Ivy Lee: The Godfather

E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing

Dan Zegart

Amy Westervelt

John Hill was born on a farm in Indiana in 1890. His grandfather had been wealthy, but his father lost all the family’s money in a series of business deals gone wrong, and Hill would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture his family's status, chasing the company and approval of rich men. Like a lot of other PR legends, he started his career as a journalist. But unlike the others, he seems to have been fairly good at it. While most of the rest just spent a year or two struggling to make journalism work, Hill was a financial and business reporter for 17 years before he got into the PR game. He even started a couple of newspapers himself, although struggled to keep them afloat.

His first foray into PR came in 1920, in Ohio, when he took a gig creating a newsletter that Cleveland’s Union Trust Company wanted to send out to local executives. By this time he was the financial editor of a steel industry trade magazine … because Ohio. These jobs put him in regular contact with executives who complained to him constantly that most reporters were inept at numbers. They also introduced him to a lot of influencers and executives in the area, and eventually Hill saw a niche he could fill: helping companies explain themselves to reporters who didn’t “get it” quite as well as he did.

Hill opened up his own firm in 1927 with Union Trust and Otis Steel as his first clients. Because Hill was well-liked by local executives, word spread fast and within a couple months he had built an impressive roster that included United Alloy Steel, Republic Steel and Standard Oil of Ohio.The Standard Oil account was an important win for Hill because he was a huge fan of Ivy Lee, the country's first PR guy. Lee may have tapped Edward Bernays as his successor, but John Hill was 
probably a more natural fit. Hill hated how flashy Bernays and many of the other PR guys of his day were. He preferred Lee’s distinguished southern demeanor and emulated it.  Like Lee, he preferred to stay behind the scenes … although Hill took it to an extreme, almost never appearing in the press. When he did show up anywhere, it was always in a conservative suit, clean shaven, hair slicked back, wire-rimmed glasses.

But just when his business was starting to take off, the financial markets came crashing in on themselves… The PR industry was actually one of the few to benefit from the Depression. In Hill’s case, when his first client, Union Trust, went under, he invited one of its top executives, Don Knowlton, to join him in March 1933, launching the firm Hill & Knowlton. His steel and oil clients had weathered the financial storm fairly well, and Republic Steel had just scored the firm
 a whale: the American Iron and Steel Institute—the trade group for the whole steel industry. They requested that Hill and Knowlton open up a New York branch near their headquarters in the Empire State building. That same month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, and the new firm
 was only too happy to oblige.

That same month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, with promises of a New Deal. Hill 

this idea, and so did most of his clients. Standard Oil had him write up an advertorial assuring people American business would be okay, and his steel clients had the firm cranking out pamphlets emphasizing the great relationship between steel workers and their managers.

“Workers in the steel industry represent a high degree of skill and intelligence,” it reads. “Most of the managers of the industry have worked their way up from the ranks. For a long time the industry has been distinguished by harmonious relationships and collective cooperation between employees and employers.”

The reality, of course, was that steel workers and their bosses had been fighting for a long time. And America’s big steel companies had done everything they could to repress unionization. It 
was a fight that went beyond the industry itself--as the largest industry and the largest employer in the country at the time, the steel industry viewed itself as sort of the last, best defense against 
unionization. A protector of American business, defender of bosses everywhere. They were helped in their efforts by near constant concern about creeping Communism in the U.S., starting with the 1919 Red Scare and continuing for decades.

Anti-union pamphlets Hill and Knowlton made for Republic Steel highlighted how union shops actually 

on workers’ rights. “A closed union shop denies the right of the individual worker to make his own choice as to whether he wishes to belong to a union,” one notes. Another Hill + Knowlton client, the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the earliest industry trade groups went beyond pamphlets to sponsor a weekly, pro-business, anti-New Deal radio drama called the American Family Robinson.

But after more than a decade of suppression, the labor movement was gaining steam again in the 1930s. A few years after opening his firm’s New York office, John Hill faced his first big challenge in P.R. And just like with his hero Ivy Lee, it came in the form of a violent labor strike.

Steel workers were starting to band together by 1936, forming the Steel Workers Organizing Committee within one of the country’s biggest unions (the CIO), officially freaking steel bosses out. The American Iron and Steel Institute put Hill and Knowlton on the case, and they wrote up full page ads with a manifesto for the industry. The ads suggested that outside agitators had coerced employees into joining the union; that the union amounted to forcing a worker to pay for a job; and that the industry, and therefore its employees, would be irreparably harmed by a work stoppage right in the midst of its recovery from the Depression. On the last day of June and the first of July 1936, the trade group sponsored full-page ads in 382 newspapers in thirty-four states.

But the unions persisted … and actually most of the industry was willing to negotiate. In 1937 U.S. Steel agreed to recognize the unions and negotiate a contract, which made it more difficult for other companies to resist. Eventually even the trade group backed down. But there was one holdout: Little Steel, an umbrella group that included smaller independent steel companies, was having none of it. Led by a man named Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel, they refused to have any sort of contract with the union. Then in May 1937, Girdler was elected president of the steel industry trade group. Apparently, he had been stockpiling weapons in the months leading up to his takeover of the industry group, and he fully intended to crush this whole union idea once and for all. A strike began at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago the day before Girdler’s election, and within four days he had turned it into an armed conflict.

The union quickly branded the event as the Memorial Day Massacre, holding a mass funeral in Chicago attended by hundreds of working-class residents. Another riot broke out at the Republic plant in Youngstown, Ohio, that June, ending with two dead and forty-two injured.

The FDR administration was having none of it. In October, the National Labor Relations Board ordered the companies to reinstate more than 7,000 workers with back pay.

Then the Senate launched investigations into the steel boss’s methods. Because of Hill’s involvement in pushing anti-union messages and ads in newspapers, he was caught up in the investigation, too. Senator Bob LaFollete discovered that not only had Hill placed ads, he had successfully bribed a journalist. George Sokolsky,  a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, frequently wrote about free enterprise and anti unionism in magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly. From 1936 to 1938, Sokolsky received $29,000 from Hill and Knowlton to write anti-union articles for the steel industry trade group. It worked: he wrote stories in prestigious newspapers and magazines about how the riots were all the union’s fault … never disclosing his connection to Hill and Knowlton or the steel industry. Sokolsky also regularly ranted on the radio for the National Association of Manufacturers and various other pro-business groups. Here he is ranting about that terrible socialist policy: social security.

World War II had just put an end to years worth of labor strikes in steel mills. John Hill was hired to help the industry through it all, but his work on that front was basically a failure. Not only had his clients lost the war with labor, but their goonish tactics had been outed in the press. They looked just like the evil bosses they were pretending not to be.

Still, a lot of people would have been fired for bungling the labor strikes so thoroughly. Hill had read the room entirely incorrectly. And not only that, he’d gotten busted bribing a journalist. But by this point, the steel and oil barons who made up Hill’s clientele considered him a friend, a trusted confident, more than someone they employed. He was routinely described in the press as a “trusted counselor to industry”. And he spent almost as much time managing how his clients saw him as how the public saw them. It was a big part of the Hill & Knowlton strategy in general. Hill and his execs didn’t just manage accounts, they attended the leadership and board meetings of their big clients and weighed in on corporate policy.

