Everything is possible but nothing is real.

In 1992, the food industry’s International Food Information Council (IFIC) retained Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, “an international market research expert,” to research “how Americans relate to food biotechnology and genetic engineering.” IFIC, a PR lobby for the use of biotechnology in agriculture, wanted to know how it could overcome consumer apprehensions about the new technology. A “core team” was assembled to aid in the research, consisting of representatives from the Monsanto Agricultural Company, NutraSweet, Kraft General Foods, Ajinomoto, DuPont, and Calgene. Other research sponsors included Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and the M&M/Mars candy company. The goal of the research team was to “develop actionable strategies, messages, and language that will express information positively about the process and products—without stirring fears or negative connotations.” ¹

Dr. Rapaille is a Jungian psychologist who uses a technique he calls “Archetype Studies,” which claims to delve into the “primordial cause for . . . opinions, attitudes or motivations.” As his report to IFIC explained, “For each element in the world, there is a first meaningful experience called the Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is the pattern which underlies this Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is completely preordained by the culture, and it is common to everyone in a given culture. . . . The Archetype is the Logic of Emotion that forms the Collective Unconscious.” Discover these Archetypes, Rapaille’s theory promised, and “you can ‘read’ the consumers like a book, and you can understand their unconscious ‘logic.’ ”²

Rapaille’s process for uncovering Archetypes was similar in most respects to what another advertising or PR person might term a “focus group,” but Dr. Rapaille liked to refer to them as “Imprinting Groups.” Each group consisted of 20 to 30 everyday Americans, which Rapaille’s team of “Archetypologists” led through a series of “relaxation exercises and visualization” aimed at eliciting their innermost feelings about biotechnology.³

The result of these exercises, the team concluded, was that the biotech industry stood at a crossroads. “In one case, we have tremendous public support—we can be viewed as farmers bringing new varieties and improved foods to consumers. But if we do not position ourselves and our products correctly, we can just as easily be viewed in the same class as Hitler and Frankenstein.” The difference depended on which “imprint” provided the Archetype for public perception of the new foods. And the public would choose its Archetype based largely on the food industry’s choice of words.⁴

“In communicating about food biotechnology and genetic engineering, we now know a variety of ‘trigger’ words that will help consumers view these products in the same vein as farming, hybrids, and the natural order, rather than as Frankenfoods,” the study concluded. In the category of “words to use,” Rapaille suggested terms such as beauty, bounty, children, choices, cross-breeding, diversity, earth, farmer, flowers, fruits, future generations, hard work, heritage, improved, organic, purity, quality, soil, tradition, and wholesome. “Words to lose” included: biotechnology, chemical, DNA, economic, experiments, industry, laboratory, machines, manipulate, money, pesticides, profit, radiation, safety, and scientists.⁵

In a memo accompanying the completed study, IFIC’s Libby Mikesell and Tom Stenzel summarized the lessons learned. “The technology in biotechnology has ‘scary’ overtones in connection with life in any form. . . . Biotechnology may not be the optimal term to use in our discussions,” they wrote. “Clotaire recommends that we ‘sandwich’ the word genetic between other words that create an association with tradition and nature. Some possible terms he suggested were ‘biogenetic gardening,’ ‘natural genetics’ or ‘natural genetic gardening.’ He composed this sentence as an example of how to use the terms: New genetic discoveries allow us to be successful gardeners of the 21st century and to accomplish cross-breeding at a highly sophisticated level, fulfilling a vision of the gardeners of the 19th century.”⁶

It is worth noting that many of the terms in Rapaille’s list of “words to lose” are straightforward characterizations of the actual scientific process used in developing genetically engineered foods, while many of the “words to use” are vague, pleasant-sounding euphemisms designed to obscure the details about everything that is new and unique about the process. Dr. Rapaille has a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, but his analytical method does not necessarily require one. William Lutz, a professor at Rutgers University and author of the book Doublespeak, has catalogued numerous similar examples of industry and government linguistic coinage, many of which originated with people who lacked any background whatsoever in Jungian Archetypology. The Reagan administration, for example, invented the phrase “revenue enhancements” as a substitute for “taxes.” Gambling casinos prefer to call themselves the “gaming industry.” Corporations refer to failed business ventures as “nonperforming assets.” The military refers to civilian deaths as “collateral damage,” bombs as “vertically deployed antipersonnel devices,” and killing the enemy as “servicing the target.”

