S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech

Cold open – Schmertz: [00:08:13] Well, it seems to me that the term spin doctor is something the press has manufactured to to really deal with the problem the press has.

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This is Herb Schmertz, the ultimate spin doctor we met in our last episode. He's complaining about his favorite target: the press

Schmertz: The press by and large would like to control the agenda and the terms of reference of all debates, and they'd like to decide what information they're going to deliver, what information they're not going to deliver

If you haven’t listened to episode 4, go back and do that, this is part two of our Herb Schmertz episode.

I’m Amy Westervelt and this is Drilled, Season 3, the Mad Men of Climate Denial.

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It seems almost unimaginable now, but before Herb Schmertz it wasn’t really okay for corporate executives to be assholes to journalists. The prevailing idea was that If you wanted the media to cover you positively, you had to be nice to journalists. You had to build a friendly relationship with them. That was one of Ivy Lee’s big rules, and it didn’t change for almost 50 years. Because it had mostly worked. It had tamped down on muckraking and given companies a way in to the press.

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But then came the 60s and 70s, Vietnam and Watergate, and suddenly everyone was suspicious of those in power again. And the perfect spin doctor for such a time was not a genteel southerner who could smooth talk a story, like Ivy Lee, it was a sharp litigator with an even sharper tongue, Herb Schmertz. He’d been a labor lawyer for years before getting into P.R., so he wasn’t afraid of a little confrontation. And he quickly found it to be an effective tool when dealing with the press, particularly at a time when Americans were really pissed at oil companies over ongoing shortages. And Mobil, as the second-largest oil company at the time, was a prime target.

[news clip – start clip, then after the guy is cursing, break in:

This is the owner of a Mobil station in New Jersey who has HAD IT with people getting pissed at him for his station never having enough gas.

[rest of news clip]

If he didn’t like how Mobil was depicted in a story, Schmertz would accuse the journalist or the TV channel or newspaper of being biased, unfair, not giving both sides of the story. And because they weren’t really used to publicists or company spokespeople doing this, in most cases, they would overcorrect in his favor. In a lot of ways, Schmertz is the guy who brought false equivalence into journalism. False equivalence is the idea that every view has an equally valid opposing view. Climate change coverage was RIDDLED with this crap for years—every climate story had to include a legit scientist and the head of some rightwing think tank who thought climate change was a hoax. That way it was “balanced.” Newspapers finally ditched this approach in the past decade, but cable news has just come around in the last couple years. In 2018, on Meet the Press’s big climate episode, for example, Chuck Todd had on a spokesperson from the American Enterprise Institute, a known industry-funded front group that regularly pushes climate science denial. So you had climate scientists and policy experts, and then this lady:

[Meet the Press clip]

Equating this woman’s opinion with the actual research of climate scientists is a perfect example of false equivalence. And it’s something Schmertz pushed for. He watched for every single mention of Mobil in the news and if it was critical at all, he went after the journalist and accused them of bias. Here he is explaining that strategy to Charlie Rose, a few years after he’d left Mobil and started his own PR firm:

[00:15:48] You made your reputation attacking the press.

Well, in part, [00:15:52][4.4]

Schmertz believed so much in the strategy of attacking the press that he wrote a whole book about it. But it wasn’t just because he liked confrontation.

[00:16:45] But in terms of attacking them, it was it was a tactic to get them to present my point of view or my decision

when you were representing Mobil, when you were senior vice president

And it was it was a tactic to get them to present Mobile's point of view by attacking them on on the accuracy and reliability.

Charlie Rose: You had a public relations problem because oil companies public relations problem lately.

Schmertz: Oh yeah, I mean, that was the worst. [00:17:05][20.6]

It didn’t always work, of course. There’s a hilarious passage in Schmertz’s book Goodbye to the Low Profile: The Art of Creative Confrontation about a meeting he demanded with the Wall Street Journal editors in 1984. He planned to cover a long list of examples of how they’ve treated Mobil unfairly. But he gets to the very first bullet point and executive editor Frederick Taylor says, “Everything you’re saying is bullshit.”

A small win for journalism! But then Schmertz retaliates. He pulls all advertising from the Journal. He takes them off his press release list. He refuses to let anyone at Mobil speak to reporters there. He won’t even give them access to basic numbers. He won’t give them access to earnings reports. Word spreads throughout the media. By 1986, Taylor was retired and Mobil was working with the Wall Street Journal again.

Schmertz was fiery and petty that way. But for all his fighting with journalists, he also saw their value. In 1970, Schmertz convinced Mobil to underwrite a new program on PBS:

[Masterpiece]

[fade Masterpiece under] I found a transcript of an interview with Schmertz from 1991, it was part of the research for a book about Masterpiece Theatre. And there’s this whole part where Schmertz talks about how Alistair Cooke, the guy you just heard there, the host of Masterpiece, was embarrassed to be associated with Mobil. Schmertz says “I think that he did not feel comfortable being associated with Mobil. And he went to great lengths to avoid being associated beyond what was necessary for the show. He didn't want to appear to be flacking for an oil company.”