By this point, Hill had also learned a very important lesson: his job wasn’t to sell the public on any particular product, company or industry. It was to sell Americans on the importance of American business in general, and particularly big business. He was pushing ideology, creating social license for American industry.

That meant working in Washington, too, of course. Shortly after the war, Hill and Knowlton became the first PR firm to have staff dedicated to public policy work. The Washington office didn’t have its own accounts; it existed solely to handle government relations for the firm’s New York and Cleveland clients. By this point that meant they had their hands in everything from energy policy to agriculture and all points between, for clients like Texaco, Marathon Oil, Coca Cola, Monsanto, and a big new client: the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), is a really good example of the type of strategy Hill would typically recommend for industries, and a good example of how the fake-expert strategy deployed by Lee and Bernays became science denial. It also illustrates the long-term link between tobacco and oil. Not only did Hill have oil clients early on who informed some of his work on tobacco, and vice versa, but he often brought them together in the same trade groups. RJ Reynolds, for example, a key member of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, also had their research arm join the American Petroleum Institute, also a client of John Hill’s by this point. And then there was the fact that the oil companies helped come up with cigarette 
filters for the tobacco companies...that's why they were co-defendants in the tobacco litigation in the 90s. That and the fact that gas stations were a primary retail outlet for cigarettes, so companies in the two industries would often partner up on advertising campaigns.

While all of this is happening between the oil guys and the tobacco guys in the background, Hill and Knowlton has their staff funding and sourcing research on all the 

things connected to lung cancer. And they’re looking for scientists to sign on to their advisory board, but what they really need is a credible director. This was all Hill’s brainchild. The tobacco companies initially argued with him that they had already done their own research, that they didn’t need a whole new research council. But Hill insisted: they needed third party, independent research that would be perceived as more credible by the media. Eventually they gave in. In December 1953, the CEOs of all the major American tobacco companies met with Hill at the Plaza Hotel to launch the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. They needed a reputable cancer researcher as director, which wasn’t easy to find. So in the first several months of the committee’s existence, its “research” was 
conducted by Hill & Knowlton staffers.

There are all these staff memos from this time where they’re giving updates on clients and the oil-tobacco connection is stark, because you’ve got updates on Texaco followed immediately by updates on the phony research committee, with lots of the same staff on both.

Eventually they hired Dr. Clarence Cook Little. He went by C.C., and Hill and Knowlton proclaimed him a world-renowned cancer researcher. It was a bit of a stretch. True, Cook 

have some impressive credentials. He had been president of the University of Michigan, and had worked for a year as the director of the predecessor to the American Cancer Society today). BUT, he was also a huge fan of... eugenics. So much so that he’d been pushed out at the University of Michigan over his views. And in that same year that he was at the cancer society, he also led the American Eugenics Society. But even more pertinent to his work with the tobacco research committee was the fact that he’d never actually done any cancer research. The cancer “lab” that Cook ran just raised mice for actual researchers to use. In the hands of Hill and Knowlton, though, Cook became a widely respected researcher.

By 1947, John Hill and Don Knowlton had mostly parted ways, although the firm kept the same name. Hill gave Knowlton the Ohio clients and kept the rest for himself. Over the course of his life, he turned Hill and Knowlton into the largest PR firm in the world. Although he retired in 1962, he remained very involved in the firm, going to the office daily right up to a month before he died, at the age of 86, in 1977. Hill had stayed true to his commitment to stay out of the press himself, and none of his industrial machinations were well known at the time of his death.

John Hill Documents

S3, Ep7 | John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle

Mad Men

John Hill: The Right-Hand Man

The Original Narrative: Energy Security

Edward Bernays: The Freudian Slip

Ivy Ledbetter Lee is widely considered the father of modern public relations (yes, yes Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, also sometimes claims that prize, but he started his firm 25 years after Lee).

Lee worked for coal companies and railroads and then in 1914 went to work for the Rockefellers. In response to an ongoing strike at a Colorado mine owned by the family, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. had sent in armed guards, who teamed up with the Colorado national guard to bust up the protest. The men invaded a camp of some 1200 miners and their families, and began setting tents on fire, and then shooting at protestors. Ultimately 22 protestors were killed, including 11 children and two women, who were suffocated by smoke when they got trapped in a pit, trying to hide from the gunfire. The incident came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre. The Rockefellers were just a few years out from the break-up of the Standard Oil Trust, and the Ludlow strike quickly made the son as unpopular as his father. They were in great need of a new image, and Ivy Lee was just the man to give it to them.

Lee went on to work for Standard Oil and the Rockefellers for the rest of his life. After WWI he helped them bring oil companies together into the first industry PR group, the American Petroleum Institute, back in 1919. In 1929, when Standard Oil signed a partnership deal with German chemical manufacturer I.G. Farben, creating Standard-IG Farben, a joint venture that aimed to develop petrochemicals and synthetic fuels, Lee picked up IG Farben as a client too. And when Adolf Hitler began consolidating power in Germany, Farben asked Lee to come to Germany. The
 $4,000 a year they were paying him was increased to $25,000 a year, and they offered his son a full-time job in Germany, too, for $33,000 a year, big money at the time. Lee met with minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels, and with Hitler himself, along with various other Third Reich leaders, and advised them on relations with the press and with America in general. When the Nazis were planning to kick out the foreign press, Lee advised them against that idea, and suggested they build relationships with the foreign press instead.

Lee also advised them that Americans would never go for the Third Reich’s stance on Jews, but it’s unlikely that he realized at the time how far that thinking went or what it would lead to in a few short years. Lee was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his involvement on “Nazi propaganda” in 1934. The transcript of that testimony is 

In addition to creating the "crisis actors" narrative we still see in use today and the press release, and launching a whole new industry in the U.S. that then spread around the globe, Lee pioneered the creation of fake expert organizations. On behalf of the railroads in the early 
20th century, he created the Bureau of Railroad Economics. The Bureau had the appearance of independence but was created and funded by Lee, on behalf of his railroad clients. Economists at the Bureau would tell newspaper journalists that taxes on railroads or railroad companies were bad, and at the time journalists didn't really think to question this ostensibly independent economic think tank. It's yet another technique we still see all over today.

Biographers of Lee are often torn over whether or not he was well intended. His lofty "principles of PR" are pointed to as ethical touchstones for the industry. We cannot speak to the intentions of a long-dead man, but we can think about the many things he said and wrote himself about the industry he helped to create. Lee was an absolute believer in the power of business to solve problems, of the free market to deliver solutions. His counseling of Hitler was more driven by wanting German and American businesses to keep trading than anything else; ditto his efforts to establish trade relations between the U.S. and Russia. He figured you don't go to war with your trade partners. As a spokesperson for and counselor to industry, Lee always encouraged telling the public the truth, but he also had a very...let's say unusual...understanding of the word "truth" 
and spoke often about his job being to deliver “my interpretation of the facts" to the public.