It is also worth noting the irony in IFIC’s choice of someone like Rapaille to help design its strategy for defending biotechnology. Whatever dangers biotechnology may or may not present to the public, it is undeniably an example of modern science in action. When talking among themselves, biotech’s promoters frequently invoke the name of science, characterizing their opponents as irrational, fear-driven technophobes. “We all are frustrated by the public’s emotional response to scientific, factual issues,” stated the IFIC report. Yet Rapaille’s advice to IFIC was not only calculated to evoke an emotional response and to avoid any mention of science, his very methodology for arriving at his analysis is at best a parody of the scientific method. In its relentless effort to probe the supposedly irrational mind of the public, it is a modern-day example of the legacy of Edward Bernays and his famous uncle, Sigmund Freud.

Hard Science and Liquid Truth

The power that science wields in modern society is a reflection of its ability to create knowledge that is as close to infallible as any product of human endeavor. Reasonable people may disagree in their opinions about Shakespeare or religion, but they do not disagree with the laws of thermodynamics. This is because the theories of science, especially the hard sciences, have been developed through methodologies that require verification by multiple, independent researchers using clearly defined, replicable experiments. If the experiments do not bear out a hypothesis, the hypothesis must be rejected or modified.

The very prestige that science enjoys, however, has also given rise to a variety of scientific pretenders—disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics that merely claim to be scientific. The renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper gave a great deal of consideration to this problem and coined the term “pseudoscience” to help separate the wheat from the chaff. The difference between science and pseudoscience, he concluded, is that genuinely scientific theories are “falsifiable”—that is, they are formulated in such a way that if they are wrong, they can be proven false through experiments. By contrast, pseudosciences are formulated so vaguely that they can never be proven or disproven. “The difference between a science and a pseudoscience is that scientific statements can be proved wrong and pseudoscientific statements cannot,” says Robert Youngson in his book Scientific Blunders: A Brief History of How Wrong Scientists Can Sometimes Be. “By this criterion you will find that a surprising number of seemingly scientific assertions—perhaps even many in which you devoutly believe—are complete nonsense. Rather surprisingly this is not to assert that all pseudoscientific claims are untrue. Some of them may be true, but you can never know this, so they are not entitled to claim the cast-iron assurance and reliance that you can have, and place, in scientific facts.”⁷

Judged by this standard, many of the “social sciences”—including the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung, and others—are actually pseudosciences rather than the real thing. This does not mean that Freud and Jung were charlatans or fools. Both were creative thinkers with fascinating insights into the human psyche, but a research methodology that derives its data from the dreams of mentally ill patients is a far cry from the orderly system of measurements that we associate with hard sciences like physics and chemistry.⁸

Regardless of their scientific limitations, theories of human psychology figure prominently in the thinking of the public relations industry. What is more important than their actual effectiveness is the seemingly authoritative justification that they provide for the PR worldview—a belief that people are fundamentally irrational and that therefore a class of behind-the-scenes manipulators is necessary to shape opinion for the public’s own good. But this belief is at odds not only with the ideals of democracy but also with the fundamental and necessary ideological underpinnings of the scientific method itself. Before scientists can reach any conclusions whatsoever about the elements in the periodic table or the space-time continuum, they have to first believe that “the truth is out there” and that their investigations will take them closer to it. The public relations worldview, however, envisions truth as an infinitely malleable, spinnable thing. For consultants like Clotaire Rapaille, the truth is not a thing to be discovered but a thing to be created, through artful word choices and careful arrangement of appearances.

“Given a choice, do you serve your client or the truth?” a reporter asked John Scanlon, one of today’s leading spinmeisters, during a 1991 interview.

