Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  Mongoven claims to be “outraged” by the charge that any of these information-gathering practices are unethical. “We always identify exactly who we are,” he says. “In every case, we had identified ourselves as a Washington consulting firm. I don’t think that makes you a spy.”

  The people his company snoops on, however, think differently. Australian writer and environmental activist Bob Burton took particular offense to a misleading MBD “survey” that he received in the mail. The accompanying cover letter, written by Jack Mongoven’s son Bart, sought Burton’s “assistance in a significant research undertaking” to “promote improved understanding and cooperation between major businesses and consumer- and environmentally-oriented interests throughout Asia and the world. . . . We would be very appreciative if you or a colleague could send us via phone, fax or mail some information about your organization. We obviously would welcome any materials that you believe would give us an accurate picture of your group—its basic structure, issue concerns, activities (past, present and future), alliances and goals. Perhaps you would be able to include samples of any newsletters or other publications your group publishes. In addition, we would be grateful for any thoughts you may have regarding the overall situation in your country and in Asia with respect to the issues you care about.” This information would be used, Mongoven promised, to help “corporate decision makers . . . develop a better appreciation of the public interest movement.”18

  Whatever gratitude MBD claims to feel when activists cooperate by answering its questions, however, it doesn’t express that appreciation in any meaningful way, such as sending them copies of the reports it writes about them. Those reports are stamped confidential and sold only to MBD’s clients.

  Defending the Free Enterprise System

  Like many people in public relations, Jack Mongoven began his career as a journalist. He later moved into politics as a Republican party operative, serving as director of press relations for the Republican National Committee and in advisory roles to the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan presidencies. His work as an anti-activist began in 1981 when he was hired to help the Nestlé corporation cope with a massive protest against its infant-formula marketing practices in Third World countries. Nestlé was the world’s largest seller of infant formula, which provided a profitable outlet for surplus milk produced in Europe and the United States. Using advertisements, brochures, and free product samples distributed in hospitals, Nestlé and other multinational corporations successfully persuaded many Third World mothers to switch from breast-feeding to formula. The advertisements argued that use of store-bought infant formula was supported by medical experts, that it was more scientific, that it was healthier for babies, and that mothers who cared about their children would use modern formula instead of the old-fashioned breast method.

  What Nestlé’s promotional materials failed to mention was that powdered infant formula could be fatal to children in the Third World, where people often lack the clean drinking water needed to dilute it, let alone facilities to sterilize feeding utensils. Cecily Williams, a pediatric physician in Africa, was one of the first to identify the problematic nature of the practice. After “seeing day after day this massacre of the infants by unsuitable feeding,” she stated bluntly that “misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition, and that these deaths should be regarded as murder.”

  Nestlé responded with a broadside accusing its critics of “an indirect attack on the free world’s economic system.” As vice president of the Nestlé Coordination Center for Nutrition (NCCN), Jack Mongoven began collecting files on the various churches, student groups, trade unions, women’s organizations, and health workers who had joined a boycott of Nestlé products. The strategy behind this surveillance, according to NCCN president Rafael Pagan, was “to separate the fanatic activist leaders—people who deny that wealth-creating institutions have any legitimate role to play in helping the Third World to develop—from the overwhelming majority of their followers.”

  This notion that corporate critics are dupes of “fanatic activists” has served as the prototype for Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin’s subsequent work for other corporate clients.

  • In 1987, Mongoven and Pagan developed a plan, code-named the “Neptune Strategy,” to neutralize boycotts of Shell Oil related to its business activities in apartheid South Africa. The plan involved creation of a third-party group called the Coalition on Southern Africa, which countered calls for Shell to divest its South African holdings by talking of ambitious plans to promote education and training of South African blacks and develop black-black business links between South Africa and the United States. In reality, COSA was a deceptive paper front group with no resources to carry out these goals.19

  • In the 1990s, MBD gathered intelligence for the Monsanto Company and Philip Morris’s cheese division at Kraft General Foods aimed at identifying critics of Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.

  • In the 1990s, it developed PR plans for chemical and meat-industry clients anxious to counter the work of consumer and environmental groups that were raising concerns about the harmful effects of dioxin and other chlorine-based chemicals.