Ivy Lee Documents

Martin Zaltz-Austwick

[00:00:00] This episode contains discussion of gun deaths, child death and sexual violence. It's discussed throughout the episodes, so if those are topics you don't want to hear about right now, go ahead and skip on to episode three.

[00:00:15] David, why are you supporting the red flag laws?

[00:00:18] This is supposed to be a man of God, but yet he's told the whole world that twenty six people died in his church when he's no. Nobody died. He's a liar.

[00:00:24] I had avoided posting about COVID for a long time because of the negative reactions I got, like, called a crisis actor all the time.

[00:00:34] For the past couple of decades, every time there's a tragedy, a small but growing group of people will find a way to say that it didn't really happen. That shooting is a hoax. COVID is a hoax, a false flag, and especially those people, the victims. They are not really victims. They're crisis actors. You could be forgiven for thinking it's something Alex Jones concocted on Infowars, but in fact, it's a story as old as... Well as old as the PR industry. Welcome back to Rigged The Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and reality right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today's trick: Crisis actors. But first, let's welcome back Mary Annaise Heglar.

[00:01:33] OK, first, I want to know what you think of when you hear the term crisis actor.

[00:01:42] Quick reminder Mary is my friend and partner in crime. We do a podcast called Hot Take Together, but I also call her whenever I find something weird in the murky underworld of disinformation. And now someone else you met last time.

[00:01:58] Mr. Rockefeller listen to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd finished my eloquent presentation of why you should do what we recommended.

[00:02:09] Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the railroad guy! Lee is generally considered the first modern publicist, and a big part of why he holds that place in history comes down to the very first job he did for the Rockefellers.

[00:02:26] It is early springtime and the strike was on...

[00:02:31] That's Woody Guthrie singing about this incident 30 years later. If you don't know that name, and I suppose some of you might not. Woody Guthrie was one of the most important and influential folk singers of the 20th century. He was a survivor of the Great Depression, and he inspired a lot of the big folk acts of the 1960s. So, you know, no Woody Guthrie, no Bob Dylan. And Guthrie was deeply committed to unions and the labor movement. By the time he wrote this song in the 1940s, the Ludlow miners strike had become a lightning rod for the American Left. But at the time that Ivy Lee was getting involved back in 1914, it marshaled the forces of the burgeoning PR industry to try and nice wash one of the worst massacres in American labor history. Today, we remember the Woody Guthrie version, so I guess folk music won in the end, in your face, Ivy Lee!

[00:03:34] Here's the story. In 1914, coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado, have been striking for more than six months.

[00:03:43] Yes, like so. I read a little bit about the conditions and coal miners around this time. And it really was like, there's a lot of people who were former slaves who worked in coal mines and their like. These conditions are not much different. So these company towns? Yeah. Yeah, the company towns were not that different than living on a plantation, especially if you factor in like sharecropping, right? And so like obviously, the work itself is arduous, which is why you get somebody doing it. You kind of don't want to let them go. The the the history of forced labor in coal mines in the north and the south is like really deep and really terrible. One of the things I heard about was like the sexual violence in these coal mining camps. So like the families would have to buy food on credit and then pay it back when they got their wages from, you know, picking or from mining the coal. I almost said picking the cotton and then like, but if you couldn't pay, if you didn't get enough money back, the women had to pay it back with their bodies.

[00:04:49] Oh, that's so disturbing. But also, yeah, of course. Or what their daughters? Right? I mean, this is this. This is a big part of what was behind the Ludlow strike to they wanted fair wages. They didn't want to have to live in the company town. You know, they didn't want to have their house tied to their employer. So that was the whole thing. And then there was the whole company store thing. So it was like the company had total control over every aspect of their lives.

[00:05:22] There's some evidence to suggest that what would become the crisis actor myth might have even begun further back than a lot of those strike. Some politicians in the South accused civil rights activists in the wake of the Civil War of being paid agitators. But Ludlow is the first documented example of the crisis actor narrative being really strategically used by a corporation to discredit its critics for a lot of historians. It also marks the birth of the modern PR industry

[00:05:57] that drove US miners out of doors out from the houses that the company owned. We moved into. Ends up and a whole lot more.

[00:06:10] Shortly after the Ludlow strike began, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company kicked all the strikers out of their homes, proving their point entirely. The strikers set up a tent city at the mine, and there were pretty regular skirmishes between them and company guards or military. And when I say skirmishes, I don't mean, you know, people calling each other names at the country bar. I mean, actual danger men with guns hired by the mine company today, we might call them private military contractors or even mercenaries hired muscle. Woody Guthrie calls them soldiers.

[00:06:51] I was worried bad about my children, the soldiers guarding the railroad bridge. Every once in a while, a bullet would blood kick up gravel under my feet.

[00:07:09] Tired of the strike, the mine owners sent in the Colorado National Guard to help their little private army shut down the encampment. They would regularly head to the camp, dragged strikers out of their tents and generally mess with them. And one April morning in 1914, things seriously escalated. We're going to hear all about what happened that day and the aftermath of the most violent campaign in American labor history. Right after this. OK, so we've heard about how tensions were ramping up between the striking coal miners and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. By April 1914, things had started to calm down. Actually, the state couldn't really afford to keep the National Guard at the camp, and scab workers had disrupted the miners bargaining power. But just as it looked as if the strike was going to end peacefully, well, relatively peacefully. The private guards helped by stragglers still remaining from the National Guard, attacked the strikers.

[00:08:20] We were so afraid you'd kill our children. Nuggets of Cave, the seven foot deep, carried our young man, a pregnant woman down inside the cave. The sleep that very night you soldiers waited till all those miners was asleep. You snapped around our little ten pound soaked our palms to the old kerosene. You struck a man. The blaze it started, you pull the triggers of your Gatling guns. I made a run for the children, but the firewall stopped me. Thirteen children died from your gun as

[00:09:13] they fired into the camp and set the miners tents on fire, killing over 20 people, including women and children who had been hiding from the gunfight.

[00:09:24] I said, God bless the mine workers union, then I hope. My hidden pride.

[00:09:35] It was brutal and quickly became a national story about greed and the plight of the working man, especially when people figured out that the majority owner of the mine was the Rockefellers. The fancy pants iest of the robber barons. It didn't take long before the press were calling it the Ludlow massacre. And here's the amazing thing they didn't break the strike even after they'd been shot at and had their children literally set on fire. They refused to back down. The strike didn't go away, and neither did the bad press. Mary Harris Jones, the famous labor organizer known as Mother Jones. She even showed up.

[00:10:20] No longer a single day when we have to destroy those institutions were on hand to spend the night before and show the world what the workers can do.