“You always try—you always serve the truth,” Scanlon replied. “But again—but the truth is often, you know, is often not necessarily a solid. It can be a liquid. . . . What seems to be true is not necessarily the case when we look at it and we dissect it and take it apart, and we turn it around and we look at it from a different perspective. . . . Whose truth are we talking about, your truth or my truth?”⁹

John Scanlon specializes in representing high-profile clients, especially clients embroiled in controversy. In 1997, the trade publication Inside PR ranked him as the number-two expert in the world at “crisis management”—the PR field that specializes in helping clients fend off scandals and repair bad reputations. In 1999, for example, he represented famed fellatrix and self-proclaimed liar Monica Lewinsky as she embarked on a media tour to promote her book, Monica’s Story. Lewinsky too, it seems, had a version of the truth to tell, as did the president whose sexual relationship with her depended on what your definition of “is” is. Scanlon’s other assignments have included PR for CBS when it was sued for libel by Vietnam-era general William Westmoreland. Later, he squared off against 60 Minutes when he went to work for the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in its effort to discredit tobacco-industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, whose story was dramatized in the movie The Insider. In both cases, Scanlon’s methodology was similar: disseminate as much dirt as you can about the opposing camp in order to distract the media from the substance of the story. In the case of Wigand, Scanlon compiled a lengthy catalogue of allegations—Wigand was a shoplifter, a wife-beater, a drunk—and circulated them in the form of a detailed dossier to print and TV journalists. The Wall Street Journal eventually set out to verify Scanlon’s dossier and found that it was an amalgam of half-truths and unsubstantiated rumors, but for a time at least tobacco’s version of the truth prevailed, and a potent message was sent not only to Wigand but to other would-be whistle-blowers that they had better not come forward. Scanlon also represented Ivana Trump during her divorce from The Donald. “What we did was quite scientific,” he said. By “scientific,” however, he meant something quite different from what a particle physicist would mean. “I mean we sat down with Mrs. Trump, with Ivana early on with her attorneys and talked about what was the specific critical message that she wanted to communicate. I mean, we had a very, very clear position.” ¹⁰ But having a “very, very clear position” is an entirely different thing than seeking the truth, which is what an actual scientist would be doing.

It would be nice to imagine that Scanlon’s fluid attitude toward the truth is some kind of aberration, but it is not. Richard Edelman, his one-time boss at Edelman Worldwide, goes even further. Not only are there different versions of the truth “in this era of exploding media technologies,” Edelman says, “there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.”¹¹

“Marketing is a battle of perception, not products. Truth has no bearing on the issue,” says advertising executive Jack Trout. The role of public relations, he adds, “is to deliver the exact same thing as advertising,” while using PR’s unique ability to provide “third party credibility and reinforce the product’s positioning in multiple media appearances.”¹²

One of the rules of PR is that spin cannot be a demonstrable lie, a point that is driven home in every PR textbook. “Never lie to a reporter” has become an industry mantra. Fortunately, there is a loophole. Spin is the art of appearances, not substance. When there is no truth except what you create for yourself, lies become unnecessary, even irrelevant. To lie is to respect reality enough to falsify it. The practitioners of public relations do not falsify the truth, because they do not believe that it even exists. This worldview, conceived in spin and dedicated to the proposition that all spin is created equal, is spreading like a virus beyond the mediaspindustrial complex that was its original host and has begun to infect the rest of society. “We live in a world where everyone is always battling for the public mind and public approval,” says PR historian Stuart Ewen. “I think the public believes there is no truth, only spin—in part because much of the educated middle class spins for a living.”¹³

You’re Stupid and You Smell Bad

The age of spin has also cheapened the practice of democracy, as Scott Cutlip ruefully admits. A dean emeritus of journalism at the University of Georgia, Cutlip was a longtime PR industry practitioner and one of its leading historians. His own “baptism in PR,” as he put it, began in 1936 when he served as press secretary for a Democratic candidate in the West Virginia gubernatorial primary. “Political PR was startingly simple in those days of small campaign budgets: no TV, no opinion polls, no handlers, no campaign consultants,” he recalls. “Statewide candidates had to rely on speeches in county courthouses or rural schools; handshaking up and down Main Street, and what publicity could be squeezed out of ‘The Speech’ for the local newspapers and possibly an interview on the local radio station. This brought the candidate face to face with voters; he heard their complaints, their needs, their aspirations. In contrast, today the major candidates—President to Governor to Senator—are carefully shielded from contact with the voters save for the customary pressing of flesh along the airport fence or at $1,000 receptions.” Today’s multimillion-dollar campaigns, he notes, are “themed to the latest opinion polls, powered by glitzy TV commercials that convey shadows, not substance, and managed by carpetbagger consultants. . . . Is this progress? Does it serve our democratic process? My answer is no.”¹⁴