  • In 1997, MBD’s work became the focus of a minor scandal when agricultural journalist Alan Guebert discovered that the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) had paid MBD some $48,000 to investigate groups, including the National Farmers Union, the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, the Center for Rural Affairs, the Land Stewardship Project, and the Missouri Rural Crisis Center. NPPC is a quasigovernmental organization that gets most of its funding in “pork checkoff funds” that farmers are required to pay when they market their pigs, in return for which the NPPC is supposed to represent the interests of farmers by helping to promote pork. However, $24 million of the $45 million in checkoff funds comes from America’s largest 40 producers, and it is the large producers who really call the shots within the organization. The larger corporate producers have been building massive factory farms that not only pollute the environment with noxious odors and manure runoffs, but also threaten the livelihood of many of the smaller, independent hog farmers among the NPPC’s 80,000 members. MBD’s report to the NPPC was aimed at advising it on how to counter “agricultural activist groups” that oppose construction of new corporate hog facilities. These activist groups were in fact defenders of small family farms, and their farmer-members were understandably unhappy to learn that their own trade organization had hired a PR firm to investigate them .20

  What we know about MBD comes primarily through two sources: the company’s literature, which it distributes sometimes at industry meetings, and leaked internal documents provided by whistle-blowers. The “Neptune Strategy,” as well as MBD’s work for Philip Morris and Monsanto on bovine growth hormone, its work on the chlorine issue, and its work for the National Pork Producers Council, are each examples of MBD activities that came to light when persons working for the company or one of its clients chose to provide copies of internal MBD documents to outside groups that were the target of its surveillance activities.

  There are, of course, certain limitations to the conclusions that can be drawn from looking at leaked documents. MBD’s internal memoranda provide snapshots into moments of time and pieces of advice provided by an influential adviser to major corporations, but they do not reveal which specific suggestion was followed and which was ignored. Nevertheless, consistent patterns and themes recur in MBD’s advice to each client, themes which are also consistent with the advice that Ketchum provided to Clorox and with the crisis management strategies that PR firms have developed for other companies dealing with environmental and health issues. Taken together, the evidence suggests that MBD’s advice is in keeping with the standard practices of PR crisis management.

  In 1996, a whistle-blower leaked two documents produced by MBD to map out “the battlefield for chlorine” on behalf of the Chlorine Chemistry Council (CCC), a chemical industry t
rade association. The earliest of the two documents was titled “Activist Update: Chlorine” and was dated May 18, 1994. The second, titled “Re: Activist Report for August” and dated September 7, 1994, included “a list of all the recommendations we provided CCC in August as to how best to counter the activists. The main recommendation—to mobilize science against the precautionary principle—still applies and dovetails with the long-range objectives regarding sound risk assessment.” These documents provide only a fragmentary picture of MBD’s work for the Chlorine Chemistry Council. Nevertheless, they provide some indication of the scope of the chemical industry’s enemy list, and the strategies that it is willing to pursue in order to defeat them.

  Mongoven’s correspondence with the CCC also reveals a corporate mind-set that is overtly hostile to the environmental, consumer, and women’s health groups that it monitors. The groups mentioned in its 1994 reports to the CCC included the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Ralph Nader’s U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), the Clean Water Network of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental research group called INFORM, a St. Louis environmental group called the Gateway Green Alliance, the Women’s Economic and Development Organization (WEDO), and the National Wildlife Federation. In the May memorandum, Mongoven alerted the CCC about the Clean Water Network’s warning that “chlorine causes birth defects, reproductive problems, cancer and other human- and animal-health problems.” In response to these concerns, Mongoven stated, the Clean Water Network “is expected to expand its assault . . . to press attacks on other areas of chlorine chemistry—product-by-product, step-by-step, application-by-application.” 21

  Mongoven expressed particular alarm at the 1994 publication of Fertility on the Brink by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), a group that he described as “highly respected by mainstream environmentalists, conservationists, industry and government.” Like the Clean Water Network, he noted, Fertility on the Brink “attributes fertility and reproductive problems to exposure to chlorine-based chemicals. The report depicts widespread and devastating effects on the reproductive, endocrine and immune systems of humans and animals as a result of exposure to an environment permeated with chlorine-based chemicals.”22

  Rather than express concern about these “complex and severe effects,” however, MBD worried about the chlorine industry’s image. Mongoven accused the NWF of using “the issue of fertility as a vehicle to play on the emotions of the public and its concern for future generations.” Moreover, he added, “anti-chlorine activists are also using children and their need for protection to compel stricter regulation of toxic substances. This tactic is very effective because children-based appeals touch the public’s protective nature for a vulnerable group. . . . This tactic also is effective in appealing to an additional segment of the public which has yet to be activated in the debate, particularly parents. . . . The tone of the debate will focus on the needs of children and insist that all safeguards be taken to ensure their safety in development. For most substances, the tolerances of babies and children, which includes fetal development, are obviously much lower than in the general adult population. Thus, ‘environmental policies based on health standards that address the special needs of children’ would reduce all exposure standards to the lowest possible levels.”23