[00:10:42] Ivy Lee had his work cut out for him to turn the tide on this thing, and he already had a full time job as the PR guy for the Pennsylvania railroad. Do you remember how much Ivy Lee liked trains, but the Rockefellers wanted him and what the Rockefellers want the Rockefellers get. This was John D. Rockefeller Jr. we're talking about at this time. And so off Ivy Lee went to Colorado by train. Of course, his first big idea was to create regular bulletins and distribute them to important people in Colorado, New York and D.C. Only a handful of these people were journalists. Most were prominent business types or politicians. Remember, this is the guy that would casually leave brochures on the seats of trains for his rail clients. So it might not surprise you to learn. He also wanted to distribute them to the miners homes. Well, tense at that point. It's possible he didn't really think this through anyway. Women had the vote in Colorado, and Lee figured if the miners wives got a hold of the truth-telling, they would vote the right way and maybe even influence their husbands to calm it down with the strike. Not creepy at all. The bulletins were all published under the title The Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom, Industrial Freedom, Amazing Freedom from the Curse of Unions, Freedom to be set on fire by the management. Lee worked really hard to keep his and Rockefellers names out of it, but they were his baby. And in those bulletins, all the way back in 1914 was the very first example of the crisis actor myth. The very first pamphlet that Ivy Lee wrote reads

[00:12:24] a strike was forced on Colorado. The men did not ask for it. They had presented no grievances to their employers.

[00:12:32] It goes on to say that these strikers are out-of-towners. They don't even work here. It's all made up by the unions. But what about the whole killing women and children, thing? Well, Ivy Lee goes, "Well, we didn't kill them and they weren't shot. They just suffocated." Here's how he put it.

[00:12:53] A fire was accidentally started either by an overturned stove or an explosion, and two women and 11 children were afterward found suffocated. Not one of them was hit by a bullet.

[00:13:07] What a ringing endorsement of corporate social responsibility! Not one of them was hit by a bullet. Put that on the recruitment poster. It's bizarre how much it sounds like the Parkland or Sandy Hook truthers that we hear from today.

[00:13:22] It's a horrible thing to think that 17 children got murdered, but it's even more disturbing to think that the government would do something like this and present it as a real event when it's not.

[00:13:35] Lee also exaggerated the salaries of various union leaders and Mother Jones, a fact he later had to apologize for publicly and correct. The thing is, the bulletins probably didn't even do that much. In the end, it was the union running out of money that put an end to the Ludlow standoff. But not long after, at Lee's insistence, Rockefeller actually met with and talked to union leaders and even had Miss Jones in, and that helped turn the tide of public sentiment in favor of Lee's client. It helped Rockefeller develop something of a reputation for being reasonable and flexible, being the kind of guy who could change his mind because Lee was so involved, and because his campaign really did improve the public's perception of what happened in Colorado and who the Rockefellers were. Ludlow is considered the first example of modern corporate PR and those few throwaway lines about how the strikers weren't really miners. Just outside agitators didn't really amount to much in Ludlow, but they planted the seeds of a new trick, one that would take root and grow in various directions. Ivy Lee only dreamed of random citizens, let alone journalists, picking up his insinuations and running with them, while Ivy dreams do come true. Let's take a look at how the crisis actor myth shows up in today's world. This is a guy who claims the First Baptist Church shooting never happened because he can find no evidence in the church walls. That bullet holes there were ever fixed by the church.

[00:15:26] All right, guys, we just want to show everybody that there's a fixed bullet hole anywhere. No way was anything replaced bullet holes.

[00:15:37] OK, folks, this is this is dark, really fucking dark. This guy calls himself side thorn. Not his real name. And he's been fixated on the idea that the First Baptist Church shooting, which killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas, didn't really happen. And a little like Ivy Lee with those women and children at Ludlow, he focuses on bullets and bullet holes as his proof. But this guy goes way beyond an inappropriate line in a pamphlet. He harassed survivors and victims families to the point where he wound up in jail.

[00:16:14] We didn't say you were crisis actor and believe this happened. We just pointed out that you're an admitted actor and journalism student and said that your anti-gun and that you're being fed talking points.

[00:16:23] This is Alex Jones with one of his many attacks on David Hogg, one of the Parkland school shooting survivors. Because of course, if you're a theater kid or God forbid, a budding journalist, you must be a crisis actor. For some, like Jones, there's money to be made off of these conspiracy theories. Others are fervent believers that there should be no regulation at all on guns and don't like that. These events encourage talk of, you know, making it slightly harder to own heavy artillery. Still, others simply can't face that these terrible things are actually happening. And with shocking regularity. The thing is, some protests do use actors. The ones organized by corporations and their PR firms, for example. It's a tactic we're going to talk about later. In the series called Astroturfing, corporate PR firms have hired actors to protest regulations and even to show up at city council meetings, posing as outraged citizens, giving public comment. We'll tell you how to spot astroturfing later, but in the meantime, here's how to tell when someone is just trying to de-legitimize a real tragedy or protest. They use the term crisis actors never seen. Someone is not pushing a conspiracy theory. Use this term unless they happen to be in disaster management, which actually does use crisis actors to practice rescue missions. They go after particular people who fit the story they want to tell a theater kid, for example. They rarely make statements about the people they're accusing, because that could lead to lawsuits. Instead, they ask leading questions Why is he so well-spoken? Why would a kid whose dad used to be in the FBI be anti-gun? Hmm. Really makes you think. And then there are the folks playing politics. Unfortunately, the ones in recent history have been very specifically targeting. Low information, voters, this is Caitlin Gilbert, a Ph.D. data scientist who focuses on disinformation and who traced exactly how it was flowing online during the 2020 election. Marginalized communities are especially vulnerable because they don't have the proper resources in many cases, or they're already coming from a place of inequity in their lived experience. So they're more likely to be like, Yeah, well, this fits with my notion of how this country has treated me thus far. So wait. After more than a century of being fed propaganda and an effort to manipulate them and benefit the powerful people are susceptible to disinformation and conspiracy theories. Who would have thought? That's it for this episode. Next week, we're going to throw on a white coat and delve into one of the most effective PR tactics ever science denial. Thank you for joining us on this dark and twisty journey through the murky history of PR. Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Take this ride all the way to the end.

[00:19:47] Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production, lots of documents, photos, videos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our website at Rigged Dot Media. Our producer is Martin Salt's Bostwick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Bryan. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the 1st Amendment project. Big thanks to Mary Agnes Hagler, who you'll hear throughout this series. If you want to hear more of Mary Mary joking around. Check out Hot. Take the show we do about climate change. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress. The show is reported by me. Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep2 Transcription

You could be forgiven for thinking the crisis actor myth was cooked up by Alex Jones to sell people on school shooting conspiracies, but in fact it's more than a century old. In this episode we meet the world's first publicist, the legendary Ivy Ledbetter Lee, and learn about his work crushing mine strikes for the Rockefellers.

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Daniel Edelman: The Psy-Opps King

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

To understand the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created. 

In response to a protest, the country’s largest oil company sent in private security teams, who wound up killing several protestors, including women and children. The company’s spokesperson claimed the protestors were hired by a labor union trying to stir up trouble.