The result of all this sophisticated PR is that although Americans still give ritual lip-service to democracy, the concept has lost much of its meaning. In fact, it has become boring and irrelevant in most people’s lives. Our political process functions formally the way we think it should—campaigns happen, votes are cast, someone ends up taking an oath of office—but the ugly truth, as we all know, is that the campaign promises are empty rhetoric, based not on what the candidates believe but on what their expert pollsters have told them we want to hear. If you ask the managers of these ever-more-expensive propaganda campaigns why they have vulgarized the democratic process, they will frequently tell you that the problem is not with them but with the voters, who are too “irrational,” “ignorant,” or “apathetic” to respond to any other kind of appeal. Like Clotaire Rapaille, they have come to the conclusion that there are words they must not use, concepts they dare not utter. Apparently people today are less hungry for serious talk and less capable of comprehending it than the half-literate voters a century and a half ago who turned out in multitudes and sat for hours listening to the debates between Abraham Lincoln and William Douglas.

“The minute you begin to view the public as something that doesn’t operate rationally, your job as a publicist or journalist changes,” Ewen observes. “The pivotal moment was when those who provided the public with its intelligence no longer believed the public had any intelligence.”¹⁵ It is disturbing to see how frequently this ideology, which corrodes democratic values in an acid bath of cynicism, surfaces today among the political insiders who claim to govern in the name of democracy and popular sovereignty. “On issue after issue, the public is belittled as self-indulgent or misinformed, incapable of grasping the larger complexities known to the policymakers and the circles of experts surrounding them,” observed author William Greider in Who Will Tell the People, his 1992 study of the Washington political establishment. “The public’s side of the argument is said to be ‘emotional’ whereas those who govern are said to be making ‘rational’ or ‘responsible’ choices. In the masculine culture of management, ‘emotion’ is assigned a position of weakness whereas ‘facts’ are hard and potent. The reality, of course, is that the ability to define what is or isn’t ‘rational’ is itself loaded with political self-interest. . . . For elites, the politics of governing is seen as a continuing struggle to manage public ‘emotions’ so that they do not overwhelm sound public policy.”¹⁶

Not only are we the people too dim-witted to understand the world, some advisers believe that we are mentally ill, suffering from “chemophobia,” “technophobia,” or some sort of “infantile regression,” to choose just a few of the pseudoscientific terms that have been coined to diagnose our condition. James Cox, a consultant to rendering plants that dispose of the spoiled leftovers from slaughterhouses, came up with the phrase “hypermotivated complainant” (HMC, for short) to characterize people who object to the odors that emanate from his clients’ factories. An HMC, he explained, is “reacting abnormally,” suffering from “a form of Parkinsonian madness.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reached similar conclusions as it worked to overcome “public acceptance barriers” to its disposal plans for sewage sludge. The main problem, it concluded, was “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.” Unlike the manic masses, the EPA in its expert wisdom knows better than to trust people’s noses: “It is difficult to say to what extent odors emanating from sludge may be imagined,” it concluded.

“My child is currently enrolled in Watauga Elementary School,” says Tamara Rich of Ridgetop, Tennessee. “Both his school and our home are approximately 1,000 yards from a sludge dump called ‘Show Me Farms.’ Although the experts will tell you there is no danger, they will also tell you there is no smell. For the past year, more often than not, people gag when they walk out the door. Our school has not been able to open windows or let the children play outside on most days. Of course, my house is now on the market, with little to no hope of selling. Ridgetop citizens seem to be having a high level of strokes, defined as due to unknown toxins by Vanderbilt Hospital. There’s also been a lung malfunction for one child that was also labeled by Vanderbilt as unknown toxins.”

