identify the conspirators. “This, it seems, is a proliferating notion in today’s world of film—blending theology and technology into a weird, low-level paranoia about existence,” observes film critic Ted Anthony.³⁵

This paranoia reflects a growing public awareness of what journalist Walter Lippmann described in 1921 as “the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. . . . What is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.”³⁶

Lippmann served as a confidential assistant to the U.S. Secretary of War during the First World War and participated in drawing up the terms of the armistice. The experience left him disillusioned about the future prospects for democracy, and in a book titled Public Opinion he readily acknowledged that all sides in the war, his own included, had lied to their own citizens about matters ranging from battlefield losses to the real postwar objectives of the warring governments. “We have learned to call this propaganda,” he wrote. “A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to suit their purpose.”³⁷

The “pseudo-environment” of fictions was inevitable and necessary, Lippmann argued, in part because of limitations in the speed with which information could be transmitted to the public at large. Even a skilled telegraph operator, he observed, could transmit no more than 1,500 words per day. As a result, foreign correspondents were forced to compress their firsthand accounts into a “few words,” which “must often stand for a whole succession of acts, thoughts, feelings and consequences. . . . It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred word account of what had happened.”³⁸ Rather than informed consensus, therefore, public opinion was bound to be a hodgepodge of half-baked notions and stereotypes based on incomplete information and the personal biases of individuals.

Given the impossibility of educating the public about the full complexities of the world, Lippmann argued that democracy was unworkable “unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.”³⁹ The expert, he argued, would “exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the administrator. All governing agencies will tend to organize bodies of research and information, which will throw out tentacles and expand, as have the intelligence departments of all the armies in the world.”⁴⁰ Lippmann thought this development would be a good thing and even recommended creating government-subsidized “bureaus of experts,” whose members would enjoy lifetime tenure.⁴¹ “The purpose,” he said, “is not to burden every citizen with expert opinions on all questions, but to push that burden away from him towards the responsible administrator.”⁴²

Complementing the rise of the expert, Lippmann also foresaw the rise of a specialized type of expert whose job would be to control and discipline the thinking of the masses. “As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner,” he stated. “Persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise.”⁴³

The world we live in today differs from Lippmann’s in ways that he could never have foreseen. His argument about the difficulties involved in transmitting information from place to place not only seems irrelevant but absurd in today’s world of the Internet, camcorders, cell phones, fiber-optic cables, and satellite dishes. The information bottleneck no longer exists. To the contrary, we are bombarded daily with more information than we can possibly absorb, and yet the modern information media have not eliminated the “pseudo-environment” of which Lippmann spoke. In fact, media noise has contributed greatly to its growth.

The Disinfotainment Industry

The creation of a media pseudo-environment is no easy task. It takes time, money, and advanced technology. No one knows exactly how much money is spent each year in the United States on corporate public relations, but $10 billion would be a conservative estimate. The PR industry has turned to the social sciences for help in developing techniques equal to the task. Psychologists, sociologists and opinion pollsters work in tandem with computer programmers to develop complex databases so refined that they can pinpoint the prevailing “psychographics” of individual city neighborhoods. Press agents used to rely on publicity stunts to attract attention for their clients. In today’s electronic age, the PR industry uses 800 numbers and telemarketing, interactive websites and simultaneous multilocation fax transmission. Today’s public relations industry has become so pervasive that part of its invisibility stems from the fact that it is, indeed, everywhere—from T-shirts bearing product brand names to movie product placements to various behind-the-scenes efforts at “issue management,” “perception management,” or “crisis management” (to use just a few of the currently fashionable buzzwords).

Some companies, with names like Capital Speakers, Inc., or Celebrity Focus, specialize in recruiting celebrity and expert spokespersons for the PR industry. Capital Speakers boasts that it can provide “access to virtually any speaker or entertainer on earth.” Celebrity Focus says it allows clients “to focus on public relations, while entrusting the hiring of celebrities to seasoned professionals.”⁴⁴ Other PR consultants specialize in coaching would-be experts and nervous corporate executives in how to present themselves before Congress or on television: what clothes to wear, what color tie, how to sit or stand (spread your feet so your head won’t seem to rock on camera), what words to use and how to pronounce them, and—when asked a question you don’t want to answer—how to say nothing while avoiding awkward phrases like “no comment.” The larger PR companies offer all of these services and more under a single roof—one-stop shopping for advertising, public relations, traditional lobbying, research, polling, direct-mail canvassing, and creating “grassroots” support for issues.