Sounds like it could have been written about any of a half dozen recent pipeline protests, right? But these are the basic details of a mining strike in 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. The mine was owned by Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller family had only a few years prior been raked over 
the coals by a messy antitrust lawsuit and a series of 

 about their monopoly on the country’s burgeoning oil industry.

They needed help burnishing their image, so they called on another industry that was just emerging at the time: Public relations. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the first modern PR guy, came up with that idea that the protestors were 

 Today we would call them “crisis actors” and it’s an accusation thrown at almost every protest, but few people know the whole thing was created
 by a PR guy working for an oil company back in 1914.

Lee invented all sorts of other tricks of the trade too. 

 for a start. Before Lee, companies had a pretty adversarial relationship with the press and vice versa. Lee thought businesses would do better to tell journalists more of their story themselves. It was so unusual that when he first began sending press releases to The New York Times, the paper printed them verbatim. On behalf of rail, coal, oil and tobacco clients Lee also created seemingly independent information bureaus, like the 

, whose experts were regularly quoted criticizing railroad tax proposals.

Again, this was more than 100 years ago. And Lee was followed by generation after generation of PR experts, each adding another bell or whistle to America’s disinformation machine—some on behalf of oil, others on behalf of the chemical or tobacco industries, often on behalf 
of all three at the same time.

For years, the story about disinformation has been that Big Tobacco created it all and then Big Oil copied them. And there's a thread of truth there. Some of the same phony scientists who sold America on the idea that smoking was safe turned around and told them not to worry about climate change. But it’s not the whole story. To get that, we need to look at the context that enabled climate denial to flourish, an information system polluted by 100 years of propaganda. And we need to look at who was hiring those phony scientists—not companies, but PR firms. When people focus on one particular form of science denial, or on one technique that this or that industry copied from another, this is the big picture they miss: the disinformation machine driving everything from QAnon conspiracies to climate denial, vaccine hesitation to white nationalism. It’s bigger than any one industry, but it was built on behalf of all of them, and if we want to have any hope of addressing the large, intersecting, complex problems facing us today, it must be better understood. And then reconfigured, or dismantled altogether.

Just as Ivy Lee was building the modern PR industry, the U.S. government realized it needed a bit of propaganda to help sell American citizens on World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had made staying out of the war a key part of his campaign, and now he needed to convince Americans that it was a good idea to join in...without looking like a hypocrite. He tapped George Creel, a journalist turned political campaigner who had helped with Wilson's electoral bid, to build out what was eventually called the Committee on Public Information and generally referred to as The Creel Committee or the Creel Commission. Creel tapped some of the nation's greatest journalists (Ida Tarbell, for one!), filmmakers, artists, and publicity men to create a 360-degree assault on the 
American public. They made films, created compelling posters, and even launched the world's first "influencers." In cities and towns across the country, Creel and his team found influential members of society and trained them to give 4-minute pro-war speeches before screenings of 
silent films or big events. They were known as the "4-Minute Men".

Several members of the Creel Committee went on to be major influences on the burgeoning PR industry. One of them was a young publicity agent from the theater, Edward Bernays. Bernays had done some creative promotion of plays with particular social missions and had worked for major ballet companies as well, and his work caught the eye of Creel. It didn't hurt that Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Bernays’ father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. While Ivy Lee was 

 part of the Creel Committee, he handled publicity for the American Red Cross during the war effort, and he and Bernays worked together often through their respective positions. Bernays became a trusted colleague of Lee's during the war, the only other PR guy that Lee thought his equal. It was after WWI that Bernays famously said, “If propaganda could be used so effectively in war, why could we not use it in peace?”

At the time, democracy was still a relatively new idea, and those in power were almost universally terrified of it. Propaganda—which Bernays later 

 because “the Germans had given it a bad name”—was created as a reaction to growing public criticism of the titans of industry who had once been hailed as heroes. But it was also created to provide those in power with the tools to manipulate the masses. Bernays, Lee, and 

—Adolf Hitler—were all close readers of French philosopher Gustav Le Bon, who posited that the public, or as Le Bon put it 

 could only be both satisfied and safe when it was controlled. Like Le Bon, Bernays had a real disdain for the public, writing in his seminal book 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

To be clear, Bernays saw himself as part of that “ruling power,” and he relished the role of manipulator.

Ivy Lee died fairly young, in his 50s, and when he did Edward Bernays inherited many of his clients, including both 

the fossil fuel industry trade group that Lee had helped Standard Oil create as World War I was ending. While Ivy Lee largely focused on shaping and controlling the way the media got information as a way to mold public opinion, Bernays tried to manipulate the masses more directly. His best known trick was obliterating the taboo against women smoking in about six months, a 

They tasked Bernays with increasing sales, and he actually went to a psychoanalyst to talk about what cigarettes signified. You guessed it, phalluses. This got Bernays thinking about the “penis envy” women supposedly feel and an emergent push for women’s rights, and boom he had it: he would make smoking a women’s empowerment issue. He convinced a few young women he knew to stage a smoking “protest” in New York, calling cigarettes “freedom torches,” then alerted the press to the protest. It made headlines across the country and within a few months women all over the country were smoking and American Tobacco’s sales were soaring.

So, to recap, PR emerged as a way for industry to deal with a three-pronged threat: the rise of investigative journalism and activism shining a light on the misdeeds of industry, the emergence of regulation (which previously left industry to its own devices), and the expansion of the vote to members of society that had little in common with captains of industry. It was wildly successful. The first wave of PR effectively put a stop to the muckrakers’ early calls for corporate accountability.

Then the Depression hit and once again America’s bosses were the bad guys. Publicists like John W. Hill helped companies like 

paint labor unions, social security, and the New Deal as socialist. Hill paid commentators like 

 to write op-eds in newspapers and magazines, or join panel discussions 

 ginning up fear about these ideas. (At one point, Hill’s firm Hill & Knowlton was paying Sokolsky $40,000 a year to write pieces criticizing Social Security and the New Deal—that's a high six-figure salary in today's dollars). Hill would go on to mastermind the 

 (TIRC), a hub of science denial around smoking...that sounds an awful lot like the research bureaus Ivy Lee had set up some 40 years before. Not a huge shock given that Hill idolized Lee.

Hill’s client roster also included the 

 during those years, so it's no surprise that you see the same tactics deployed by TIRC then used by oil companies to combat rising concern over "the greenhouse effect" or by agribusiness to combat rising concern over GMOs. In fact Hill would have folks from the tobacco companies and chemical companies join the API, because he spotted ways for all three industries to work together—to lobby together for or against regulation, to trade strategies and ideas, even to create new products together. Without PR firms bringing them together, these industries and companies 
may have tended to stay in their own worlds, but the type of cross-pollination Hill enabled was hugely influential.

In fact it’s how the cigarette filter came about.

Cigarette filters are one of the reasons oil and gas companies were named defendants in the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. “When tobacco companies needed to assess the toxics in their cigarettes and in cigarette smoke, the people they turned to to do it were the oil companies,” says Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Oil companies had been testing exhaust and refinery smoke for years because of the Clean Air Act, so they were the ones that had the sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to test for toxins in cigarette smoke.