From the point of view of the technocrats and spin doctors, the Tamara Riches of the world are just “hypermotivated complainants,” and their stories of illness, inconvenience, and injury are merely “unfounded anecdotes” that should not be taken seriously. Given the public’s evident inability to smell the difference between sludge and shinola, someone has to do our thinking for us, and that’s where the experts come in.

Spinning the Moral Compass

It would be a mistake to think that the practitioners of public relations are blind to the ethical dilemmas posed by their profession. They talk about them, even joke about them. At a two-day industry trade seminar in 1998 called “Media Management ’98,” PR industry consultant Jim Lukaszewski delivered two workshops, leading off each with slide presentations of cartoons that provided a PR version of gallows humor. “I admire your honesty and integrity, Mr. Wilson, but there’s no room for them in this firm,” went one punch line. In another, a CEO informed his flack that “we’re laying off half our staff and raising executives’ salaries. Announce it to the media and put a good spin on it.”

After the chuckling subsided, Lukaszewski introduced himself as “a specialist in managing other people’s bad news. If there’s a million gallons of toluene under your parking lot, I’m the guy you want to call.”¹⁷ A consultant to Fortune 500 companies, he has worked with senior executives on issues such as product recalls, plant closings, chemical spills, and hazardous-substance exposures. In advertisements in PR industry trade publications, he describes himself as an “expert’s expert.” He helps clients prepare themselves to be interviewed on 60 Minutes or Nightline, or to give testimony in front of congressional hearings. He also teaches communications at New York University and has written numerous articles for publications such as Public Relations Quarterly, PR Reporter, and PR Tactics.

On his website (www.e911.com), Lukaszewski gives examples of some of his recent work. As the following excerpts show, his clients are typically major corporations that have been targeted for criticism by environmental, human rights, labor, and other citizen groups:

• “Provided . . . counsel to a large state-owned petrochemical company in South America related to its efforts to relocate neighboring villages now too close to its growing manufacturing facilities. The strategies developed addressed issues related to litigation, activist intervention by nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups from other areas of the world, anti-government action, the damage caused by cultural intervention, and long-term community-company relationship building.”

• “For senior environmental officer of Canadian natural resource company, provided strategic response recommendations for managing aggressive campaign by U.S. environmental groups against the company and its largest U.S. customer.”

• “Helped prepare executives of major U.S. defense contractor for annual meeting disruptions by anti-nuclear activists.”

• “Prepared directors, senior managers, and locally based executives of national financial cooperative for public demonstrations against farm foreclosures.”

• “Guided Fortune 500 toy manufacturer through attack by largest U.S. animal rights organization over the issue of animal testing.”

• “Developed specific, targeted, pro-active face-to-face communications response to noise, odor, and quality-of-life complaints by neighbors of a mid-size manufacturing facility.”

• “Counseled senior executives of major U.S. retailer/merchandiser facing very public action by a national and international labor organizations protesting manufacturing practices in Central and South America.”

In person Jim Lukaszewski is amiable, unflappable, and seemingly sincere. A member of the Public Relations Society of America Board of Ethics, he comes across as something of a moralizer within the industry, arguing that ethical behavior is the only way to avoid bad publicity in today’s world. Where does the “ethical” part come in? At Media Relations ’98, Lukaszewski explained that he advises clients “to resolve the situation with the activist. It’s unavoidable. We’re eventually going to have to sit down with them. Let’s do it today. We’re probably not going to make them happy, but we can probably resolve it down to where they don’t have a case. . . . Honorable action, on the ground, is the crucial ingredient, not media coverage. . . . If you’re a crook, if you’re a slimeball, then the media strategies I recommend will not work.”

These comments came during a provocatively titled panel discussion on the subject “When the Press Attacks: Should You Stonewall or Cooperate?” Debating Larry Kamer of Kamer/Singer Associates, Lukaszewski took the side in favor of stonewalling. “Respond to the media only when your message goals are served,” he said. “There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says you have to call the press back.” In order to communicate effectively in crisis situations, he advised that people should stick to scripted messages or shut up altogether. To keep friends and relatives quiet as well, he joked, “duct tape is very handy.”¹⁸

The following day, Lukaszewski’s message seemed at first to be diametrically reversed. Speaking at a workshop titled “Face the Press,” he argued that PR strategy should be based on four principles: (1) “openness and accessibility”; (2) “truthfulness . . . unconditional honesty is the only policy”; (3) “responsiveness . . . recognition that any constituent concern is by definition legitimate”; and (4) “no secrets. Our behavior, our attitudes, our plans, even our strategic discusions must be unchallengeable, unassailable, and positive.”¹⁹

How do you achieve openness and accessibility while stonewalling? Lukaszewski’s recipe consists of first making a list of the ten or so questions that a client most dreads answering, plus another list of questions that the client wishes someone would ask. Then he writes out and rehearses scripted answers to each question.

