Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  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? Becaus
e “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 Div
ision 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?