“And when the oil companies reported back to the tobacco companies on the toxins they were in fact finding in that smoke, you know, what did they do with the information?" Muffett said. "Did they go public and say there's a massive risk here? No. They entered into joint enterprises, joint ventures with the tobacco companies to produce cigarette filters.”

Since the inception of the PR industry, its most expert practitioners have deployed a handful of techniques on behalf of multiple industries and really in service of all industry: to paint business as a good faith member of the community, to sway public opinion, to avoid what infamous PR guy Rick Berman calls "public judgement," and to create political will in their favor. But they weren't operating in a vacuum. In deploying these techniques on behalf of industry, they fundamentally shifted the information ecosystem in America.

Today, it's not just industries that want to avoid regulation or deal with a crisis who use PR techniques, it's everyone from your local county government to your favorite musician to the most 
earnest nonprofit. It's the filter through which all information flows to the public. Which doesn't 

 to be a bad thing, but it has certainly led to the information pollution we have in the U.S. today, where trust in journalists and experts is at an all-time low, the public is tremendously confused, people can (and do) just consume "news" that tracks with their opinions, and so on. To clean up that pollution, it helps to know how to spot these techniques. Our hope with this investigation and related podcasts and documents is to help people do just that—not to make people even more suspicious of everything they see, or double down on getting their information only from one trusted YouTuber, but to pull the mask off a bit and help people find their way through the filters to the information they need to make important decisions about their lives.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

Newsom Documents

Edelman Documents

Schmertz Documents

Berman Documents

Bernays Documents

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

S3, Bonus: We Interrupt This Podcast for New Research + Emily Atkin and Guardian CEO Anna Bateson on Banning Fossil Fuel Ads

S3, Ep9 | Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation

S3, Ep8 | Meet The Harrisons

S9, Ep1 | The Panic

S3, Ep6 | Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

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

S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

S3, Ep4 | Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona

S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

S1, Ep1 | Fake Experts and Real Bacon

S3, Ep3 | Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

S3, Ep2 | The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

S1, Ep3 | A Tie Is a Win

S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

S1, Ep3 | Weaponizing False Equivalence

S9, Ep3 | The Next Citizens United Will Be a Climate Case

[00:00:00] Dr Little, have any cancer causing agents been identified and cigarets. No, none. Whatever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking as such. What are the conclusions reached by your organization that there is need for much more research over a wide area? And, in my opinion, to single out smoking as a causal agent is on the evidence to date completely unjustified.

[00:00:30] In 1952, Dr Richard Dahl published a groundbreaking study in the UK. It linked smoking to lung cancer. Here he is much later in life talking about those early days of research and how that research was received.

[00:00:48] The media were, of course, against us for a long time, and whenever they announced a new observation on the harmful effects of smoking is like is not there, in demand announced it would be smoking a cigaret, or they would have someone else get up through tobacco industry and say, Well, it is controversial. Somebody else doesn't believe it.

[00:01:10] The following year in the US, Dr Ernst Winder showed another devastating link between tobacco and cancer. Winder and his team painted tobacco tars from cigaret smoke onto the backs of mice. 44 percent of the lab animals developed malignant tumors,

[00:01:28] according to this repeated nationwide survey. More doctors smoke camels than any other cigaret, and

[00:01:34] there was me thinking the medical establishment was anti-cancer. It would take nearly 20 years before those sorts of ads were banned. But the tobacco industries campaign to discredit the science on smoking and cancer showed no signs of stopping. In a lot of ways, this is a well-known story. Plenty of folks have seen the insider.

[00:01:58] You go public and 30 million people hear what you got to say. Nothing. I mean, nothing will ever be the same again. Now, the work we did here is confidential, not for public scrutiny anymore than on one's family matters. We're very serious about protecting our interests.

[00:02:20] And some know about the shady scientists who work for tobacco and went on to work for the oil industry thanks to the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and their book The Merchants of Doubt.

[00:02:32] The important thing that we thought we had discovered in our research about thought we thought people needed to understand was that actually the roots of this story are not found in the fossil fuel industry. There, found in the tobacco industry. And in fact, there was there is a direct connection between climate change denial and the denial of the harms of tobacco in the in the actual person of this man, Fredrick Sykes, who was the founding director of the George C. Marshall Institute but also worked for six years as the director of biomedical research for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

[00:03:04] But we're going to explore a lesser known side of the story today. The PR guy who developed the industry's spin on science, a rather unassuming dude who wore navy suits and tiny little specks and would seem right at home speaking at the weekly Rotary Club meeting in Columbus, Ohio. The silent but deadly. John Hill, even his name is sort of forgettable, but his impact was decidedly not. Welcome back to Rechte The Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and science right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt, today's trick: science denial.

[00:03:47] This is Dan Zegart. I have been for most of my life. Investigative reporter and I. I wrote a book called Civil Warriors Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry.

[00:04:00] After Civil Warriors, Zegart kept researching tobacco's efforts to sell the American public on their products. One name kept coming up. You guessed it John W. Hill.

[00:04:13] When I was researching my my book, a bunch of documents were released by actually by congressmen that dealt with Helen Norton's original corporate building of the denial machine that became so well known, which started in 1954.

[00:04:35] Hill & Knowlton is the firm John Hill ran with his partner Don Knowlton. But Hill wasn't always in PR. John Hill was born on a farm in Indiana in 1890. His grandfather had been very wealthy, but his father lost all the family's money in a series of business deals gone wrong and hell would spend the rest of his life chasing the company and approval of rich men. You could say he had sugar daddy issues like a lot of our other PR guys. He started his career as a journalist before he turned to the dark side. But unlike the others, he seems to have been fairly good at it. Hill was a financial and business reporter for 17 years before he got into the PR game. He even started a couple of newspapers himself. Although he struggled to keep them afloat, some things never change.

[00:05:37] In 1920, in Ohio, he took his first step into the PR world when he was hired to create a newsletter for Cleveland's Union Trust Co., a bank. By this time, he was the financial editor of a steel industry trade magazine. Because Ohio, these jobs put him in regular contact with executives around town, and eventually Hill saw a niche he could fill. Helping companies explain themselves to reporters didn't get the steel industry. In other words, they didn't think capitalism was frickin awesome. Hill opened up his own firm in 1927 with Union Trust and Otis Steel as his first clients. Because Hill was well-liked by local executives, word spread fast, and within a couple of months he was doing PR for United alloy Steel Republic Steel and Standard Oil of Ohio. In 1953, Hill was tapped to help another industry struggling to maintain a good relationship with the public tobacco. Here's Danziger again, reading from a chapter of his as yet unpublished but copyrighted book Addiction Inc..