During actual interviews, he advises clients to use “bridging language” so that their answers actually respond to their preferred rather than the feared list of questions. He has developed a number of specific phrases that can accomplish this bridging function:

• “I have heard that too, but the real focus should be . . .”

• “Opinions can differ, but I believe . . .”

• “Here’s an even tougher question . . .”

(The question you wish they’d ask is “tougher”? This must be some strange new definition of “unconditional honesty” that isn’t in the dictionary.)

Lukaszewski also puts a tight time limit on interviews, allowing reporters at most half an hour to interview his clients. Otherwise, he fears, reporters will start to ask “off-the-wall questions” that don’t fit the script. He advises clients to repeat all of their messages three times during the course of an interview, so that in reality reporters get only about 10 minutes’ worth of quotable material. To limit things still further, he has a standing rule that interviews should end as soon as a reporter hesitates for more than (literally) seven seconds between questions. To emphasize this point to the audience at Media Relations ’98, he counted deliberately from one to seven. “See? That’s plenty of time,” he said. “If they pause any longer than that, you shake their hand and say, ‘Thank you for coming.’ Here too, you want to use positive language.”²⁰

Lukaszewski even advises his clients who are being interviewed to give reporters printed versions of their scripted answers, which he calls “communications objectives.” “It’s amazing how accurate the reporters become when you give it to them,” he said. “The communications objectives become the core of the story, generally.”²¹

Sweetspeak

Pat Farrell, a PR executive at Ralcorp Holding, the human-feed company spin-off from Ralston Purina, understands and shares Lukaszewski’s passion to eradicate candor. Farrell’s résumé includes more than two decades “managing issues” like “restructuring, reengineering, downsizing, rightsizing, capital expansion, product improvement, technological advances, synergy, long-term plans, short-term outlook, new product introductions, cost-reduction initiatives, strategic alternatives, and renewed focus.” He has helped employers weather food tamperings, firings, and two fatal shootings in the workplace—“not at the same time,” he notes.

Speaking at a November 1996 PR trade conference, Farrell described his experience managing the image of chemical giant Monsanto’s artificial sweetener, aspartame (trade name Nutrasweet). The product was having a hard time winning public acceptance, he said, because of “emotional and seemingly illogical responses” from the public. “This was important to our company because we were seeking to grow our franchise outside the accepted context of diet,” he explained. In order to understand the public’s resistance, Monsanto hired a psychologist. Farrell did not mention the psychologist’s name, but his advice was remarkably similar to Clotaire Rapaille’s suggestions for genetically engineered foods.

For years, Farrell said, the company had described Nutrasweet as “an artificial sweetener.” But the word “artificial,” it realized, “conjures up cancer, headaches, rat studies, laboratories, dueling scientists, allergies, epilepsy, you name it, none of which are very appetizing.” Referring to Nutrasweet as a “sugar substitute” was also a mistake. “People don’t like it when you claim to be like sugar,” Farrell said, because “memories of sugar take them back to their childhood, a simpler time when there was less to worry about and sugar was a sweet treat, a reward. . . . Our own words were defining our product in a manner that created thoughts of being unnatural, unsafe, unsweet and led people to conclude that we believed Nutrasweet was better than the most beloved food product in history.” The psychologist also advised them that “the American public admires and takes great pride in discoveries and innovations gained through hard work.”

