[pf] Trust Us, We're Experts!

by Tom Wheeler

18 December 2000 22:22 UTC

Given the recent discussions on PF, I thought I'd let you know about a new
book that's coming out in a couple of weeks. I've read the galleys and it's
another fine piece of investigative journalism from Stauber and Rampton. -
Tom

http://www.prwatch.org/books/experts.html#reviews

Trust Us, We're Experts:
How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future

by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Publisher: Tarcher/Putnam
Available January 2, 2001

We count on the experts. We count on them to tell us who to vote for, what
to eat, how to raise our children. We watch them on TV, listen to them on
the radio, read their opinions in magazine and newspaper articles and
letters to the editor. We trust them to tell us what to think, because
there's too much information out there and not enough hours in a day to sort
it all out.

We should stop trusting them right this second.

In their new book, Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science
and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber offer a
chilling exposé on the manufacturing of "independent experts." Public
relations firms and corporations have seized upon a slick new way of getting
you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral "third
party," like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog
group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral.
They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you
believe what they have to say--preferably in an "objective" format like a
news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid
handsomely for their "opinions."

For example:

You think that nonprofit organizations just give away their stamps of
approval on products? Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $600,000 to the American
Heart Association for the right to display AHA's name and logo in ads for
its cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol. Smith Kline Beecham paid the
American Cancer Society $1 million for the right to use its logo in ads for
Beecham's Nicoderm CQ and Nicorette anti-smoking ads.

You think that you're witnessing a spontaneous public debate over a national
issue? When the Justice Department began antitrust investigations of the
Microsoft Corporation in 1998, Microsoft's public relations firm countered
with a plan to plant pro-Microsoft articles, letters to the editor, and
opinion pieces all across the nation, crafted by professional media handlers
but meant to be perceived as off-the-cuff, heart-felt testimonials by
"people out there."

You think that a study out of a prestigious university is completely
unbiased? In 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. Former U.S. Treasury
Secretary Lloyd Bentsen cited the study in a Washington Times column and
advocated for changes in federal law to make it harder for consumers to file
for bankruptcy relief. 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; that the study itself was
produced with a $100,000 grant from Visa USA and MasterCard International
Inc.; and that Bentsen himself had been hired to work as a credit-industry
lobbyist.

You think that all grassroots organizations are truly grassroots? In 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." Their cause: A campaign against plastic milk
bottles. It turned out that the group's spokesperson, Alana Maloney, was in
truth a woman named Janet Rundle, the business partner of a man who did P.R.
for the Association of Liquidpaperboard Carton Manufacturers-the makers of
paper milk cartons.

You think that if a scientist says so, it must be true? In the early 1990s,
tobacco companies secretly paid thirteen scientists a total of $156,000 to
write a few letters to influential medical journals. One biostatistician
received $10,000 for writing a single, eight-paragraph letter that was
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A cancer
researcher received $20,137 for writing four letters and an opinion piece to
the Lancet, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and the Wall
Street Journal. Nice work if you can get it, especially since the scientists
didn't even have to write the letters themselves. Two tobacco-industry law
firms were available to do the actual drafting and editing.

Rampton and Stauber reveal many more such examples of "perception
management"--all of them orchestrated to make us buy or believe whatever the
"independent expert" is pushing. They also explore the underlying
assumptions about human psychology--e.g., "the public must be manipulated
for its own good"--that make this kind of subliminal hard-sell possible.

Destined to be hated by P.R. firms and corporations everywhere, Trust Us,
We're Experts is an eye-opening account of how these entities reshape our
reality, manufacture our consent, get us to part with our money, even change
our lives. A whole new spin on spin, it will forever alter the way we look
at news, information, and the people who serve it up to us.


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"Our first work must be the annihilation of everything
as it now exists."  -  Mikhail Bakunin

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debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own."  -  No.6