[00:06:49] John W. Hill, the founder of the public relations giant Hill and Knowlton, had just walked into his office on the thirty fifth floor of the Empire State Building. When he got an emergency call from Tommy Ross, who handled public relations for the American Tobacco Company, Public Relations was a new and still small business at midcentury. Hill and Ross sought each other's advice and met occasionally at watering holes in midtown Manhattan. So Hill wasn't really talking to a competitor on the morning of December 14th, 1953. Ross painted a startling picture at this moment, he said. The chief executives of six of the seven major tobacco companies are in a suite at the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, trying to figure out how to stave off the collapse of their industry. It has started two weeks earlier with the release of a sensational study by a scientist at the Sloan Kettering Institute that found cigaret tar produced cancerous lesions in mice. The latest in a series of ominous findings over the previous four years, strongly linking cigaret smoking with lung cancer. And just six days before Ross is cool on December 8th, Dr. Alton Ochsner, a thoracic surgeon and pioneer, a lung cancer researcher, gave a speech in New York in which he said that quote the male population of the United States will be decimated unless some steps are taken to remove the cancer producing factors from cigarets close quote. Tobacco stocks dropped four points after decades of continuous growth. Cigaret sales began a steep decline.

[00:08:49] Hill met with those panicked executives in their suite at the Plaza the next morning. Later, he wrote in his autobiography Quote, After being admitted to their suite, I found the tobacco man sitting there looking mighty glum. I thought, Here is a group of men who consider themselves good upright citizens being held up before the country as killers who came up with a genius strategy to help them. The tobacco execs wanted him to deliver a Pro cigaret campaign that would discredit the recent studies. But Hill advised them that that wasn't enough. They also needed to fund new scientific research that would contradict the studies connecting smoking to cancer. This was a much bigger project than just running a PR campaign and a new tactic for an industry on the edge of a public opinion precipice. The exact said OK, and a few weeks later, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, TIRC was born.

[00:09:51] Now, fake experts weren't new. We know this. Even fake research institutes existed before John W. Hill. You Might remember the Bureau of Railroad Economics from episode one created by Massacre Re Brander and train nerd Ivy Lee all the way back in 1890. But John Hill was going to take fake expertize to a whole new level. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee never claimed to be independent, but their research was taken seriously even by the most legit journalists of the day. Edward R. Murrow himself When I first heard this story, I was not shocked exactly because it's the sort of thing that you still kind of see today, but surprised that it happened way back then into Murrow himself. So I called up Mary Annaise Heglar, a writer and my frequent partner in podcasting.

[00:10:46] The long standing idea in science, and it's still very much the case today, is that if you are good at communicating, you must be bad at science,

[00:10:59] and I will never understand the logic of that. No matter how many times you tell me that story is never going to make any kind of sense.

[00:11:07] It doesn't right? really. It really doesn't. But anyway, it's very much a thing in the scientific field. So on top of the fact that they're training these scientists to be very good speakers. They also know that that the scientists on the other side are are not going to be getting this training and they're probably going to be bad at communicating the science that they're doing.

[00:11:31] right, they're playing chess and we're over here playing Tic TAC Toe.

[00:11:36] So in 1955, Edward R. Murrow, who's like a very well-regarded journalist, there's a radio award named after him. All this stuff, he has this.

[00:11:48] Yes, he has this TV show where he does, you know, it's like very, you know, he's like tackling the hard hitting news of the day, all that kind of stuff. And so he decides to do a two part series on this new research about smoking and cancer. And he has on all of these like, you know, logit, all the researchers who have been doing the work showing the link between cigarets and cancer. And then he has on a bunch of people from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and the tobacco guys again, like all, are very spoken. Murrow, like, like, spent more time talking to the tobacco funded researchers, in part because, like the interview was going better. Right? This is really key to understanding the genius of science denial, both the bias toward people who are media trained, who do a good job of presenting their case, their story, their point of view to the media. That bias is still very entrenched, particularly on TV and radio, but then also the bias against being good at those things. If you're a scientist, which is a really big problem when the public needs to understand science and a very easy thing for industry to weaponize.

[00:13:14] Here's Dan Zegart with more of the tobacco story.

[00:13:18] And the industry had gone out way out on a limb and said that it was not. It was not only going to be vigilant, but if it found something that was in cigarets that cause cancer, it would, you know, it would halt, stop everything and take very dramatic action and make sure that it was removed. So that was the standard that they had set themselves. But the thing was that when Murrow went out and did it and went out, and actually he had very little to do with finding the he himself who was, you know, probably the preeminent. A figure at that point in television journalism had very little to do with actually picking the people who were interviewed, the scientists who were interviewed were mostly picked by Fred Friendly, who is his producer. These were eminent people. These were Elmer Hess, who was the president of the American Medical Association. It was W. C. Hooper who was an important figure at the National Cancer Institute. It was Dr. Paul Coton who was an environmental cancer specialist out in Los Angeles. And all of these guys were in one way or another, compromised by the industry. They had taken there, either they were already on the payroll or, in the case of Coton, were actually members of the Tobacco Industry Research Council, which was this front group they had set up.

[00:14:33] Here's a snippet from the two part series Murrow did about cigarets and cancer on his show. Seeing Now in 1955,

[00:14:43] filter tips represented less than two percent of the total in 1952. In 1955, more than 20 percent are filter tips, and the figure is rising. There is a clear indication that the relationship between cigarets and Health has caused this change. The cigaret industry aware of this fact and fully cognizant of its responsibility, has organized the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. Its scientific director is the eminent cancer investigator, Dr. Clarence Cooke, little head of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine. Dr Little, have any cancer causing agents been identified and cigarets. No, none. Whatever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking as such. This is interesting in a way because there are many known cancer forming substances in time. It is interesting that certain of the published data seem to show an association between certain types of cancer, but perhaps cancer in general and excessive use of cigarets. Now, we're very interested in finding out what kind of people are heavy smokers and what kind are not. Not everybody is a smoker. Not everybody who smokes is equal a heavy smoker. And what determines these selections on the part of people? Is it a different nervous type of person that smokes a great deal? Is it a person who is reacting differently to a strain of stress because it is very clear that certain people just can't take it as well as others?

[00:16:38] I mean, if you can separate yourself from from like how awful it is, it's very smart. It's like like this guy is being asked, is there any correlation between smoking and cancer? And then he kind of goes like, Well, you know, what about the other causes of cancer? Certain types of people who are very anxious types of people might not handle cigarets as well as other types of people. That's diabolical. Yeah. Dan Zegart again.

[00:17:13] But if you look a little deeper, you found was every single one of these guys was had it essentially either been been bought and paid for and was on the staff or was about to be and those relationships were not disclosed fully. Some of the people were not on yet actually working for the Turk, but they were about to be or they were already had a relationship and were carefully selected by the industry to be put forward. The point here is that, you know, these were eminent people and actually when Fred friendly got a call from one of the tobacco guys and they asked him, Well, how is it going? How's your program going with Murrow? And he said it's going pretty well, but if anything, I think it's going to make. It's going to make the tobacco industry look better than these scientists because your people are better at explaining their more definite. And of course, this is what it's possible to be more definite when you are really espousing a particular point of view and you were paid mouthpiece. Yeah. And that's the great advantage that these guys have always had this particular wing of the scientific community.