Armed with this knowledge, Nutrasweet created “sweetspeak.” According to Farrell, “Words such as ‘substitute,’ ‘artificial,’ ‘chemical,’ ‘laboratory, ’ ‘scientist’ were removed forever from our lexicon and replaced with words such as ‘discovered,’ ‘choice,’ ‘variety,’ ‘unique,’ ‘different,’ ‘new taste.’ ”

Using sweetspeak, Farrell gave an example of how Nutrasweet now responds to the question: How do you know aspartame is safe? The answer: “Aspartame was discovered nearly 30 years ago. Since that time, hundreds of people in our company and elsewhere around the world—people with families like yours and mine—have devoted themselves to making sure consumers can be confident of their choice when they choose the taste of Nutrasweet. People have looked at our ingredient in every which way possible, and we encourage that because we want consumers to be comfortable when they choose Nutrasweet. That has been our commitment for nearly three decades, and it will always be our commitment. You can feel confident choosing products that contain our ingredient, but if you don’t, you have other choices.”

Euphemisms are not always enough, however. Sometimes, says Washington-based PR professional Jeff Prince, a public relations expert needs to speak sweetly and carry a big stick. A veteran of food wars fought by the National Restaurant Association, Prince spoke at the same 1996 trade conference as Farrell and described his years battling the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a media-savvy nonprofit organization that warns consumers about risks from sugar- and fat-laden foods. CSPI is the organization that documented the high fat content in movie theater popcorn and once garnered headlines by calling fettuccine Alfredo “a heart attack on a plate.” In recent years, it has campaigned heavily to inform the public about bowel discomfort and other health problems associated with Olestra, the “nonfattening fat” developed by Procter & Gamble and used in Wow brand potato chips.

Prince described CSPI as “the megabeast of science hype.” He pointed with particular alarm to a CSPI study which found that a mushroom cheeseburger with fried onion rings at TGI Friday’s contains about 1,800 calories and the same amount of fat as five strips of bacon, four chocolate frosted donuts, three slices of pepperoni pizza, two banana splits, and a Big Mac combined.²² “The restaurant industry needs to be concerned,” Prince said, because eventually CSPI’s nutritional information will lead to “a decline in consumer confidence, a growing sense of guilt about eating out.”

The National Restaurant Association has developed three different themes to counteract the CSPI message. First and foremost, it has stressed “variety and choice—arguing that studies show that only 31 percent of restaurant-goers are not concerned about nutrition when they eat out, and restaurants cater to customers by offering low fat items. The second thing the restaurants have pushed, of course, is the ‘food police’ line, and they push that as far as possible,” Prince said. “The idea is simply that people . . . don’t need a third party interfering and making those choices for them especially when this third party seems inhuman, inflexible, puritanical, rigid.” The third tactic employed by the restaurant industry is to raise questions about CSPI’s science, its accuracy, and its procedures. So far this has been underutilized, Prince said, urging “a concerted effort to make the case against CSPI’s science and to raise the whole question of how and when and where you report scientific studies. . . . Raise the question of proper use of science and you begin to chip away, as you do that, at CPSI’s credibility.”

Rather than attacking CSPI directly, however, he recommended that interested companies employ the third party technique. “If it is the National Restaurant Association and Procter & Gamble out there making the case, nobody is going to believe them. Their ox has been gored. . . . What I am talking about is doing briefings behind the scenes to educate the media, and you would have to distance it from interested companies . . . and you would have to get the scientific community involved,” he said. “The whole project would, I think, require considerable scientific expertise, it would require considerable skill in media management and almost infinite tact, but through a concerted effort I think it could be done, because the press no longer wants to believe CSPI. They would like to find an excuse not to carry those stories, but we haven’t given it to them yet. It may well be a job for some currently underfunded organization, or perhaps for some new organization, but it seems to me the food industry ought to get together and get this job done soon. . . . We would need well written objective backgrounders. We would need expert testimony, perhaps even a panel. We would need to win the support of media critics such as Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. . . . We’d need their support and I think we could get it.”