But it’s clear that Schmertz is kind of hurt by this, that he respected this guy. He talks about him as having style and class. And then he talks about why he always wanted journalists hosting the shows Mobil produced. Quote: “I think actors don't really have as much credibility as journalists when they’re talking about these kinds of shows.”

[bring Masterpiece back up for a bit]

What’s also clear in that interview, is that Schmertz was very hands-on with his work at PBS. He had script approval, casting approval, and was one of, if not, the key decision makers on which shows ran during Masterpiece. In fact it was Schmertz who pushed them to air Upstairs Downstairs, which the PBS team thought was too “commercial.” It went on to be Masterpiece’s biggest hit.

[Upstairs Downstairs]

By the 1980s, Mobil was spending $3 million a year on PBS programming, and Schmertz was one of the most important men in British television. In a weird way, you probably have him to thank for Downton Abbey. Somehow he knew that the people he wanted to reach–the influencers–would fall hard for British TV. He even specifically told the writers not to try to write for an American audience.

In 1982 Mobil ran a survey and found that 31 percent of upscale Americans surveyed chose Mobil gas; second place by a longshot was Exxon at 16 percent. It was all part of what Schmertz called affinity-of-purpose marketing. THIS is why Schmertz kept sticking with PBS … it reached the precise audience he was after. Well that, and it was cheap. He talked a lot about what a bargain it was… kind of a bummer for PBS, which at this point in time was taking so much money from oil companies–not just Mobil but also Exxon, Texaco and Chevron–that people were referring to it as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System”. The oil companies, though, were all getting a big reputational boost, and that was the point.

[SchmertzAffinity2] [00:02:44] There are those that argue that this practice amounts to pseudo philanthropy in which corporations and the public are under a false impression that something is actually given being given away for humanitarian purposes.

That’s Schmertz on a panel about “corporate philanthropy” and whether it actually exists. Spoiler alert: companies only spend money on stuff that helps their bottom line.

[Schmertz Affinity 2 continued] I don't know that I'd be that severe, but I will tell you that this is one of the fastest growing areas of tie-in between corporate giving and marketing, and it shows a sophistication and awareness on the part of corporations that they can tie their business interests to other interests in the cultural and educational and philanthropic area and yet be able to show to whomever is interested, whether it be shareholders or whatever, that that there is a bottom line payout for the for the giver. [00:03:36][51.7]

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When Schmertz wanted to combine the magic of his New York Times advertorials with his new taste for TV, he was thwarted by a now-forgotten piece of policy that we talked about in Season 1: the Fairness Doctrine. It was an FCC policy that basically required balance, not just in coverage but advertising too. So if you ran an ad for a liquor company, for example, you’d have to give some free space to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that sort of thing.

Schmertz made multiple different Mobil advertorials that he tried to get placed on broadcast TV, first for free, then as paid advertising. But they all turned him down, citing the Fairness Doctrine. So, after a lot of public complaining and accusing them of bias and censorship, he made his own network: the Mobil Showcase Network. It only produced shows occasionally, but Schmertz would find ones he liked, buy them, get them produced and then offer them to the 55 or so stations in his network. They were regular TV shows, totally just entertainment, they just had these little Mobil Showcase ads before them that would show Mobil oilmen being good guys, or talking about how great energy was. Like this one:

[Mobil Showcase]

Schmertz was great at finding ways around regulations on what or how Mobil could advertise. And when he couldn’t get around them, he worked to change them. Here’s environmental sociologist Bob Brulle again:

[00:20:07] Mobile was one of the leading corporations to fight for that legal right. I don't have the reference. My office is still cast, but there was a pretty big effort to get a Supreme Court ruling that basically supported corporate speech and the right of corporations to do advertising of there,, not just product product advertising, but of their positions. [00:20:34][27.5]

That case was in 1978, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti. Way before Mitt Romney called corporations people, this case determined their personhood.

[00:20:55] I don't think people really appreciate how big of a deal that was in shifting the rules of of speech in the public space for that. Now, suddenly, corporations could use their budgets, which are enormously, you know, larger than individuals to to advocate their position in the public space. And as as a sociologist, I would say that what this did was it allowed for a systematic distortion of the public space is that it gives corporations basically a loudspeaker to amplify their voice above everybody else's. [00:21:40][44.7]

[00:22:25] Bellotti is a very big deal. I think bigger than than Citizens United. I mean, Citizens United basically opened up the whole campaign finance area, but Bellotti opened up the whole public space. Yep. All of the media, to do these kind of large scale corporate propaganda efforts

You can see the results of that case everywhere today. In the oil companies’ first amendment defense of climate denial, in the absolute carpet-bombing of fossil fuel ads out there right now. In the total lack of regulation of advertising on social media, or in podcasts for that matter. We’re living in the world Herb Schmertz wanted, the one he helped to build.

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Next time, we’ll bring you the story not of one man, but of a husband and wife. A power couple that Dr. Brulle once described to me as the intellectual parents of climate denial. Come back for that. They’re still alive and well, and you’ll never guess what they’re working on today.

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