[00:18:25] The tobacco industry scientists weren't just definitive because they had an opinion. They also had the benefit of Hill and Knowlton Media Training

[00:18:34] Hill and Noel and put these people through their paces, particularly Clarence, Dr Clarence Cooke, little who they spent weeks and weeks with, getting him ready and talking to him and just trying to understand how he was going to come off. As time went on, the industry got even better at grooming people and went to great lengths to woo scientists to get them to do a research project for them.

[00:19:01] This strategy worked great for decades.

[00:19:05] The result of this whole campaign by tobacco was that it was completely effective. They found as they looked, there is a great deal material on this, in the tobacco files, in the documents that are found that you can find that were produced in the lawsuits where they go back and they say there's very, very little in the way of interest now in smoking in health. This is 18 months after the tobacco broadcast by Murrow. So they it's amazing because this is a very small group of people, a few scientists, some public relations, public relations firm, you know, and a handful of companies. And they completely change the public dialog about the most pressing health concern, probably of the 20th century, which was smoking the pandemic. And that's not an exaggeration of smoking related illnesses millions of people a year worldwide.

[00:20:01] There are a couple things to pay attention to in this story about how well the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and Murrow. The first is that while this tactic is generally referred to as science denial, it's also misdirection. The tobacco industry folks did deny certain scientific facts. Or at least cast doubt on them. But what really made this multi-decade campaign work was the way they obscured the link between cigarets and cancer by flooding the public sphere with studies on all the other causes of cancer. This is the story of PR, not comic books, but after the break, we're going to meet one of the self-described supervillains of this story. By day, a sort of average conservative public relations guy, but under the cover of darkness, Dr. Evil. More on him after the break. Another big figure in tobacco lobbying is the infamous PR guy, Richard Berman. He's so notorious that 60 Minutes once dubbed him Dr. Evil. And today he actually uses that to sell himself in proposals. Although I'm not sure where that Ph.D. is from. Can you get funding to do a doctorate in evil? I think I'm just going to call him Mr. Evil until he can produce his degree. Just plain old dick evil. Richard Berman was once described as a quote Despicable man, an exploiter, a scoundrel, a world historical motherfucking son of a bitch by his son, the late David Berman. Music fans might know that name. He was a poet and the lead singer of the band Silver Jews, but he and his father did not get along. Richard Berman was just to evil. Here he is, speaking to a roomful of fracking executives about how to keep the anti-fracking folks at bay.

[00:22:11] Yes, you played in people's minds a time. They don't know who's right and you win all ties because the tide basically ensures the status quo. People are not prepared to get aggressive in moving one way or the other. So we all take a tie any day if I'm trying to preserve the status quo.

[00:22:29] This tape was recorded by someone in the audience who subsequently leaked it to the New York Times, so it's pretty hard to hear. But what Berman is saying there is he'll take a tie any day if he's trying to preserve the status quo. In other words, these tactics don't have to win. They don't have to convince the public to like fracking. They just have to tie because people who aren't sure about an issue won't campaign for change and the status quo carries on. That's the goal with campaigns like the ones Berman does and also like the one hell cooked up for Big Tobacco. They don't need to convince people that smoking is good for them, or even not bad. They just need to confuse the issue enough to stop any big changes. Maybe smoking's bad. Maybe it's fine. The science sure seems confusing. In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general released a report that backed up the research Dahl and Weiner and others had done for decades.

[00:23:34] This book, containing 387 carefully worded pages, is a federal government report. Its title Smoking and Health, a report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. It was released at noon today, and it says in view of the continuing and mounting evidence from many sources, it is the judgment of the committee that cigaret smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.

[00:24:03] It still took another six years for the government to ban cigaret ads on TV and radio, and 25 years after that for a series of lawsuits to reveal the truth about all the research tobacco companies had suppressed, particularly with respect to how addictive nicotine was, how much they knew about that addictiveness, and how much they used that information to hook people on their product. When those lawsuits went to trial, many of the same scientists who had been trained to speak to the media turned up as witnesses. Hill and Knowlton had picked them for that very reason,

[00:24:41] being very canny assessments of this person's personality, how they would play and therefore developed a stable of people who not only would speak for, let's say, the press, but would also testify before Congress and appear in in trials as lawsuits began to be filed. These became there, litigation ready experts, and they were really formidable. They won, obviously, because they won every case that was ever filed against them until 1996. That's a pretty good record. That's for 42 years. That's a pretty good record.

[00:25:17] That brings us to another key part of this story. And this show, a lot of people think public relations just means media relations, getting stories in the papers, securing interviews for company exacts that kind of thing. But the people and tactics that we're talking about go way beyond that. Public relations guys like John W. Hill or Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays, they would call people who only deal with the media side of things. Press agents. And they would do it with a certain level of disdain for them. Public relations meant literally dealing with the public or really several publics. There was the general public. And then there's also legislators there, another public, another audience to be convinced, confused or calmed by these arguments. Businesspeople were a public women, youth, mothers, employees. In the case of Tobacco, Hill and Knowlton worked to improve the general public's view of the industry, but also to ingratiate the industry within the scientific community and with legislators. When the science makes your product look really bad because you know it causes cancer or creates superbugs or sets the ocean on fire. You need a strategy to distract people from all that. Hill's approach to science, denial and distraction has been used by multiple industries in the decades since Big Tobacco had its day in court. Climate change is an obvious example. The fossil fuel industry suppresses information, hires experts and spokespeople to cast doubt on climate science. Misdirects attention toward other causes of the problem. And even highlights the benefits of CO2.

[00:26:58] The scientific evidence remains

[00:27:02] as to whether human activities affect the global climate CO2.

[00:27:06] OK, this is gas of life, so if they want to tell you their CO2 is dangerous, you tell them to stop reading, right?

[00:27:15] We are changing the conversation about climate and carbon dioxide, a mild warming gas and a powerful plant food. We know the benefits of CO2. Food can be grown where it wasn't ground before. It has increased crop harvest by a third. Farmers pump it into their greenhouses to produce more food for your family. NASA's satellites tell the story CO2 has greenes the globe in the last 100 years.

[00:27:43] All of those people you just heard are funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chemical industry uses this tactic often to. Here's how a few industry spokespeople talked about the recent finding connecting glyphosate to cancer. Glyphosate is a key ingredient in the popular weed killer roundup.

[00:28:04] It will do no harm. No, it is not. Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.

[00:28:08] We do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing increases in cancer. You can drink a whole

[00:28:14] quart of it, and it won't hurt you. If you want to drink some, we have some here. I'd be happy to actually. Not, not really. But not really. I know it wouldn't hurt me. Roundup and glyphosate products are vital to farmers around the world and not only large scale farmers, but also vital to smallholder farmers.

[00:28:33] As a scientist is very disappointing seeing all of this misinformation

[00:28:38] about glyphosate online because it is scaring people. Misinformation is beginning to dominate the space, and I'm

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