  Most people, of course, regard “concern for future generations” and “the special needs of children” as something more than mere emotionalism. For MBD, however, such concerns are not only irrational but a threat to science itself. “Anti-chlorine groups will probably devise tactics which promote the adoption of the ‘precautionary principle,’ ” Mongoven warned, although “the principle, which shifts the burden of establishing a chemical’s safety to industry, is unlikely to be adopted. The debate over the ‘precautionary principle’ will elevate the dioxin issue to a more conspicuous level. . . . This is a critical time for the future of risk assessment as a tool of analysis. The industry must identify the implications posed by the ‘precautionary principle’ and assist the public in understanding the damage it inflicts on the role of science in modern development and production.”24

  The Chlorine War

  Jack Mongoven’s preoccupation with the precautionary principle is a reaction to an emerging body of controversial science regarding a class of chlorine-based chemicals—including DDT, dioxin, PCBs, and many others—that have come to be labeled “hormone mimickers” or “endocrine disruptors.” Prior to the 1990s, much of the debate over these chemicals was shaped by the legacy of science writer Rachel Carson and her 1962 environmental classic, Silent Spring. For years, concerns about these chemicals focused on whether they could cause cancer, and indeed there is a substantial body of scientific evidence suggesting that this is the case. The focus on cancer, however, has tended to obscure the fact that these chemicals also interfere with the hormonal messaging systems that control body development during fetal growth and infancy, thereby affecting growth, the reproductive and immune systems, and even personality, intelligence, and behavior. Although the science surrounding the “endocrine disruptor hypothesis” is still incomplete, leading researchers and scientific bodies have called for precautionary action now to avert the threat of serious harm to the environment and human health.

  The role of DDT as a hormone mimic was observed as early as 1950, when researchers noticed that roosters exposed to DDT failed to develop male characteristics. DES was synthesized in 1938 by British scientist Edward Charles Dodds. At the time of its discovery, it was hailed by leading researchers and gynecologists as a synthetic form of estrogen, the female sex hormone. Doctors began prescribing DES for women with problem pregnancies, and eventually 4.8 million pregnant women worldwide would use the synthetic hormone—a massive and irresponsible experiment, as it turned out. In 1971, DES was linked to vaginal cancer in daughters whose mothers had taken the drug during the first three months of pregnancy. Subsequent research would also link DES with reproductive problems, including deformities of the genitals.

  It was the hormonal effects of yet another chlorine-based chemical—dioxin—that served as the catalyst for the Chlorine Chemistry Council’s concerns and its decision to hire Jack Mongoven. Dioxin has been a subject of fierce debate since the 1970s, when it earned a reputation as one of the most toxic substances known to humans.25 Formed as an unintentional by-product of many industrial processes such as waste incineration, chemical manufacturing, and pulp and paper bleaching, dioxin tends to bioaccumulate in fatty tissue, which means that it can be found at elevated concentrations in foods such as meat and dairy products. Dioxin was a toxic component of the Vietnam war defoliant Agent Orange, was found at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, and was the basis for evacuations at Times Beach, Missouri, and Seveso, Italy. In 1985, an EPA risk assessment found that dioxin causes cancer in animals and probably in humans as well.

  In 1985 and again in 1988, the EPA conducted risk assessments of dioxin, concluding in both cases that it should be classified as a probable human carcinogen. However, scientific data regarding its effect on humans has been limited, in part because scientists have not been certain how much dioxin people are exposed to, and also because of the difficulty in separating dioxin’s effects from the confounding effects of the many other chemicals to which people are routinely exposed. In 1990, a group of scientists representing both industry and the public health/environmental communities met at a conference, held at the Banbury Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, which called for a new and more comprehensive EPA risk assessment. For industry, the hope was that a new risk assessment would conclude that the risks from dioxin were lower than previously estimated. The Chlorine Institute went so far as to have Edelman, its PR firm, issue a news release which falsely claimed that the Banbury Conference had reached a “consensus” to the effect that “dioxin is much less toxic to humans than originally believed.”26 Although this claim was later retracted following angry complaints by several conference participants, EPA admin
istrator Bill Reilly stated publicly that dioxin seemed less dangerous than previously thought. With industry’s blessing, he began a third EPA assessment of dioxin. Unfortunately for industry, the results of that reassessment ran contrary to expectations.

  EPA’s reassessment took almost four years and cost $4 million. In addition to dioxin, the agency also considered a range of “dioxin-like” chemicals such as PCBs that are known to produce similar effects. It commissioned separate scientists from both inside and outside the agency to draft each chapter of the study, which ultimately involved the participation of about 100 scientists, including non-EPA scientists who peer-reviewed each chapter. In 1994, a six-volume, 2,000-page draft report was released and opened to public comment. It concluded that in addition to promoting cancer, dioxin and a number of other similar chemicals can disrupt the endocrine, reproductive, and immune systems, and that they can do this to a developing fetus at extremely low levels of exposure. Owing to pressures from industry, however, the draft report has become such a hot potato that EPA staff has become reluctant to talk about it publicly. As of late 2000 (the date of this writing), the finalized risk assessment remains unpublished.