In the months immediately following Prince’s remarks, CSPI indeed came under intensified attack from conservative think tanks, several of which receive heavy funding from Procter & Gamble. There is no paper trail to prove that this was a coordinated campaign, but to CSPI head Michael Jacobson at least, it seemed like more than mere coincidence. “The whole operation reeks of behind-the-scenes manipulation,” he said. Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution wrote a blistering op-ed, defending Olestra and attacking CSPI, that ran in the Wall Street Journal and was subsequently republished by the Washington Times and the Cincinnati Inquirer. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, which received about $125,000 from Procter & Gamble’s foundation, wrote a column for USA Today that accused the CSPI of attempting to intimidate the FDA into blocking Olestra and called the Center a “national nanny.” The Detroit News published a column by two writers affiliated with the industry-funded organization Consumer Alert, who characterized the CSPI as “food police” offering “the uninvited opinion of nutrition activists.” Another article, titled “Attack of the Food Police,” ran in Reader’s Digest, which counts Procter & Gamble as its third-largest advertiser. In the New Republic, CSPI was accused of “using sloppy data” and “misleading” the public by Stephen Glass, a New Republic assistant editor who had previously worked for Policy Review, the journal of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. (When it comes to misleading the public, Glass turned out to be in a class by himself. His later firing from The New Republic became one of journalism’s most embarrassing scandals, after it was discovered that he had habitually fabricated information and that some of his stories were in fact completely fictional.)^a

Perhaps the most interesting attack on CSPI came from an industry-funded group calling itself The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). After CSPI released a study about high levels of fat and cholesterol in breakfast foods, TASSC issued a news release via PR Newswire titled “Much Ado About Nothing—Sound Science Group Responds to the Latest CSPI Scare.” Rather than disputing CSPI for being wrong, however, the news release attacked the study on the grounds that its conclusions were too obviously correct to deserve mention. “The CSPI Sherlocks have discovered that eggs, sausage and butter contain fat and can push up cholesterol. So what?” the news release scoffed.

“This is just another example of how CSPI cloaks common sense with a mantle of ‘science’ for no purpose other than garnering free publicity from the all-too-willing news media,” complained TASSC director Garrey Carruthers. “It’s time for everyone to say no to this junk science.”²³

What is interesting about this line of attack is the way it recasts the definition of science itself. For TASSC, the distinction between “sound science” and “junk science” hinged not on the empirical question of whether facts are true, but on the PR question of how the facts might appear. In the empiricist tradition, scientists do not attack their colleagues for repeating widely accepted facts. If a physicist says that gravity exists, you would not expect other physicists to accuse him of “junk science.” TASSC’s rejoinder, however, was not intended to raise factual questions about the CSPI study but rather to persuade journalists that the study was not newsworthy. People already know how much fat is in the food they eat, the argument went, so why make a big deal out of it? “There’s no news,” said Michael W. Pariza, a food industry-funded researcher at the University of Wisconsin and TASSC adviser who was quoted in their news release.²⁴

The following year, CSPI released another study. This one surveyed 203 registered dietitians to assess their ability to estimate the nutritional content of restaurant meals. “Trained dietitians underestimated the calorie content of five restaurant meals by an average of 37 percent and the fat content by 49 percent,” the study reported. “The survey revealed that not even one of the 203 dietitians surveyed estimated the calorie or fat content of all meals within 20 percent of the correct values.”

“The survey proves that even nutrition professionals can’t estimate accurately the calorie and fat content of restaurant meals,” said Dr. Marion Nestle, who chairs New York University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies and participated with CSPI in conducting the study. “If nutritionists can’t tell what’s in restaurant meals, consumers certainly can’t,” Nestle added. “Huge restaurant meals are one of the reasons why so many Americans are gaining weight.”

Indeed, a June 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that more than half of U.S. adults and more than 20 percent of children are overweight. “We are facing a real epidemic of obesity,” said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “All segments of the population are getting fatter, but the highest increase is among the youngest ages. . . . There is no worse harbinger of what’s to come.”

“It’s so subtle,” said Dr. Robert Kushner, a clinical nutrition researcher. “People aren’t even aware of what’s happening to them. Tongue in cheek, I say it’s an alien plot to fatten up Americans. . . . I believe you can liken the restaurant industry to the tobacco industry in the 1960s. The industry’s attitude is, we are responding to what the public wants. . . . Most Americans struggle with estimating how much food they consume. You would get 100 different guesses from 100 people if you put a plate of food in front of them.”²⁵

But so what? Apparently it’s our choice. And besides, it’s not news. Have you tried those Wow brand potato chips?