The federal government is forbidden by law from spending money on public relations, but this has proved to be no barrier in practice, since the same activities go on under the rubric of “public affairs” and other euphemisms. In 1986, Senator William Proxmire asked the General Accounting Office how much money federal agencies spend on public affairs, and received an estimate of $2.3 billion—a figure that did not include the PR activities of Congress or the White House. This number has surely grown since, although there are no government statistics or even standards with which to track and measure its growth. During the Reagan administration’s military interventions in Central America in the 1980s, its Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean used the third party technique to orchestrate media coverage of the war. On March 11, 1985, for example, Professor John Guilmarten wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal alleging a dangerous arms buildup by the Nicaraguan government. “Professor Guilmarten has been a consultant to our office and collaborated with our staff in the writing of this piece. . . . Officially, this office had no role in its preparation,” noted an internal White House memo that was uncovered during the Iran/Contra hearings. The memo also mentioned op-ed pieces that its consultants had drafted to be signed by contra leaders and submitted to the Washington Post and New York Times, and spoke of using a “cutout” (CIA-speak for “third party”) to set up interviews between the contras and various Washington news media. In its first year of operations alone, the program claimed credit for 1,500 speaking engagements and for sending material to 239 editorial writers in 150 cities—all the while concealing the fact that the White House was the source of the propaganda.

Some PR campaigns are entertaining, some are merely frivolous, and some are undoubtedly beneficial to the public. The cumulative human cost of these experiments in thought control has nevertheless been profound. On repeated occasions in the twentieth century, experts in manipulating public opinion have led the United States and other nations into war. Washington, D.C., is home to prominent PR firms whose clients include dictatorships that murder and torture their own citizens and even spy on the United States, while simultaneously lobbying for foreign financial aid and special trade favors. The private health care industry has launched massive PR and lobby campaigns on repeated occasions to block health care reform, with the result that the United States remains the only major industrial power on earth with a large population of uninsured—ranking near the bottom in terms of the actual health of its citizens despite spending more per capita on health care than any other nation.⁴⁵

There is nothing wrong with many of the techniques used by the PR industry—lobbying, grassroots organizing, using the news media to put ideas before the public. As individuals, we not only have the right to engage in these activities, we have a responsibility to participate in the decisions that shape our society and our lives. Ordinary citizens have the right to organize for social change. But ordinary citizens cannot afford the multimillion-dollar campaigns that PR firms undertake on behalf of their special interest clients, usually large corporations, business associations, and governments. Raw money enables the PR industry to mobilize attorneys, broadcast faxes, satellite feeds, sophisticated information systems, and other expensive, high-tech resources to outmaneuver, overpower, and outlast true citizen reformers.

That we live in a world of media manipulations is understood almost instinctively by the public. Whether we see through a particular propaganda campaign or not, we all know that we live in an age of half-truths, weasel words, and slick image campaigns. When someone says, “That’s a bunch of PR,” they rarely mean it in a positive sense. “PR has become a catchall phrase for what the public doesn’t trust,” observes Betty Keepin, the president of a trade association for women PR executives. In 1994, the Public Relations Society of America and the Rockefeller Foundation began a five-year survey aimed at determining which types of public figures were most trusted by the general public. Forty-five different types of public figures were assessed, using a “National Credibility Index” devised by the PRSA to measure “the degree to which an individual trusts the person advocating or espousing a position on an issue.” To the PRSA’s dismay, public relations professionals came almost at the bottom—number 43, just below “famous athletes” and barely squeaking past “famous entertainers” and “TV or radio talk show hosts.”⁴⁶

The PRSA’s study was completed in 1999 and released with little fanfare on Friday, June 18—“just before the Fourth of July vacation period and a favorite ‘burying ground’ for those trying to minimize publicity,” noted the PR trade publication O’Dwyer’s. The survey prompted a few expressions of concern from industry practitioners, some of whom suggested that perhaps they should launch a “PR for PR” campaign. Others resignedly admitted that any such campaign would probably be doomed to failure. But for Dave Siefert, president of the International Association of Business Communicators, the results were neither surprising nor particularly bad news. PR pros work “in the background,” he said, and people “see the results of our work, not our personal involvement.” The public relations industry itself may lack credibility, but PRSA’s survey showed that “national experts” were the third most trusted type of public figure in America (after Supreme Court justices and schoolteachers). And after all, Siefert said, “the national experts are often delivering messages developed by PR pros.”⁴⁷

The media stage on which much of modern public life is conducted has created two kinds of experts—the spin doctors behind the scenes, and the visible experts that they select, cultivate, and offer up for public consumption. The experts who work behind the scenes prefer to stay there, because invisibility is necessary to achieve their illusions. “Guys in my business hate becoming public figures . . . when we don’t control it,” says former Reagan aide Edward Rollins, now a vice president at Edelman.⁴⁸ Today’s wizards of spin are rather like the Wizard of Oz. They have perfected the craft of speaking in a booming, magisterial voice that inspires admiration and awe, but they fear being unmasked for what they really are—showmen who have learned to use hidden wires, smoke, and mirrors to make little men and little ideas seem grand and convincing. There is a reason that the Wizard begged Dorothy to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” But she had to look, and understand the contrivance behind his magic, before she could find her way back home.